It Sure Will Suck to be John Mulaney’s Baby

It is hard to despise a baby, but if anyone can do it it will be the rabid fans of John Mulaney. The comedian announced last night on Late Night with Seth Meyers that he is having a child with The Newsroom actress Olivia Munn.

Usually this would be a joyous announcement, but there’s a lot of shit swirling around it (addiction, divorce, Mulaney previously saying he didn’t want children) that has made fans of the comedian deeply conflicted about the matter. More than maybe any comedian, Mulaney’s fans seem to see him as their father and their husband and their best friend, and in their eyes daddy-hubby-bestie has done a bad thing.

The bad thing is that he left his ex-wife, Anna Marie Tendler, and then months later shacked up with Munn and almost immediately got her pregnant. Tendler was a large presence in Mulaney’s stand-up routines over the years, and fans seemed to believe that the couple would be in love forever, die in each other’s arms, and be greeted by their very cute French bulldog Petunia in heaven.

To put on my Freud hat for a second (it’s shaped like a penis), Mulaney fans saw the ordeal as if their parents were getting divorced, but also as if they too were getting divorced. The whole situation is, how you say, very weird.

Munn was spotted by Page Six looking very pregnant before the official announcement, so people got a jumpstart on their bizarre tweets before it was confirmed.

Literally what does this mean and how did it go viral? I feel like I’m missing a reference. Is Tendler a filmmaker? I thought she made artisan lampshades. If you want to maintain whatever sanity you have, I must beg you to not go into the replies of this tweet, where people are saying things like “this is why you don’t stay with a man through rehab/addictions.”

After his appearance on Seth Meyers, the Mulaney hive felt even more compelled to share their musings on his life, and continued tweeting as if they know any of these people personally.

There are many more tweets, most of which feature more intense displays of some kind of personal offense and betrayal, but I’m not going to call out specific small accounts for being little freaks.

As always, being famous seems like absolute Hell on Earth. I feel neither bad nor good for anyone in this situation, because it is none of my business. But if I must pick a side, I side with the unborn child, who will come into this world with lots of people hating it because of some narrative they’ve constructed in their head.

We mustn’t lose sight of the real reason to not like this baby: its parents are a stand-up comedian and a former professionally hot nerd turned actress, a set of parents that can only produce a child that will be interminably annoying from the moment it can speak to the day it graduates from USC.