If last week’s episode of Netflix’s Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney was the only episode you had ever seen, you would be forgiven for thinking that the show was shot live at a community board meeting in New York City. After all, the conversation, which featured some of the most accomplished people in entertainment, quickly descended into a competition to see who could most gratuitously equate Big Apple bona fides with complaints about all the ways in which bicycles have ruined New York.
Everybody’s Live is Mulaney’s absurdist homage to classic television talk shows and variety programs such as The Dick Cavett Show, The Merv Griffin Show, or Johnny Carson’s version of The Tonight Show. And last week’s episode certainly wasn’t hurting for interesting people: At one point, Amy Sedaris, star of the cult classic Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy; Sigourney Weaver, of Alien, Ghostbusters, and Gorillas in the Mist fame; and Natasha Lyonne, whose brilliant turns in Russian Doll and Poker Face are among my favorite pieces of episodic storytelling of past half decade, were all on the talk show couch.
The stated theme of the program was “Is Uber Good?”
And that explained the presence of the non-celebrity at the distant Siberia end of the stage; Mulaney invited L.A. journalist and public transit expert Alissa Walker to, presumably, keep the conversation grounded in facts.
Setting aside that the evening’s putative question has been known for more than a decade — it’s a resounding “no,” at least for people who care about congestion, carbon emissions, and public transit ridership — Mulaney barely bothered to engage with Walker, the editor of Torched, a news site focused on the infrastructure changes and policy choices being pursued by Los Angeles as it preps for the 2028 Olympic games. After Walker offered one reason why Uber is not “good” — i.e. because of the congestion and the undermining of public transit — Mulaney asked Walker how she got to the studio.
When she answered that she took the bus and the train, Mulaney seemed positively shocked. “This is a dystopian nightmare!” he exclaimed. Walker, one of the smartest writers and reporters on the urbanism and transportation beat, never got a chance to defend the LA Metro, a system that sees more than one million average weekday boardings.
It went downhill from there, from the perspective of public transit. Sedaris and Weaver offered pure windshield perspectives: Sedaris by mentioning that she takes Ubers to visit her godchildren in (NJ Transit-accessible) Maplewood, N.J. and Weaver emphasizing that she prefers yellow cabs. Fine enough.
Still, as any discussion about urban transportation grows longer, the probability of a complaint involving bicycles approaches certainty. (I’m calling this one “Gordon’s Law.”)
When Lyonne joined the panel, Mulaney asked her about Uber, but Lyonne turned the conversation to where it was perhaps always destined to go. Plastering her classic New York accent so thick that she should be forced to go before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, Lyonne stated, “What I don’t [like] is bicycles in New York.” After pausing for a laugh from the studio audience, she continued, “I think we need to shut down the bike lanes.”
That allowed Weaver to knock cyclists who “don’t use the bike lanes anyway.” The rapid-fire conversation continued with Lyonne adding, “We gotta get rid of those bicycles,” before Richard Kind — the Ed McMahon to Mulaney’s Johnny Carson — brought it to an almost inevitable crescendo, yelling, “And get rid of the electric bicycles! They’re the worst! They’re killers!” [Fact check: They are not.]
Walker made a humorous attempt at de-escalation — “You know I’m going to disagree with everything that was just said,” she quipped — and tried to bring the conversation back to reality with pragmatic solutions such as “well-maintained” bike lanes that might be more likely to be used by the cyclists Weaver never sees in bike lanes. Walker also pointed toward a rational allocation of limited urban real estate as another way of reining in the chaos: “The bus should have a lane, the bikes should have its very own very wide lane, and then there should be a wider sidewalk.”
The mention of a wide bike lane clearly triggered Lyonne, who cut Walker off.
“This is insane,” she said. “It’s Manhattan, we don’t have the space.”
Classic windshield perspective! Lyonne was clearly not able to see that it’s all the Uber Black XLs and Cadillac Escalades ferrying celebrities and other wealthy New Yorkers that are taking up all the space.
The conversation was a missed opportunity, though, of course, Mulaney’s show isn’t supposed to be “Point/Counterpoint.”
“It’s a comedy show,” Walker told me. “I’m not even sure this is truly what any of these people believe.”
The conversation failed in one other way, perhaps more specific to the format: It just wasn’t that funny. For a brief moment, it felt more like a Real Housewives reunion show than a conversation featuring some of the smartest and most-talented minds in entertainment and culture. Good television, sure, but not great comedy.
It’s not that jokes about e-bikes can’t be funny. Take Mulaney’s brilliantly absurd Broadway-inspired ode to New York City, which aired on the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special earlier this year. The musical number featured Scarlett Johansson, her arm in a cast, and Paul Rudd singing about the dangers of e-bikes to the tune of a signature ballad from Little Shop of Horrors. In that sketch, e-bikes were presented as just one of many annoying or actually bad things that defined New York in different decades, such as the pre-Disney version of Times Square or the drug- and alcohol-infused power lunches of 1980s Wall Street.
That’s the weird thing about some New Yorkers’ sense of nostalgia; for some reason, they look fondly back at the city’s crime-ridden, trash-filled hellscape days, when murders were in the thousands and hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists were killed every year.
But build a few bike lanes and people’s heads explode (even as the number of pedestrian and cyclists’ deaths keeps declining).
Walker shared with me a thread from r/JohnMulaney where viewers shared their reactions to the episode. “What’s with all the hate on transit and bikes? John and his guests are coming across as very entitled,” wrote one user.
“I’m totally fine with people who aren’t a fan of using a bike to get around,” added another. “But there’s no need for them to tell others that they shouldn’t.” Still another said that bikes “don’t deserve the hate” and wondered why so much oxygen was devoted to dragging a form of transportation that is “more efficient, more eco-friendly, quieter and takes up less space than cars.” Others applauded Walker for standing up for what she believes in. Some Los Angelenos even took offense at the disparaging of their city’s public transit system.
So, is there any widespread appetite for getting rid of the bike lanes? Not really. Either way, who cares? That question is soooo 2010. As former New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has said since that era, “The people are so far ahead of the press and the politicians when it comes to what they want to see on their streets.” Looked at another way, we should celebrate this latest bout of bikelash on John Mulaney’s show. Comedy fans are now way ahead of the Hollywood elite.
