John Mulaney Says He Deserved His SNL Joke Backlash

You may remember John Mulaney hosting Saturday Night Live right before the presidential election on October 31, and you may remember that he told a joke implying that it didn't matter who won on November 3, and that he got some backlash about how "deeply irresponsible" that message was.

Mulaney discussed that on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Tuesday night, and said that people had "good reason" to criticize him for that.

"The intention of the joke was that some things will never change despite the winner, and that the poor will still suffer, the rich will continue to prosper, the mentally ill and the drug-addicted will not be taken care of, Jane Lynch will still book gig after gig and do a great job at it, little girls will still want to leave a sleep over 'cause the other girls bullied her, and then she'll have to sit upstairs at the dining room table with the dad of the girl who bullied her and wait for her parents. There's that awkward moment," he explained. "So it was a very smart joke, but in the set-up, I said basically like 'no matter who wins,' which I really didn't even agree with. I often say things on TV in front of ten million people that I'm just kind of floating as ideas."

"So I should have said I very much want one to win over the other, and there will be improvements if one wins," he admitted. "I deserved the backlash. I flat out forgot. I just forgot to do it. I ran the joke in, like, a field in Connecticut and I was like 'all right, let's rock and roll' and I never was like 'hey, don't you mean that one guy is worse than the other?' and I forogt to make the joke good. So the beginning was a strange thing to toss out there three days before an election in front of a lot of people, going 'look, it doesn't matter who wins because...' and now I'll get to the Jane Lynch joke." 

Mulaney got criticism for it right away. "My wife, everyone who knows me was like 'what the hell did you just say?' and I was like 'what? No good? No good?' There's no excuse for not working out the wording of a joke that you then do on television."

Kimmel mentioned that voters in both parties were apparently mad at him, but Mulaney corrected him. "Less so them," he said of Trump voters. "They like low voter turnout." 

However, he did explain that he got right-wing backlash from a joke he told on the February 29 SNL he also hosted.

"I did a joke that was not about Donald Trump," he said. "The joke was about how it was a leap year, and leap year had been started by Julius Caesar to correct the calendar, and another thing that happened with Caesar was that he was stabbed to death by a bunch of senators because he went crazy, and I said 'that's an interesting thing that could happen'... A lot of magazines that I don't think existed before, like patriotic magazines that just suddenly were on Twitter, you know, just like Bald Eagle Monthly, like 'this is an outrage!'"

The Secret Service even investigated him. "I guess they opened a file on me because of the joke," Mulaney revealed. "Am I stoked there's a file open on me? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it in the moment? Not so much. The person vetting me was very understanding that the joke had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It was an elliptical reference to him. I didn't say anything about him... in terms of risk assessment, no one who's ever looked at me has thought I registered above a 1."

Here's Mulaney's monologue from the Halloween episode.

And here's his monologue from the Leap Day episode.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.