Computational Analyst Claims That the Secret to John Mulaney’s Success Is ‘Engineered Spontaneity’

One methodical comedy nerd believes that there is a quantifiable reason why more than paleontology.

There is a strong argument to be made that the first generation raised on computers both personal and mobile considers Mulaney to be the most influential comedian of their time. Across the country, millions of younger Millennials who lived the advent of social media and the explosion of easily accessible computational tools while they were entering adolescence can still recite multiple-minute chunks of New in Town by heart, possibly during their lunch break at a mid-level web development job. Mulaney is a massive star to the first internet generation, including to political scientist and pop-culture critic Vlad Surdea-Hernea, who recently performed large-scale computational analysis to identify the “precise architecture” of Mulaney’s art and to learn the secrets of his success.

Using Natural Language Processing, Surdea-Hernea analyzed 3,500 sentences from Mulaney’s streaming specials to better understand the construction of Mulaney’s art. According to Surdea-Hernea's findings, Mulaney has mastered the technique of “engineered spontaneity,” or as Surdea-Hernea defines it, “comedy that appears most effortless precisely because of its careful design.” 

Strangely, Surdea-Hernea’s exhaustive report came to no conclusions as to how much of Mulaney’s massive success was due to the Tumblr crowd dubbing him “America's Virgin Boyfriend.”

Following his exhaustive research, Surdea-Hernea came to a handful of conclusions about Mulaney’s comedy. First: “His vocabulary actually got simpler as he got more famous, but his sentences got longer and more complex.” Surdea-Hernea found that, over time, Mulaney grew to use much more accessible language while developing increasingly intricate narrative structure, making him easier to understand while he crafted complicated stories.

Surdea-Hernea also considers Mulaney to be an “emotional architect,” or “a comedian who orchestrates emotional states to maximize impact.” As for Mulaney’s favorite emotion to architect? Surdea-Hernea says that the comic is especially fond of confusion, which naturally builds toward realization. Think “there’s a horse loose in a hospital,” and consider the confusion of both the audience and the horse itself.

This building and release of tension is the cornerstone of comedy writing, but Surdea-Hernea says that Mulaney is a unique wielder of this all-important technique, noting how Mulaney will extend the gap between set-up and punchline, or “negative sentiment” to “positive peak,” for 8 to 12 sentences longer than his peers. Surdea-Hernea attributes Mulaney’s mastery of tension and punchlines to his time working as a writer on Saturday Night Live, a series that’s notorious for its tension, both comedic and personal, as well as its occasional punches.

But as Surdea-Hernea notes, Mulaney’s specials aren’t just showcases of emotional architecture, confusion-realization cycles or set-ups and punchlines — they’re complete experiences, with every element working in harmony to create a single, fluid work that explores Mulaney’s wit and emotions that are unique to him. When he’s onstage, Mulaney appears to be a natural performer, completely in his element, concealing the “hidden technique” and careful engineering of his comedy.

However, Surdea-Hernea’s study makes no attempt at understanding a scientifically tertiary but practically inextricable aspect of Mulaney’s oeuvre – his personality, specifically in how it unintentionally engenders parasocial attachment. If Mulaney’s divorce drama has taught us anything, it’s that his fans think of him not as a comic, but as a part-friend, part-boyfriend, part-teen-idol whose personal life is too entangled with his work for them to separate the art from the artist.

But ultimately, that aspect of Mulaney’s celebrity isn’t an intended variable in his comedy formula — and, if you want computational analysis of Mulaney’s private life, there are already thousands of TikToks that explore the subject in a similarly exhaustive fashion.