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Chosen One of the Day: Mr. Music from John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch
We here at SYFY FANGRRLS love ourselves some Jake Gyllenhaal. Seriously. That love sometimes comes hand-in-hand with being somewhat terrified because our boy is intense. And the most recent version of that combination of love and horror for Gyllenhaal was felt just this past December when he made a surprise cameo as Mr. Music in John Mulaney’s Netflix special John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch.
The special was already a wonderful mish-mash of what we remember most fondly of after school specials in the late '80s and early '90s: it was weird and funny, full of random celebrity cameos, and I could easily imagine watching it as a latchkey kid.
But it’s Gyllenhaal’s introduction, at the end of the show, that brought a level of millennial-absurdist humor within a familiar framework that we want to celebrate today.
He’s Mr. Music! But no, he doesn’t want you to play your skinny trumpet (read as: clarinet)!!! “Instruments are stupid!!!!!”
We get a full song on the potential of objects to make very quiet music.
When you tap a pen on a paperback book
Not too loud, but you get the point!
It doesn’t really work out for Mr. Music, though. The sounds are too soft.
“Is Mr. Music OK?” asks one of the sack lunch bunch children.
"No, Mr. Music’s not OK. He’s having a lot of trouble," John Mulaney, authority figure, replies.
After a sequence of Mr. Music getting increasingly frustrated by his inability to create a loud sound, he accidentally walks on some broken glass and it breaks him.
“I stayed up late trying on clothes I already own and I didn’t prepare and I failed.”
Whomst amongst us, I ask. Whomst.
We love the chaotic evil disaster, Mr. Music. Doomed to the Sisyphean task of finding music in the most unmusical of places and failing again and again and again. A legend for our times.
