With friends like these, John Mulaney is a “Saturday Night Live” celebrity.
The stand-up comic and former “SNL” writer got a hero’s welcome as he was inducted into the Five-Timers Club Saturday night with the help of some of his new classmates, including Conan O’Brien, Paul Rudd, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Candice Bergen and Elliott Gould.
“What we’re all trying to say is that this has become not special,” Martin told the new kid during his initiation.
“Let me be the first person to say ‘who are you?'” Bergen, who hosted five times between 1975 and 1990, chimed in.
“You wouldn’t know me but if you have a niece or a son who’s bad at sports, they might,” Mulaney retorted.
Fey brought her own Five Timers Fizz, made up of “Justin Timberlake’s tequila, Dan Aykroyd’s vodka, and Tracy Morgan’s club soda, which is aquarium water,” while Rudd mourned how pathetic his own fifth hosting gig was in December when the omicron surge sent the audience home.
The conversation quickly shifted to whether the honor was even an honor at this point as club membership continues to grow.
“In order for you to get in, someone has to retire,” Bergen suggested.
That’s when the excuses started flying in: Fey couldn’t be bumped because “she was the first woman ever to wear glasses on TV,” according to Martin, while Fey insisted Bergen had to stay because she was “back here in the ’70s (and) can you imagine the sexual harassment that happened back then?”
Instead, it was up to Rudd to hand over his “SNL” smoking jacket to the newcomer.
Elsewhere in the show, Colin Jost and Michael Che tried to navigate the line between funny and too far in talking about Russian’s invasion of Ukraine in the “Weekend Update.”
“In my lifetime I’ve seen footage of attacks like this on other countries, but never a white one,” Che acknowledged.
“Many analysts were surprised that Putin went through with the invasion, even though it was obviously going to be a colossal mistake,” Jost said. “But he couldn’t back down after all that build-up…kind of like NBC still had to go through with airing the Winter Olympics.”
Mulaney also hit on some more serious topics during his opening monologue, including a December 2020 dinner with his friends.
“It was not dinner, it was an intervention for me. My least favorite kind of intervention,” he said. “I knew right away it was an intervention. You know how bad a drug problem you have to have if when you open a door and see people gathered, your first thought is, ‘This is an intervention about my drug problem. There’s no other reason people would be behind a door.'”
Mulaney entered rehab shortly after the intervention. Now, he said, he’s focused on girlfriend Olivia Munn and 12-week-old son Malcolm.
“Life is a lot better and happier now,” Mulaney said. “He is pretty cool for someone who can’t vote.”
