A year-old ‘Everybody’s Live’ sketch is having a second viral moment, and it’s funnier and more pointed than the $200 million biopic that prompted the resurrection.
There is a video going around again this week. You may have already seen it. John Mulaney, in horn-rimmed glasses and an extremely committed black sweater, sits across from someone in a chimpanzee costume wearing an MJ-style red leather vest. The chimp has a face mask so unmoving it loops back around from “uncanny” into “openly hostile.” Between the two of them is an electronic keyboard. The chimp is Bubbles. Bubbles is being interviewed.
The clip is from Episode 5 of Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, Netflix’s live talk-show experiment, which aired April 9, 2025. The official Netflix account posted the sketch on April 10 with the caption “John Mulaney in a bombshell interview with Bubbles Jackson,” it racked up 4.1 million views, and then it sat there for a year doing the thing that great absurdist comedy does — quietly rewarding people who scrolled past it the first time.
This week, with Lionsgate’s Michael biopic in theaters and most of the press conversation focused on what the film isn’twilling to say about its subject, the Bubbles sketch came roaring back. People started passing it around with some version of the same caption: a guy in a chimp suit pressing soundboard buttons did a better job interrogating Michael Jackson’s legacy than a $165 million movie.
They’re not wrong.
What actually happens in the sketch
The premise is that Mulaney has scored a sit-down with Bubbles Jackson — yes, that Bubbles, Michael Jackson’s former pet chimpanzee, who is now grown up and famous and also a chimp. Mulaney opens with a real fact: the actual Bubbles was born in 1983 and, since 2005, has lived at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, where he is now in his early 40s and reportedly a pretty content retiree. This is, weirdly, the only true thing in the sketch.
Everything that follows is a precise parody of the somber sit-down celebrity exposé. Mulaney plays a smug interviewer pressing for the goods. Bubbles, voiced via robotic speech-board by comedian Langston Kerman frantically slapping keyboard buttons offscreen, parries with the practiced deflections of every fading celebrity who has ever sat for a 60 Minutes segment. The sketch references a “documentary that HBO Max recently pulled,” the kind of detail that lands harder when you remember HBO’s Leaving Neverland exists. Bubbles wants to talk about the music. Bubbles wants to talk about the legacy. Bubbles smokes a banana. Bubbles claims, apropos of nothing, that John Landis drank toilet water. Bubbles, when finally cornered on the topic of Jackson’s victims, will only discuss a Doritos prank.
Why it’s working now
Two things make the sketch a year-later sleeper hit instead of a forgotten throwaway.
The first is that Everybody’s Live itself has, in retrospect, been one of the strangest things on television in years. The Netflix series leaned into a deconstructed-late-night format that often felt actively hostile to the conventions of the genre — loose weekly themes (this episode’s was “getting fired”), guests who had no obvious reason to share a couch (Bill Hader, Johnny Knoxville, and Chelsea Peretti), and bits that escalated past the point of comprehensibility on purpose. The Bubbles interview is one of those bits. It does not really have a punchline. It just keeps going, and the chimp’s affectless face keeps not blinking, and Mulaney keeps gravely nodding like he’s interviewing a head of state, and somewhere around the banana-smoking the whole thing achieves liftoff.
The second is Michael. The Antoine Fuqua biopic that opened in wide release this weekend famously cut all references to the 1993 allegations after a legal clause was discovered late in post, and now ends in 1988, before any of the genuinely difficult chapters of Jackson’s life occur. Critics have largely landed on “sanitized” as the word; even Paris Jackson has publicly distanced herself from earlier drafts. Audiences leaving the film with the strange sense that they’d watched a tribute concert with a story attached have, this week, done what audiences do — they’ve gone looking for something that will engage with the harder material, and they’ve stumbled back onto a guy in a chimp suit pressing the “Aaaaahhhh” button.
What makes the sketch work as critique, rather than just absurdism, is that it takes the form of the celebrity-defender interview seriously. Bubbles is not a strawman. He is, as LateNighter put it, a “self-impressed, dangerously edgy fading celeb” — exactly the kind of inner-circle figure who shows up on cable news to insist that the music is what matters and that the people raising questions have ulterior motives. The bit lands because every Bubbles answer is something an actual Jackson defender has actually said, just routed through a soundboard and a costume.
A note on the actual Bubbles
It feels worth saying, briefly, that the real Bubbles is fine. He is a 42-year-old chimpanzee at a Florida sanctuary, he likes to paint, he does not have opinions about HBO documentaries or his former owner’s posthumous reputation. The version of Bubbles in the Mulaney sketch is a comedy construct, and the construct is the joke — that even the chimp, given a soundboard and a publicist, would close ranks like everyone else.
That’s the line the Michael biopic could not figure out how to walk. Which is why a sketch about a chimp smoking a banana on a Netflix talk show ended up, almost a year after it aired, doing the actual reckoning the movie wouldn’t.
