John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City (2018) on Netflix
John Mulaney takes the Radio City Music Hall stage for a stand-up routine about his adolescence and his family. His material ranges over celebrity, marriage and politics.
- Netflix4.5/5
- IMDb7.9/109,766 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Recorded live at Radio City Music Hall, the special presents John Mulaney in the observational style of his earlier stand-up. He greets the audience and opens with stories about his mother's supposed encounters with the supernatural and about his parents' marriage. Memories of his father follow, a man who preferred psychological scrutiny to physical discipline, and who turned a sex talk into a discussion of the composer Leonard Bernstein. The routine then moves to his childhood, the rituals of elementary school assemblies and a retired Chicago police detective's talk about stranger danger, and to his college years and the weight of student loans.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mulaney said the title "has no meaning" and comes from an episode of The Simpsons where Moe Szyslak's boxing name was revealed as "Kid Gorgeous"; he settled on it because it made his wife "laugh the hardest".
- Mulaney revealed after the special's release that he had refined and performed the routine while recovering from a labral tear in his knee, and found calling himself a "kid" at age 35 so amusing that it helped shape the title.
- Industry veteran Scott Pask dressed the stage to look like "Fritz Lang by way of the Christmas Spectacular", with three hydraulic levels that raise and lower as Mulaney ascends during the cold open; Mulaney was still disappointed he couldn't write a joke requiring the in-house rain jets.
- Releasing the special in May made Mulaney eligible for the Primetime Emmy Award for Writing for a Variety Special, which he won in September 2018.
- The special's popularity spawned memes across Tumblr and Twitter, where reaction gifs of Mulaney's performance became routine and a viral "things as John Mulaney quotes" phenomenon emerged.
