Three stone deities stand watch over the entrance of the Asian Garden Mall, in Orange County’s Little Saigon. The mall is a cultural hub for Southern California’s enormous Vietnamese population. Old men sit nearby, smoking and talking heatedly over newspapers—actual newspapers—beneath a waving South Vietnamese flag. A steady stream of visitors approach to take photos in front of the façade.
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Among them, more naturally than you might imagine possible, comes John Mulaney, pushing a stroller and pausing to rub the belly of a stone Buddha for good luck. Alongside are his mother-in-law, Dung Kim Schmid, and her husband, a mild-mannered retired optometrist named Sam. They are visiting Southern California from Oklahoma City on the occasion of the arrival of the stroller’s occupant: Mulaney and wife Olivia Munn’s second child, a daughter named Méi June.
They stop to regard the deity statues: Phuoc representing fortune; Loc, prosperity; and Tho, longevity. “Would you really want the longevity if you don’t have the prosperity and fortune?” Mulaney muses, though it wasn’t all that long ago that he was in danger of having exactly the opposite problem.
If this seems a strange place to find yourself at the start of a profile of John Mulaney, you might consider how John Mulaney feels. Once such a consummate urbanite that you half expected to see a pigeon on his head and his pockets stuffed with takeout menus, today he looks every inch a suburban dad, in his white lace-up Vans, olive jeans, long-sleeve shirt. Only days ago, he and his family, which also includes Malcolm, who is nearly three, moved into a new house overlooking the ocean. With Méi came a massive, new three-row SUV, though, frankly, it seems like a lot of car for John Mulaney, much less a tiny baby.
Sometimes, he says, he imagines himself a character in the TV show Quantum Leap who somehow ended up in the body of a dad at Sky Zone, the chain of indoor trampoline parks. “I would come to in all these foam blocks, which have absorbed a lot of human sweat over the years and are very hard to climb out of, with my son standing above me,” he says.
Here are the facts of how the past four years led him to this peculiar place: In 2020, while living in New York City, he entered rehab, for addiction to cocaine and a smorgasbord of pharmaceuticals. He and his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, split up. He relapsed. He went back to rehab, this time with the help of a starry intervention that has since passed into legend thanks to his Emmy-winning Netflix special, Baby J. This time, the sobriety stuck. Soon after, he connected with Munn and, soon after that, it became known that she was pregnant.
