How Brennan Lee Mulligan Lost His Mind And Became Internet History

The internet is made for bite-sized content — a quippy tweet, a goofy TikTok — the type of thing that simply appears on your screen for ten seconds to make one joke before offering you the chance to move on to the next piece of media. The very nature of the internet content has little room for what one might consider "high art," which makes the viral success of Brennan Lee Mulligan's 'I cannot win' monologue all the more impressive.

There's a tragic shortage of great rants online nowadays. The days of Christian Bale and Charlie Sheen dominating the internet with their unhinged monologues have long since passed us by. In fact, prior to Mulligan's 2020 diatribe, the closest thing the internet had to a viral rant in ten years was Arin Hanson losing it while playing Sonic '06.

Yet in two minutes, Mulligan immortalized himself in internet history with an uninterrupted, frighteningly articulate and completely hilarious expression of unbridled rage.

Who Is Brennan Lee Mulligan?

Here's how it went down: Brennan Lee Mulligan made his name online as part of the College Humor troupe, which later moved over to the Dropout TV subscription service. In addition to his comedy work, he is known for remarkable acting chops on Dimension 20, a Dungeons and Dragons show where he DMs hours of gameplay and inhabits many different characters.

He is also extremely competitive, and any instance where Mulligan is losing a low-stakes game of trivia or improv comedy is often gold.

Where Does The "I Cannot Win" Monologue Come From?

A perfect storm formed in an episode of Game Changer, an improv comedy "game show" where host Sam Reich creates a new "rule" for each episode and the only way the three contestants can score is if they figure out the rule of the game. In "Yes or No," Mulligan faced off against Ally Beardsley and Zac Oyama where the object of the game appeared to be just say "yes" or "no" and get a point if you get the "correct" answer. As the episode goes on, Ally and Zac have accumulated points, while Brennan remains at zero.

At the end of the game, he exposes the game's real rule: the "right" answer is always the opposite of whatever he says, doing so in an incredible off-the-dome monologue that squeezes in references to the history of numbers, the myth of Icarus and the myth of the Minotaur. There's only so much justice that can be done to the clip with words, as the real joy of it is listening to the steady rise of rage and the brilliant enunciations of certain words (in particular, "brought to us by our FRIEEEENDS in Arabia" has rattled around this writer's head often over the past few years).

The clip was an instant classic, and soon spread outside the realm of Dropout TV fans and into the wider internet, as parodies and animations soon began spreading on YouTube and TikTok.

Mulligan's work continues to provide laughs in various shows on Dropout and YouTube, and luckily, it seems everyone he works with is intent on making sure he loses every game he plays, meaning there's much more gold to find in his frustrations.