John Mulaney played to a full house Friday night in Toronto at the Sony Centre — he was the first of several JFL42 headliners and he performed to a large, excited audience. But before he strutted onto the stage and spoke of the spirit of Bloor (more on that later), Joe Mande very ably warmed up the crowd.
Mande’s set almost got off to a rocky start as some kind of bell sound went off intermittently, leaving the audience laughing and Mande wondering what was going on. Eventually it stopped and Mande continued, joking that he almost had a panic attack. His casual delivery never gave away too much of his jokes beforehand — as he started talking about his love for Kendrick Lamar (he saw him seven times in one year) he noticed Lamar’s concert behaviour and turned it into a completely absurd scenario of Lamar as a statistician. But he couldn’t have gotten any more laughs if he tried as he told a childhood story of going to “Jewish summer camp” and finding out he had irritable bowel syndrome.
Before long, Mulaney was up, and there was rarely more than a few seconds where he didn’t have the audience in stitches. He threw in a few jokes about Toronto, of course. “I looked up Toronto on Wikipedia before I got here,” he told the audience, telling them Toronto was built in one day in 1981 and hasn’t changed at all since. Oh, and that Torontonians are in service to the great spirit of Bloor, whom they appease by naming a street after. But his richest material came from his own life, from his overly stern father and his status as a recently married man. Talking about the latter, he carefully deconstructed the phrase “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” and later described the fundamental personality difference between him and his wife based on how they reacted to a question about a Best Buy loyalty card.
I can’t imagine crowd work is a specialty of Mulaney’s, but he managed to build a delayed-payoff joke. A woman got up to go the bathroom early on, and while she was out Mulaney spoke without a microphone, telling the crowd to say “We love pancakes!” when he said later “You know what they say about Toronto!”
Sometimes he didn’t need to make observations about the absolute strangeness of Back to the Future or how drug laws would change the drug-dealer/client relationship. He mined plenty of humour out of his time as a temp and the strange conversations he overheard in two different offices. The “characters” of his story were real people, and in one story involving an eccentric older website owner and his middle-aged secretary, the overheard conversation itself was hilarious; somehow it got even funnier as Mulaney broke down each line and what each person must have been thinking.
Given the political climate in the U.S., Mulaney told a few jokes about Donald Trump, and while describing him as “what a hobo imagines being rich looks like,” the jokes fell a little flat. It was the only real weak point of his set, as he ended with a long story about his family’s connection to Bill Clinton while somehow managing to work in the plot of The Fugitive.
Mulaney got an almost-immediate standing ovation after ending his set, and his arsenal of jokes certainly earned it.
