I love how he gave this bit at an autism benefit because it is also a heavy Autism Mood™
This is the most relatable thing I’ve ever seen.
TRANSCRIPT:
JOHN MULANEY: I normally don’t notice people. I zone out constantly. Have you ever zoned out for a few minutes? I’ve been zoned out since 2014.
AUDEINCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: I just - all day long, I wander into traffic walking like Charlie Chaplin, listening to a podcast while thinking about a different podcast.
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: I can zone out anywhere - I was at the doctor’s office, he was reading me the results of a blood test, it was important I listened, and I zoned out! I was like, “nah, I’m gonna stare at the wall and think my thoughts”.
AUDIENCE MEMBER WHOOPS
MULANEY: I was like, “huh. None of the Beatles had moustaches… but then one day, all of them had moustaches.”
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: “That’s weird, I can’t think of a time a group has done that”. Some people in my life don’t want me to zone out as much - they want me to focus, and they want me to be in the moment, and they want me to do this by meditating. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried meditating, but I’ve been trying it. This is how you meditate, okay? You sit on the floor with your back perfectly straight, which I hate more than ISIS -
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: I don’t like sitting up straight! Alright?! It’s never gonna happen! If meditating was sitting hunched over on the toilet with your elbow on your knee while kind of looking at your phone, I’d be the Dalai Lama.
AUDIENCE LAUGHS/APPLAUDS
MULANEY: I don’t like sitting up straight. So you sit up straight, and you breathe, and this helps you stay in the moment. Don’t bother! The moment is mediocre at best!
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: I mean, it’s fine. Let’s all try right now - let’s all be in the moment, in silence, right now. [A HALF-SECOND PAUSE] Sucked, right? Not fun at all!
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: That was boring! You gotta zone out! You have an imagination! You have a movie theatre in your brain that plays fake arguments that you win.
AUDIENCE LAUGHS/APPLAUDS
MULANEY: Have you ever just been sitting there thinking about something for twenty, twenty-five minutes, and all of a sudden you’re like “oh my god, I’m driving!” and you remember? You’re like -
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: “I’m going seventy-five miles an hour! I have been for a while! I could’ve changed so many lives!” Sometimes, my wife - I have this wife - she’ll be like, “are you watching the road?” and I’m always like, “I am looking through the windshield.”
AUDIENCE LAUGHS
MULANEY: “And I’m not gonna hit anyone, but no. I’m thinking about the Beatles.”
Hey @vulpeculavolans added a transcript to this AND THAT IS SO AWESOME THANK YOU SO MUCH!
“I’m gonna stare at the wall and think my thoughts.” Is my true ADHD/Autism experience lmaoooo
“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” -Jorie Graham, in a conversation
I’m glad to know that John Mulaney was an English major because it means when he says “college is just ‘I think Emily Dickinson is a lesbian!’ and they’re like ‘partial credit!’” he says it with authority.
