John Mulaney at UCB: Basketball and Hooks for Hands

uh i am uh very emotional about uh i will also be talking about the the game of basketball i'm very emotional about this and i'm a little high on dayquil so if i am rambling please forgive me but um it's funny timing that this came up now because we just got through with uh march madness which i hate uh because i always get like roped into a pool you know and i don't understand what's happening it's like those big water bottles where you're supposed to give to the homeless like i don't know where the money's going but like i want to look cool so i get like a little bit and then people hand me this bracket and i'm supposed to like know what that means it's basically when like the ncaa thing happens people are basically being like hey do you want to be confused for a month and i'm like yeah can i pretend to be a man that sounds good with that gonzaga that's a weird name i'll choose them i've become one of those people who hate sports and i i i've become one i wasn't always and i dislike that but i do have problems with sports because it's supposed to be this like leisurely activity but now there's like post-game shows and so much money and bureaucracy and it's like someone took something that you're supposed to use to blow off steam and they were like hey let's add some steam to it but i didn't always like i liked i liked sports when i was younger um i loved basketball when i was very small i grew up in chicago uh in the late 80s and early 90s basketball was kind of a big deal back then and i loved it and then was terrible at it and living in chicago back then and being bad at basketball would be like living in baltimore now and being bad at heroin like it was but followed have to you have to understand building up i started playing when i was nine years old building up to nine years old i was a huge chicago bulls fan my dad uh would get tickets often so we would go to the games my brother and my dad and i and we would sit uh up in the first balcony and next to these uh three guys that we called fat fat and skinny one was fat and another was fat and the other guy was skinny and it was they were they were exactly like the super fans they all had mustaches and they would drink and chain smoke through the game and whenever we played the cleveland cavaliers they would just chant lamb beer sucks lamb beer sucks throughout the entire game it was wonderful and we would go out to the hot dog concession and there was a guy that worked at the concession at chicago stadium and he had uh uh hook hands he had hooks for hands and my dad would always use him to put life in perspective um he didn't have uh when i say hooks he didn't have hooks like captain hook's hooks which are sharp these were like two bent paper clips that he could use to grasp things in this case hot dogs and we would walk up there and we would get our order we'd order and we'd walk away and we'd have them and then my dad would walk with us uh away from the concession and it got to a point where like we could time it like we walk away and my brother would go three two one and my dad would go boy that makes you think huh [Music] you bet he's got hook hands you got two proper ones which bothered me because like that guy's whole life wasn't hooks you know like he had other things about him it wasn't like he woke up every morning was like hooks for hands why sometimes he probably runs in a movie and made a night of it look we had a basketball hoop in my backyard and i i thought when i was very little that i knew how to play i think i would just sort of shoot and and bounce the ball off the wall and have fun with it and more often than not i would just take photos of myself in front of the hoop holding the lawn like that and my brother my brother and i have disposable cameras and we take photos of ourselves holding the ball and then because i wanted to look like a professional basketball player i would go into the kitchen and i would wet down the sides of my hair and i would try and sweat like a grown-up by like i'd pour a cup of water on my t-shirt so that it sweat like in a v so that it looked like i'd been playing basketball so there's all these photos of me when i was five and six years old standing there with a basketball sweating like an older divorced man and then when i was nine um i went to saint clement grammar school in chicago and and everyone played basketball and i had to play and i and i was excited to play because i thought i was going to be good and that's the problem it's like in my head i'm good at sports like my brain is good at sports you know like my brain understands how a man could dribble down a basketball court and then make a layup right but then my brain has to outsource the job with my weird feminine limb and i end up face down with a bloody leg and i went in there to the first practices and people were good and i didn't know how they became good because i wasn't good yet but they were suddenly good and i thought i was going to be good from the get-go you don't understand like i always had a big ego even when i was a baby i would think oh i'm real soft and i thought that's great you know so i always thought highly of myself so i was something like what the [ __ ] is going on i'm not good at this and it developed to a point that i i slowly realized by like fifth and sixth grade i was like i am a bench warmer like i am a bench warmer yeah it's sad i mean i i don't know if you can understand like the humiliation of every saturday morning putting on a pair of breakaway pants and never having a reason to break them away then they're just pants so i had to uh i had to do other things i mean i i still like i followed the game i closely watched like i still remember all the plays the 2-1-2 defense 2-3 defense motion offense diamond press that was when we when you press is when you play defense over the half court line is that right yeah yeah and we have we have a game annually where we play the girls and we have this tiny japanese ref that uh worked at our school english group no bestie girls no plastic girl i got to seventh and eighth grade and this was like i remember even hearing my mom talk about it she's like you know fifth and sixth graders you know it's fun but by seventh and eighth grade we expect the kids to win and i was like holy [ __ ] i got to seventh and eighth grade and the coaches were these two guys who i who i loved coach kane who was the head coach and then uh mr tui he didn't go by coach he went by mr tui who was an old ex-marine and like freelance chicago journalist who i think was just a drinking buddy of coach kings and then we started bringing to practice and one day he was just like by the way you all know the assistant coach here mr two we don't even were like hi mr dewey and mr tui smelled like cough syrup and it wasn't until i myself was in a rehab thing and uh this doctor was like and you know a lot of alcoholics mask their drinking with coffee and i was like holy [ __ ] mr dewitt [Music] and they were wonderful and i and ibk and i loved the team and loved being a part of it and i took on outside responsibilities like john besides playing so i would uh i would keep track of the uniforms that was one of mine and so when we started seventh grade i like michael jordan wanted to be number 23. so i gave myself number 25 and then i was told in front of the entire team that i couldn't be number 23 because you because i was the worst player on the team i was supposed to go to the best player on the team but what i argued was that why don't you give it to me then they'll think i'm the best player on the team but this doesn't really check out because it's not like you would be like oh hey you know they're down by 20 and they still haven't put in their secret weapons more often than not i mean i didn't play in the games ever really i'd play in practices though and like what i do was if i if i messed up when i when i airballed when i got fouled horribly i would just like i'd like act like um like a mental patient you know like if i airballed or something it'd be like yeah yeah so that they would so they would be like oh this guy's not bad at basketball he's just playing crazy you gotta keep an eye out for him i was also the scorekeeper too and this led to one of my favorite uh instances from basketball is that well as i said we went to a catholic school and so uh we would play other catholic schools those were the divisions we were in however as some sort of like expand your horizons type program we would go play uh three jewish schools every year first jewish school i ever played uh i we did not encounter jewish kids in our grade school it was like it was diverse as far as like blacks and hispanics and stuff but there were no jewish people so this was the first time i met uh jewish people in my life was playing solomon schechter now let me say this i love julie my best friends are jewish seriously i love jewish people i'm minored in in jewish studies in college i love jewish people and fetishize jewish women but and this is only about solomon schechter this is the first jewish people we ever met and this is only about solomon schechter they were point-shaving thieves [Music] so midway through the second quarter my coach is pacing around like you know like like coach's place like coke heads you know he's like pacing around and he's looking at the school and he's like wait a minute we got four more points in that and they're just like no you don't have four more points than that and he goes malani get up in their face and tell them what's what so i take my record book and i'm getting up and he was he was like really get angry at him and i get up in this grown man's face this first jewish man i ever met i'm going you're a liar you're cheating us put those points back up and they didn't and we lost by about four points so there was some animosity to that school and only that school and then at the next practice my coach pulled us aside he goes we're not going to play solo and check the river again i wrote him a letter and i told him to stick it and i would like to i picture that letter just being a single piece of paper that just says like oh just like a gift from god or something when i was in seventh grade this guy transferred into our school named mikhail lombropolis that was his name and it didn't get any better from there he joined the basketball team because like almost every single boy had to play basketball okay i was terrible at basketball he was horrible he was horrible he was the worst basketball player i've ever seen when he airballed it would go behind him like literally also he was colorblind he was colorblind he couldn't take geography class because they'd be like what country is this here in blue and he didn't know from blue he didn't know what he was doing and because his mother would drop him off at school riding a bicycle we decided that she was a lesbian so this guy had a lot of strikes against him suddenly i was off the hook but like any kid that transfers in with a weird name who's colorblind his mom is a lesbian he transferred out very quickly and i was once again the worst player on the basketball team and then seventh grade moved into eighth grade and then the seventh graders joined our team we played with the eighth graders now the seventh graders join us and there were seventh graders playing ahead of me now there was one kid now who joined named billy who was worse than me and he was kind of heavy and the coach called him tank but he had an excuse for being bad he had asthma so it was like tank is the worst player on the team but he has asthma so mullany's the worst player this was by the way spoken about it right now like oh yeah you're that comedian like people used to be oh yeah you're horrible at basketball you're the worst player on the basketball team i hated most especially playing in front of my brother my brother was two years older than me and he was pretty good like he wasn't on the starting five he would get the sixth man award every year and he was respected he was like a guy he like wasn't in the mafia but he was like friendly with the mafia so he was like respected by the mafia but it was a basketball team and i hated playing in front of him or him coming to games and watching me not play it was so mortifying and once when i was in eighth grade my brother came to a game and he was sitting in the stands and it the the water ran out like the the water bottles ran out and i knew that they were gonna tell me to go get more water in front of my older brother so i see the coach being like and then it like came down it came like i watched it like clockwork people like passing it down to the end of the they also put us at the end of the bench [ __ ] you what is that so they're passing the water bottle down and they weren't saying if it was just like give it to him give it to him give it to him give it to him give it to him and it gets to me and i absolutely like in a movie i had the water bottles i look up at my brother he looks at me and then i go tank fill these up alumni would come back and stuff me uh to practices they would come back to stuff me i found this out like my coach's son and other kids who had already graduated would come back to practice and they would want to like do go into scrimmage with me so that they could stuff me because i was so easy to stuff so that was like a hobby by the way this is a tangent i haven't really figured this out but i would go to northwestern basketball camp over the summer and i was good at basketball and i don't know i was better i wasn't good i was better than terrible and i don't know what that was i think maybe just like being out of people's eyes i i would be a little more comfortable to play better and then i would go back and i would be terrible again and in eighth grade uh in the middle of the season my coach's son coach kane was telling you about it was a real hero to everybody his son who would sometimes come and coach with our team uh was murdered he was getting out of a car and he was carjacked and he was killed and it was like a [ __ ] horrible tragedy throughout our neighborhood even a city it was big news that this had happened and uh my parents were very good friends with the canes uh they were you know community people and stuff and my mother went over there and as she tells me the story he had been this was the day after the shooting and he had been upset uh the entire day obviously but completely inconsolable and not talking and my mother went over to talk to him and she said jim that was his name jim is there anything we can do for you and apparently according to my mom he said yeah see if john can learn how to make a jump shot [Laughter] which is awesome and really touching but that's how bad i was at basketball no it's nice it's a nice memory but still like that you know he hadn't spoken you know and it was a one-liner so the first game back the first game back his first game back uh coaching us uh we all had like um black ribbons and stuff on our uniforms and uh it was a very sad game and we were very happy to have him back but he was still very emotional and so we were uh the team was kicking the [ __ ] out of the other team we were up by like 20 or something and i should mention that the benchwarmers would play uh in the last 30 seconds if we were winning them it was kind of like towards the end of the civil war when it was just like the union army was just like crazy old men and boys who would like light [ __ ] on fire and rape it and like they weren't trained soldiers you know what i mean it was like sherman's march was just sort of a party which i kind of always hated because part of my rationale as to what people in the stands were thinking was that they were maybe thinking like oh maybe that kid's injured so he can't play now when i go into the game they're like oh john's not injured john sucks i went out into the game his first game back last 30 seconds i had half of one minute to not do anything wrong i walk out on the court and i get the ball and i don't know what it was hubris i decided to go for a shot you know and i get fouled right away i get knocked to the ground and this ref runs over to help me up he's like hey hey hey don't you worry son we're gonna get you some free throws that will not be necessary if you're looking to make this up to me might i suggest a gift certificate because i was about to take a shot it was a technical foul so they cleared the court they were like yeah you're going out there solo really explore the space with how god-awful you are at this game so from the stands you could watch me shoot free throws and you could watch like my team's bench watch me shoot princess you know what i mean and they looked at that moment like some like bizarre last supper painting you know it's just people like oh he's not going to shoot free throws is he oh this is a really bad idea and my coach in the middle just like one i got up to the foul line and i airball the first one [Music] but i did not airball the second one because i don't know if you know this but after you airball the goal no longer becomes to make a basket it's just to hit some [ __ ] to show the people in the stands that you have a general sense of the game so i hit some [ __ ] bottom of the backboard and that was my last year of basketball and at the end this was this was one two three four solid years of playing basketball at the end of the four years we had this big sports awards ceremony where all the teams would get together and they do this every may and the woman who was in charge of all athletics got up to give a speech a very important speech that i'll never forget she got up there and she said you know programs like the boys basketball program are so important because the alternative for young men could be using drugs or alcohol and that was the first time that i ever heard that there was an alternative [Applause]

Channel: CB H

Views: 255,676

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Id: SNPUKkPJFvE

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/peperoni_dog_farts]

That was really good! He’s comedic timing could not possibly be more on point

[u/Rebloodican]

What’s really incredible is how much of this got left on the cutting room floor when making The Top Part. The material that didn’t make it would’ve made a solid album in its own right.