John Mulaney compared his three-year-old son’s “diva” behavior to working with Ellen DeGeneres.
Mulaney began his latest episode of Everybody’s Live with a tale about his son’s recent spring concert. The story reminded him of Degeneres, who ended her talk show in 2022 amid constant rumors that she was a bad boss behind the scenes.
Mulaney described how he’d struggled to convince his son to wear light jeans for his concert, as the school requested.
“If you were a neighbor of mine last Friday at 5.15 p.m., you would have seen me running out of the house in a jacket and tie, holding a tiny pair of light jeans, chasing after a three-year-old boy only in his underwear, screaming, ‘We had a deal!’” Mulaney said.
The comedian soon mused, “It’s hard to get toddlers to perform together. They’re all divas of their own kind… Every toddler at heart is the star of their own show.”
“Do you know what having a three-year-old is like?” Mulaney continued. “Having a three-year-old is what I imagine working on Ellen’s show is like.”
“Because people come over, you know, and they’re like, ‘How is it?’” Mulaney said. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s fun. You know, we have fun, there’s games… No, but some days are hard. but it’s fun, y’know.’”
His impression continued, “‘We have dancing, you know. So if he starts dancing, you dance. But if he stops dancing…’” He got serious: “‘You f—ing stop dancing right away.’”
Elsewhere in the episode, Mulaney tried to create a line of over twenty-four men standing side to side, each of them exactly one inch taller than the other.
The plan hit a snag when one of the men, who claimed to be 6′0″, turned out on further inspection to only be 5′11″.
Mulaney was devastated at the news, but he told his live viewers that if any of them were exactly six feet tall, they should run over to the studio as fast as possible.
At the end of the episode Jimmy Kimmel, whose talk show is also hosted in Los Angeles, rushed into the room.
“I’m 6’0″ on the dot,” he announced, to great applause. The coveted 24-man diagonal height line, which Mulaney has been working on since his March 29 show, was finally accomplished.
