Why Kyle Mooney insists his ‘real’ musical persona isn’t comedy

Kyle Mooney was doing a silly bit with his two-year-old daughter recently, a natural thing for him both as a professional sketch comedian and as a dad — when she suddenly stopped him.

“I think I was being a lion,” he says, “and she was like, ‘No, don’t be Funny Daddy. Be Real Daddy.’ Which hurt,” he deadpans. “It’s like: I’m being a clown again. And she could see right through it.”

The “real” Kyle Mooney, the recording artist known as “Kyle M” on a new album he wrote and performed, is also a bit — a Kaufman-esque character purporting to be the authentic Kyle, the sincere songster bearing his heart on songs about his blue car, being bullied in middle school and the ills of our “digital society.”

The album is called “The Real Me,” and the whole thing is a charade — and very Kyle Mooney.

Mooney, 41, stayed committed to the bit in an interview the other day over hot dogs and beers at Walt’s Bar in Eagle Rock near his home. With his long curly hair and an open button-up blue shirt with black stripes, he was perfectly himself for the entire hour — sweet, a little bashful, not performative or yukking it up — but when I mentioned that he clearly finds the sound of breathing into or clumsily handling a microphone to be funny, he took a beat and looked at me askew.

“The album is not comedy,” he said, straight-faced. “So, you know, leaving the microphone sounds in there… that was just something I didn’t really realize. And that is also just me maybe being new to the recording experience — like, it was just actually recorded in my bedroom, which I feel like a lot of people might not even know.”

He took the “real” Kyle’s songs out on the road this summer, a tour which culminates at the Lodge Room Wednesday. In the stage show he also does a few of his best-known characters — including Todd, a San Diegan dude who hosts the show “Inside SoCal,” and Chris, a pop-punk rocker who wears all black and, according to Mooney, “considers himself to be a badass.” And on this final hometown date, he’ll reunite with his old sketch group, Good Neighbor.

What makes the “Kyle M” stunt just a little confusing is: Mooney really is sweet, sincere and earnest IRL.

“He’s so spot on in how he sort of makes fun of awkward people,” says Vanessa Bayer, Mooney’s friend and fellow “Saturday Night Live” alum, “but he’s not really making fun of them. He’s really kind of doing a tribute to them. He just understands how humans are in such an exact and hilarious way — and just the way that he’s so earnest about everything is what makes me really laugh. Especially as Kyle M.”

Ever since he was making early internet videos, Mooney has specialized in a variation on that awkward kid at your school in the late 1990s — or maybe it was you — the one who goes up to a stranger and mumbles a half-baked attempt at sounding cool and smart, or the one who swaggers and sings off-key on a cringey, self-serious rock song he wrote. His characters don’t quite know what to do with their hands or where to focus their eyes; they make what they consider to be rad music videos with their buddies at the skate park or in their mom’s kitchen.

He brought a lot of these characters with him to “SNL,” and he recently played a spin-off — a stoner who works at a video rental store — in the A24 comedy-horror film “Y2K,” which Mooney co-wrote and directed.

They are all “still a version of me,” Mooney says. “I feel like if a person can relate to it, it’s probably because they are some version of that. And, yeah, it’s exaggerated, but I do and say awkward things all of the time. Fortunately I was able to sort of hone in on portraying, like, ‘What is this thing that I’m experiencing in real life, and how can I sort of exploit this or utilize this?’”

Rachel Zegler, one of the stars of “Y2K,” laughs as she recalls Mooney coming up to his young actors on set “to give us direction, and he’d be like, ‘Or not. F— me, I guess,’ and like walk away. We’d look at each other, like: I don’t know if he’s kidding or not. There were also a lot of moments where he would give direction and be like, ‘And by the way, guys, thank you so much for being here.’”

The two became friends over the course of filming — most people who work with Mooney want to stay his friend — and Zegler says the “real” Kyle versus the sweetly uncouth one is “a blurred line. It wasn’t really until I hung out with him outside of work that I was like: Oh, okay, this is just who you are.”

Mooney inherited his funny bone. His mom, Linda, “was really silly and loud, and so she took up her own space,” he says — but it was really watching his two older brothers, Sean and Ryan, make skits and funny videos with the family camcorder that activated his desire to create things that made people laugh.

He started making videos in eighth grade — mostly parodies of “Cops” — but he took it to another level with his friend Dave McCary, who grew up with him in San Diego, and who shot and edited their first videos. Those influenced much of Mooney’s core aesthetic; retro, ’90s-era graphics, clumsy edits and funky keyboard sounds all root his awkward skaters and dropouts in a specific time and place, and they’re part of what is both funny and endearingly nostalgic about his comedy.

He still has the Oberheim DX, a 1982 drum machine that he used on videos like his man-on-the-street interview series with Good Neighbor — the group Mooney formed in 2007 with McCary and two friends he made while studying film at USC: Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford.

McCary persuaded Mooney to go up to random people at the Lakers parade in 2010: “I had a vague sense of a character, something I was doing around the house,” Mooney says, “watching sports with Dave and acting like I knew what I was talking about.” A mealymouthed shy guy, he attempts to ask questions but the syntax is all scrambled and he aborts midway through, leading to confused (and funny) reactions from strangers. He did the character several more times at various conventions.

Mooney says he was never not scared, “but we always hoped it never felt aggressive, and that it was more that this person is, like, truly trying their best and has a lot of love in their heart.”

The performer has built a career portraying awkward, sincere characters who don’t quite fit in, from internet videos to “Saturday Night Live.”

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Mooney and Bennett both got hired by “SNL” in 2013 off the strength of Good Neighbor’s sketches. “Obviously he was hilarious and very original,” says Carmen Christopher, the stand-up comedian and actor from “The Bear.” “When he got hired, it was cool to be like: Whoa. That’s like a weird, funny guy. They’re into that. That’s kind of promising for comedy.”

Bennett left the show in 2021, Mooney a year later. They recently started a podcast, “What’s Our Podcast?” where they basically just get to hang out again with the added bonus of interviewing famous funny friends.

Christopher has been opening for Mooney on the “Real Me / Fake Me” tour. He’s been friends with Mooney for a decade, but says he was surprised at just how seriously Mooney takes his craft of silly characters and songs.

Especially, perhaps, considering how charmingly lo-fi and “sloppy” a lot of it seems on the surface.

“I think that’s probably why it’s so inviting,” Christopher says, “because it doesn’t feel pretentious in any way. Sometimes his videos feel like it’s your buddy down the block who made his first video. But you’re like: This is so funny.”