Let John Mulaney Host a Televised Awards Show, You Cowards

Courtesy of Michael Buckner via Getty Images

Normally you couldn’t pay me to give a second thought to who’s hosting any given awards show, let alone who should, but as this past Sunday’s Golden Globes painfully reminded us: these things matter. Not to be the umpteenth person to pile on poor Jo Koy, but when you kick the evening off with a trainwreck of a set, establishing a rough tone that’s hard to bounce back from, suddenly three hours can feel like six.

Picking a good host is perhaps an even more thankless job than actually hosting—we, the viewing body, are quite the fickle audience. We want someone who has the chops to really command a room full of the most famous people alive—which is a very short list!—but were also desperate for a new face that isn’t Billy Crystal, Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Kimmel for the seventeenth, eighth, and tenth times, respectively.*

Navigating that tension is how you get Jerrod Carmichael hosting the Globes last year (a fun experiment that was captivating, if a little uneven) and Jo Koy (an experiment that will be ridiculed for the next decade.)

But we have a few more of these things to go before it all wraps with the Oscars. Kimmel is already slated for that one, but does, say, the SAG Awards (which just announced nominees this morning) have a host yet? How about any of the other half-dozen award shows in between now and March? If any of them are looking for someone charming, someone who’s not above the musical detour these broadcasts love so much, someone who walks the line between edgy and respectful, that person has been right under our noses, churning out Netflix specials, hanging out with Pete Davidson and becoming the least famous SNL Five Timers’ Club member to date (his words, not mine): John Mulaney.

Last night in Los Angeles, Mulaney hosted one such smaller-scale award show, the Governors Awards. It was a private affair, not broadcast anywhere, but clips and tweets from the audience reveal the obvious: he killed it, of course. The most viral portion of Mulaney’s monologue finds him taking potshots not at the famous attendees, but at his own Hollywood Q-rating, reading an email from his agents (a new go-to move of his, it would seem) about Maggie Gyllenhaal wanting him for her new film…as a glorified extra. Of course, he wasn’t above laying into the audience here and there, with say, a very online joke about Bradley Cooper’s awards-baiting or even daring to rib Queen Angela Bassett, both of which apparently got a warmer reception than the duds Koy threw out Sunday.

Mulaney’s chops come as no surprise to the Baby J faithful, those of us who were there for every new installment of his recurring Saturday Night Live Broadway series—or those who remember his first big hosting gig, alongside Nick Kroll for the 2017 Spirit Awards. Their 10-minute opening is relentlessly funny, volleying from winking self-deprecation about hosting the only midday awards show, to meta-commentary about the need for every monologue to get political, to audience participation that even made Warren Beatty break.

That was seven years ago. The Spirit Awards were smart enough to call that dynamic duo back the following year. But why haven’t we given John anything televised since? Maybe he hasn’t wanted it; the stakes are considerably lower playing to a room where a few phone videos may leak versus being broadcast to CBS or wherever. Maybe some of the Producers That Be are still trying to wrap their heads around the Sack Lunch Bunch. Whatever the case may be, it’s time for someone to make the call—and for John to answer. The fate of our attention span depends on it.

*(Stats totally based on perception, not reality.)

Originally Appeared on GQ