“Am I stoked there’s a file on me? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it in the moment? Not so much.”
John Mulaney has had quite a year: He hosted Saturday Night Live twice, was nominated for two Emmy Awards, and this weekend his show Big Mouth returns for Season 4 on Netflix.
NBC / Getty Images
He’s also been killing it as a (temporary?) writer/correspondent on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
And, like the rest of us, he’s been going through the hellfire of 2020, starring COVID-19 and the US presidential election.
As it turns out, some of John’s political humor got him in a bit of a situation with the Secret Service, as he revealed during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel.
During his opening monologue on the Feb. 29 episode of SNL, he made a joke about leap year that had some political implications.
NBC
The lawyers were wrong, it seems.
As he explained to Jimmy Kimmel, the joke didn’t mention any politician by name, but that didn’t stop the literal Secret Service from asking some questions.
NBC
“They investigated me, and I guess they opened a file on me because of the joke.”
“Am I stoked there’s a file on me? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it in the moment? Not so much.”
John made it clear, though, that the person who vetted him understood that the joke had “nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
CBS
For the sake of being thorough, the agent still asked him if he had published any “rants” or “manifestos” of the president, about which John quipped, “I have bad writing habits, I could never pound out a manifesto.”
Rest assured, John didn’t get in any trouble.
ABC
NGL, if I was questioned by the Secret Service for telling a joke, I’d never tell another one for the rest of my life.
He also took the opportunity to address one of the jokes from his most recent SNL monologue on Oct. 31 that got a bit of backlash which, according to John, was well-deserved.
According to John, he meant to say that some things would never change regardless of who won the election, but ended up implying that the outcome of the election didn’t matter, which he was quick to say is not how he actually feels.
ABC
“I should have said, ‘I very much want one to win over the other, and there will be improvements if one wins.’ And I deserved the backlash,” he told Jimmy. “It was a strange things to toss out there, three days before an election, in front of a lot of people going, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter who wins.'”
Thankfully, John was able to clear up what he meant, and we all learned a valuable lesson: jokes are serious stuff.
Netflix
It’s all fun and games until the Secret Service opens a file on you.
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