When we think of comedy and marriage, we probably think of “’er indoors” jokes: all those Les Dawson-era gags about henpecked husbands and battleaxe in-laws. Jokes about marital bliss have been thin on the ground – until now. Step forward “the Jay Z and Beyoncé of alternative comedy”, as one US reviewer dubbed Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman.
Mullally is the comic actor best known as shrill, alcoholic socialite Karen Walker in Will & Grace – a role that showered her in Emmys and Golden Globe awards. She’s in London tonight with her husband, Offerman – libertarian moustachio-man Ron Swanson in the sitcom Parks and Recreation – for Summer of 69: No Apostrophe, a live comedy show about the blissful (and highly sexed) state of their 14-year union.
They created the show two years ago, Mullally tells me from home. She’s on her phone while Offerman spirits the pair from a gig in Maine, to another in Vermont.
“We’re pretty no-frills,” she says. “We have a rented car, and we hit the road every day and drive to a new city.” Touring daily and performing nightly with one’s spouse might not sound ideal. But that’s the whole point about Mullally and Offerman. “There were some articles written,” says Mullally, “about our marriage, mythologising it, making it into the greatest love story ever told. So we used that as a springboard for this show, to say: indeed, it’s true. There is no greater love, and here’s how you too can achieve it.”
This isn’t the seraphic existence you’d have thought fate had in store for Karen Walker: domestic harmony wasn’t remotely her scene. That show-stealing turn was the making of Mullally, a jobbing actor with a couple of Broadway musicals and bit-parts in Seinfeld and Frasier before Will & Grace came calling, when she was 40 years old. She met Offerman the following year; he is 12 years her junior – 46 now to her 58.
Photograph: Ho/Reuters
At first, she was the famous one – until Offerman was cast in NBC’s Parks and Recreation, the Amy Poehler-led local gov sitcom, for which he too was soon a fixture on awards shortlists. Offerman had guested on Will & Grace, and now Mullally became a regular guest star on Parks and Rec as Ron Swanson’s manipulative (and highly sexed) librarian ex-wife Tammy.
Ron and Tammy, says Mullally, partly explain her and Offerman’s “greatest romance ever told” reputation. “That relationship is very funny and sexual, dangerous and horrible,” she says. “And strangely intriguing. So people were reeled in by that.” What kind of married couple, the world wondered, can cheerfully simulate hate-sex for laughs? “And then I joined social media,” Mullally goes on, “and started posting pictures of the two of us. And that pushed it over the edge.”
In interviews, the couple made public their pact never to go more than a fortnight without seeing one another. Then, in 2010, they featured on a New York Magazine cover – both of them nude, Offerman’s dignity preserved behind a bunch of grapes – which ratcheted up their reputation as a duo with lots to laugh about and nothing, save Offerman’s dignity, to hide.
Doesn’t it feel pressured, being an exemplar of marital contentment in the US? “Oh, sure,” says Mullally. “If we’re ever seen having a public spat in a coffee shop, I think the concept of romance will die. In their show, they stress that “we’re just normal people, and that we do argue from time to time”. But Summer of 69 also sells the dream of their mutual bliss, tracing their relationship since meeting as co-stars in an LA play in 2000. Anecdotes are spliced with improvised banter and “songs about our genitals”, with Offerman on guitar, and Mullally on ukulele. (Substantially rewritten for its current tour, the show reportedly features a new song about Donald Trump.)
“It’s all comedy,” says Mullally, adding: “We’re more in the Amy Schumer camp than the Jerry Seinfeld, [so] a lot of the comedy is of a sexual nature.” Some of the audience are there for more than just laughs. “You also see two people who are not only in a healthy relationship, but are also having fun together. And a lot of people say they’ve been inspired by that.” Then there’s the show’s public information function. “I think it’s nice for younger people to know that you can be older than 27 and still get it on with your husband. A lot of young people think it all comes to a screeching halt once you’re 32. But it really doesn’t.”
For Mullally, “things have always seemed to happen later in life,” she says. “At this late stage, for example, I just got my first real part in a real movie.” (Alongside Bryan Cranston in the rom-com Why Him?) But what she’d really like is meatier dramatic roles – such as the one in Off-Broadway play Annapurna, in which she starred in 2014 alongside, you guessed it, Nick Offerman. But Mullally’s not good at controlling her own career. “I tend to let the chips fall where they may. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong,” she says, a little wistfully. “I could probably be more hands-on. But if I sit down and plan a campaign to become the next Meryl Streep, I don’t think anybody’s going to be particularly impressed.”
A further obstacle may be the sheer eclecticism of Mullally’s professional life. Here she is globetrotting in a husband-and-wife cabaret show. In October, she tours with Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle as part of the singing double-act Nancy and Beth – described on their website as “the Andrews Sisters, honky tonk, country and western and some Joni Mitchell”. (Music, she says, is “what I was before I was ever an actor.”)
Surely this jack-of-all-trades approach must drive her agent crazy. “It sometimes drives me crazy, too,” she says. “It’s great, but it’s hard to juggle everything.” Especially when you’re bound by a solemn pledge to see your husband every fortnight. “Ah, but the positives of that far outweigh the negatives,” she says, and probably not only because Offerman is listening in from the seat beside her. “We’re really happy together, and we always can’t wait to see each other.”
- Summer of 69: No Apostrophe is at the Hammersmith Apollo, London, on 3 September.
