Image Credit: Brad Barket

Stand-up comedian and Saturday Night Live scribe John Mulaney makes plenty of pop culture references in his one-hour Comedy Central special New in Town: Among other jokes, there’s a well-delivered line about Ratatouille and even a pitch-perfect Def Comedy Jam take on Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But Mulaney, who has an affinity for all things television (“I don’t daydream, I just think about things I saw on TV. I’ve noticed that sometimes I’ll be staring off and I’ll just be thinking about a commercial I saw when I was 10, or when they lip-synched Ray Charles on The Cosby Show,” he jokes to EW), assures us there’s one thing he won’t go near in his act: Friday Night Lights.

“The biggest new show in my life has been Friday Night Lights, which I watched on DVD,” Mulaney tells EW. “So I was thinking about new jokes and brainstorming and I was thinking, ‘Well why don’t you talk about how much you like Friday Night Lights?’ and another part of my brain was like, ‘No. You will not cheapen Friday Night Lights in your stand-up!’ Also, I took the show so seriously, I don’t even know if I have any funny take on it other than it being great and I want to be Coach Taylor. I did talk like Coach Taylor a little after I watched the series. I would talked in clip sentences like [in a convincing Coach Taylor accent] ‘You get your priorities straight.’”
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