Transcript of South Beach Sessions - Mike Birbiglia New

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Are you ready to give me your soul?

Sure.

He's Mike Birbiglia, and he's a writer, he's a director, he's an actor, he's a comedian, he even does one-man shows. He's got a new new special, The Good Life, on Netflix. We'll talk about that in a little bit, but let me start with the one-man show. What is it about you that would gravitate toward the idea of a one-man show? What is— what was in your childhood that would make you somebody who thinks he could pull off successfully, and did, a one-man show?

I did not mean to write a one-person show. I was trying to make movies. This whole time, like when I was in college, I studied screenwriting and playwriting. And at the end of college, I went to apply for all the jobs in screenwriting and realized that's not a thing.

So you failed your way into a one-man show.

Yeah, so in other words, like what happened was, so I did stand-up because I was working the door at the Washington, D.C. Improv during college. And so I was seeing great comedians. I mean, Mitch Hedberg and David Tell and Brian Regan, Margaret Cho, and all these people. I was getting to watch them for free 'cause I was a door person. It was unbelievable. It's like amazing education. But one of the things, I worked in the office, so I was able to see the pay stubs of everybody. So you go, "Oh, this person's making a few thousand dollars. The middle act is making $500." Mm-hmm. The MC's making $250, you know what I mean? So I was like, well, I can MC and try to make a living doing that. And so I drove my mom's station wagon around the country for a couple years, and then it kind of became something. I got a couple specials on Comedy Central and all that. And then I circled back and I was like, well, why don't I try to write a one-person play?

Mm-hmm.

Because I really love plays and I love movies. And so I kind of merged standup into a play and that's what became Sleepwalk with Me, which was at the Bleeker Street Theater in 2008.

Well, that is an interesting thing about you. For those who don't know your sleepwalking tales, we will get to them, but let's drive through on your mother's car there. You're doing what? You're just emceeing what? What are some of the sad or ridiculous places you're going to emcee things trying to figure out what you want to do with your life?

I had a spreadsheet of comedy club bookers across the country, and it was accumulated from other comedians and people who were trying to do the same thing. They'd say, "Oh, there's this booker in Louisiana, and they book a bunch of one-nighters in Louisiana and Texas." And there's someone who does, bunch of stuff in West Virginia and Ohio, and you could call them. And I would literally just call them every day. I was like a telemarketer. I was just, "Hey, I'm Mike Birbiglia, I'm a comedian, I could send you my tape." This is in the era of VHS cassettes. And so I would book myself for next to nothing, any place that would take me. And so a lot of times it would be one-nighters. Like, I remember in my first show I talked about how One night I was at like a restaurant called Fat Tuesdays and it was, and I was backstage, which is the sidewalk, which was the sidewalk of a strip mall. And the manager says to me, "So you're gonna go out and you're gonna do 25 minutes." And I had probably like 10 minutes tops. And I turned around and I threw up on the sidewalk.

While he's saying this to you?

We walked back in, I got really nervous. Threw up on the sidewalk. To this day, I've heard that the headliner of that show tells the story from their perspective also. But it's probably funnier, but it's like, but I threw up on the sidewalk, then I walked on stage. I probably did 5 minutes and then I ran outta jokes and said, and now you're headliner. And I brought him on. But I will say like, I, doing those gigs, and it was a lot of like colleges, it was a lot of like, one time I was performing in the center of like a walkathon for lupus, like an all-night walkathon, and I'm got a microphone, I'm trying to entertain people going around me, and I mean, it's always, it's so demoralizing, you know, but it was then, and it still is like what I wanna do. Like this idea, like you guys were making jokes before, We started about my notebook, like everywhere I go, people see me with my notebook and it's just all jokes and it's gibberish, but it's like the idea that even if you're in a hell gig, you're in the center of a walkathon for lupus or you're on the sidewalk of a strip mall throwing up, like if the end result is I go on and I say to an audience some stuff I thought of and I wrote in my notebook, that's a pretty good job.

You know what I mean?

It's a great job.

Like that's a good job. Even if it's terrible, it's pretty good.

Uh-huh, the walkathon for lupus makes makes me sad, though the words together are funny. They're funny, yeah. This notebook, it's a pacifier for you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of these I get at hotels. So like this one, for example, is from Hotel St. Cecilia in Austin, Texas when I stayed there recently. I love really nice notebooks. Like if you notice, it's got like a nice fabric to it.

I mean, it has to be a nice notebook. Your profession's in here. Like this is an obsessive compulsive gold mine of this is your career in here or your next gig is in here.

Yeah, you could even say the career. It is. So it's all here. And then, so yeah, I've done, and I still do tough gigs. I mean, like it's always, I would say standup comedy is consistently demoralizing. Like it's unfailingly masochistic.

You've gotten good at failure, correct?

Yeah, pretty good at it. 'Cause it doesn't, I don't feel it past, the next hour or two. I feel like my old failures, it would, the residue of it would stick with me for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. Now it's like, you know, I do a hell gig, it doesn't quite go right, they don't quite get me, they don't know who I am. An hour later, I'm like with my daughter and we're playing Monopoly, and I'm like, this is great.

It sounds like what you're describing is the mixed martial artist who kicks the tree until his shin is calcified so much that he can get better at that thing. That's right.

That's what it is.

Like, and so you, but it still takes an hour. You still suffer it for an hour, but you've been at it how long now?

20-something years, probably 27 or 28 years.

Okay. And you're saying it's consistently demoralizing.

Yeah.

It's a pursuit that has more failure in it than success.

Yeah, because I think what it is, is it's one of the rare art forms that is, Definitively trial and error. Stand-up comedy is you try a joke, it works, you try it again, you tweak it a different way. You try something, you know, or you try a joke, it doesn't work, you either forget it forever, you cross it out, or you rethink what, you analyze like, how did they take it in? And could I do it differently so that they would get it?

I imagine, given what you're describing at the door of a club, the kinds of comedians that are coming through there, and given where it is that you went to school, and your peers had a remarkable amount of success—

Yeah.

That it would be hard for you not to be competing on success, and even if you were succeeding, not necessarily enjoy it as success because the people around you are also, uh, are climbing to places that you're surrounded by people who are legendary people.

Yeah, yeah, it was this very odd sort of, I think it's Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers maybe, about pockets of people who form, ice skaters, hockey players, and all the variables that create like a grouping of people. So like, in my college at Georgetown, I cast into the improv, in my improv group, Nick Kroll. And then a year after I graduated, Nick Kroll cast John Mulaney. And then in the middle of all of this, at college, Bradley Cooper was there in the plays.

Mm-hmm.

Jonah Nolan, the screenwriter, and director was in my classes. I mean, like, it was a pretty extraordinary group of people. So that's, yeah, that's present, I would say.

Did you feel like you belonged?

Yeah, because it wasn't all at once. It wasn't like everyone, all those people experienced that level of success immediately. I feel like the first one that happened was Actually Bradley Cooper, 'cause he graduated, he was older than us, and I didn't even know him, but he graduated and moved to New York, and then he was on the show Alias.

Mm-hmm.

Or he moved here, I don't know where they shot that, but it was one of those things where I was like, he's on the show Alias? Like that was astonishing to me. The idea that anyone who went to our college and was in the plays we were watching would be on like a hit series is outrageous. Yes. But yeah, I think like that's, you know, and I think John had that, Mulaney had that with me because he would visit me in New York and he would look at me and go like, oh, similar to me looking at the pay stubs of comedians at the DC Improv, I think he'd look at me and go, oh, he, Mike does this as his job. Like he just writes jokes and performs jokes. And yeah, he said that before too. I think there is something to watching someone do something who you feel a kinship with or similarity to. And then understanding like, "Oh yeah, I could do something like that." You're driving around, you said years in your mother's car?

Years?

Probably a couple years, yeah.

Just called—

I started when I was 22. And yeah, I mean, it was most of my 20s.

But in pursuit of a career, or are you a bit lost? Do your parents who come from health and science, are they looking like they feel like you have the right path in mind?

No, my parents were not sold on this as a career at all. My dad is a retired neurologist, my mom's a retired nurse. You know, my dad would say, you know, maybe this comedy thing could parlay into advertising, you know, and I would just be like, no, no, I think this is the thing. And he was like, "Michael, you need—" He would sort of fly off the handle sometimes. He'd be like, "Michael, you need some goddamn reality testing." That's what he always said, reality testing. And he's not wrong. I mean, what's funny is at the time, I feel like I put a judgment on it. And in the sense of like, he didn't get me, he didn't understand me. And now I'm a dad. You know, my daughter's 11, like I have a better sense of like, oh right, you're just trying to protect your kid.

Oh, he was just scared and there's no money in what you were choosing.

No.

What would that reality test look like though when you imagine the game show in your mind? Like, is he the host of a show that is reality test and you come out and you think you're gonna make a living cracking jokes?

That's right. No, I mean, early on he said to me, I told him I was working at a comedy club He goes, "Comedy club? What do they do, strip?" You know, because that was his only point of orientation was like long, you know, he grew up in the '50s in Brooklyn. It's like, you know—

A God-fearing American goes to a club to see someone nude, not to see you talk.

That's right, that's right. Right, it was like, I feel like the only clubs where there were in that era, I mean, that's what like Richard Pryor and all those people came up in.

Dirty, tawdry places.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They came up in like these kind of burlesque, kind of mixed arts. There wasn't such a thing as a comedy club. So I feel like that was the point of view that my dad came from.

Forgive me for switching gears here, but you married a poet. That seems like a harder way to make a living than even comedy. Poetry seems like a real hard way to make a living.

As far as I can tell, there's no path. It's, yeah, no, and it was of course what, it's actually what I wanted to do when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I was always, I always told people I want to be a poet or a comedian or the owner of a pizza restaurant where third graders could hang out. That was when I was third grade. And then seventh grade, I want to be a poet or a comedian or owner of a pizza restaurant where seventh graders can hang out, et cetera. I never became a poet, but then I married a poet. And yeah, she's fantastic. Sometimes we'll do a thing called jokes and poems, like at Joe's Pub sometimes, or even we've done it here at Largo in Los Angeles before where it's just, Jenny will do a poem and then I'll do a joke that's riffing on what the poem is, and then she'll do a poem that's inspired by what I'm talking about. And it's fun. Yeah, she's brilliant.

You wanting to be a poet though, what, how does a kid, like what does that look like growing up? You wanna be poet, screenwriter? You failed your way into merely jokes because you had these noble ambitions about what writing was that wasn't just making the guy who's 7 vodka tonics in chuckle in the corner.

Well, I think it's that you, that your point of reference is when you're younger is, just narrower. So, for example, like, when I was a kid, we would read poems, you know, we would, or we would read, you know, Shel Silverstein or Roald Dahl or something like that. And I go, "Oh, okay, I could do something along those lines." 'Cause that was the closest thing to what we would read. And I would think, "Yeah, I could do that." And then when I was in high school, I went to see, my older brother took me to see Steven Wright live at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, and it was all these one-liner jokes. And I think I was 16, and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna do that." 'Cause that made, I think at different phases you're exposed to different types of expression.

Well, but to be exposed to him, to that comedy, where it's not just that it's one-liners, but it's one-liners delivered— in a character you've never seen before.

Yeah, yeah. It was shocking. It was a shock to the system.

And the 16-year-old in you— what, is just awed with discovery there on the idea that that's—

Yeah, yeah. And then I went and started writing in my notebook. Literally. I didn't even— I didn't know you could be a stand-up comedian. I didn't know anything. But I went home, and I just wrote a lot of one-liner jokes. In the spirit of Stephen Wright. And then it was when I was a sophomore in college, I think I entered the Funniest Person on Campus contest, and then I won. And one of the things that I got from that was, one of the prizes was to perform at the Washington, D.C. Improv. And it was just coincidentally, I got to open for Dave Chappelle, who at the time was 24, headlining comedy clubs nationwide at 24, and was DC native. He had started, I think, at 15. And so that was really unbelievable. It was actually, I remember it really well because it was the year "Half Baked" came out. It was like the month Half Baked came out.

And so when do you start to feel something that feels like success? When do you feel like you're actually growing into your voice?

So I moved to New York. I was like living on my sister Gina's couch in Brooklyn for a little bit. And then I moved to like—

What's a little bit?

6 months or so. And then I spent another year in Astoria, Queens, like living on an air mattress on the floor 'cause I couldn't afford a bed, like, or dressers. Like, I just had piles of clothes. It was ridiculous. And then I, there's a, at the Comic Strip on the Upper East Side, there was a manager there who booked the show since the '70s, this guy named Lucien Hold. I don't know if you ever heard about this guy. But he had passed, like, Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. I mean, there was a lot of people who sort of came through there. And he took me under his wing and let me host a show every night, every Sunday night at the Comic Strip. And so, and it was a long show. It would be like, start at 7 o'clock at night. And it would go till like 1 in the morning. And it would just be like 25 comics. So that was interesting 'cause it was like I was able to like meet everybody. I mean, to this day I feel like I run into people in New York who I just met from hosting this show.

And then I got Montreal New Faces, which was, I mean, kind of a big deal when I was like, I don't know, 23. And then Eddie Brill saw me from the Letterman Show and said that I, He thinks that I had a shot to do The Letterman Show, and then I did it like a year later.

How long was it before you were comfortable with your work being deeply personal?

It was somewhere in my 20s. I mean, I remember I had a joke. The first personal joke I ever told was I said, my girlfriend is older than I am, so she's starting to get the, to the age where she's thinking about having kids, which is exciting, 'cause we're gonna have to break up. And then I go, I've decided I'm not gonna have kids until I'm sure nothing else good can happen in my life. And it's so simple, right? Even now it's like, it's pretty funny. And that was like, I wrote this 20-something years ago. It's like, there's something simple about, I'm thinking about this in real time, that there is no real joke. Right? It's just altruism delivered in kind of a straightforward way, but simultaneously is unexpected. And so I think that that was, I saw the audience reaction to that joke and I was like, oh, this is really interesting because I think that with like good standup, there's a cost. Yeah. I think there's like, if you're opening up a piece of yourself, there's a cost. I think you, for you, for the people around you, people you love, no one really wants you to do it.

No one wants you to talk about them. And so it's, I think that was hard, but that was when it was, I mean, it was in my mid-20s.

The cost, what is the cost?

I think the cost is everything is copy at a certain point. Everything is used. You know, even with the notebook, it's like I'm at breakfast and I'm like writing down things that are my thoughts. And it's like, I could do that or I could also live. And not be documenting. You know, it's really like, it's an odd, it's a cataloging of your own existence, and then it's a combination of that, and then it's kind of divulging it to strangers. So there's a cost of that to you and people you're close to. But I think that the upside counterbalances it. I think the upside is high. 'Cause I think that if you open up to audiences about how you really feel, or things that, you know, there's the old expression, "We're only as sick as our secrets." I think if you open up to an audience about your secrets, there's nothing more amazing than feeling close to complete and total strangers. Like, in some ways, that's like a profound idea. It's like, there's like multiple ways to view the world. It's like you can view, everything, everyone, when you're walking down the street, you can view everything as hostile or you can view it as, well, they're just like me, I'm just like them.

And I think that comedy in some ways is I'm like them, they're like me.

But what is the cost of what you're talking about, which is the compulsion, right?

Yeah.

This is a bit of an addiction. This is a magical book. This is a thing here that you are always thinking about this in a way that can become so important, then you miss all sorts of life events because you are present here in your work and yourself and your narcissism and the thing that makes you happy, and you are not wherever else you need to be. That is part of the cost.

Yeah. I, I, I have no answer.

Because, well, but is there anything more like, is at the ambition that comes into making your career this, is there anything more important than this? Of course. Of course everyone can say family, but when you're not being present in family, it's at least in part because you're obsessing or, you know, thinking about yourself, your ambition, your work.

Yeah, I think that's true. I think that the, I would say the only chink in the armor of that is, was having my daughter. She's 11. I would say since then, I really, I started to figure out how to compartmentalize and block off 7 hours in a day and have that be the only time that I'm doing that. And then when I'm with her, I'm with her. So that is different.

I mean, that is what generally changes selfish people to unselfish people when you, I mean, caring people, how's it changed you?

Well, it's just like, I would say it has forced me to become more deliberate and actually try to understand my own process so that I can figure out how to deliver as well or better with constraints.

More disciplined.

Yeah.

I would imagine that whatever the previous version of you was before marriage could be sloppy and consumed with just this. And so there doesn't have to be something that's disciplined.

100%. Yeah. And even like, what was funny is like in the pandemic, I started doing my podcast, Working It Out, and I would work out jokes with other comedians. And that, previously I had never considered doing that because comedians always view that as burning material. Like once people hear this, they'll never want to hear it again and that joke is gone. And because of the pandemic, no one was performing. I was like, well, I'll just try. Even if this burns this, then I'll write another hour. This will be— Yeah. The pandemic out or whatever. But then what I found was in doing it, and that the people who listen to the podcast actually come to the live shows, and they're interested in knowing how the jokes evolve. And so it's like, it's interesting how you, I think sometimes we all underestimate comedy audiences, that they're actually, I think, often more savvy than we think they are.

Well, I was gonna ask you about working it out, the specifics of what you're doing there, which is showing the innards of joke writing and a lot of people are interested in how people who are funny come by their funny. What do you think is the reason that what you're doing connects with your audience? If it can be assigned a broad definition for everybody, like what, where and how do you think you're connecting with your audience by what you decided to do with your podcast?

I think that it's possible that if you had a radio show or something in the '70s about the deconstruction of jokes, that it wouldn't have connected. I think there's something about 2026 where we've, you know, we've been marketed to so much and we've seen so much art, so many TV shows, so many movies, so many comedy specials, that in some ways I think we're a little ahead of it at this point. Point when we see anything. And, you know, you go to see a magician, you're not even a magician, and you go, "Something's gonna happen with that curtain." You know what I mean? And like, we— that's not even our profession. I think that that's— comedy's like that. I think we go to a comedy show and we go, "Oh, he's gonna try and shock us with something that we can't even imagine." And I think sometimes what happens is when you deconstruct it for the audience, with the audience, they actually appreciate more when you do something that is surprising, 'cause they didn't think they could be surprised, 'cause they thought they knew everything.

How long were you sleepwalking before you decided to use sleepwalking as material? Because it seems like it would— I would assume that most people are fascinated by all that is happening in your sleep.

It's very strange. I wrote a draft of my one-person show, Sleepwalk With Me, while I, you know, in the years when I was sleepwalking, but had not jumped through a second-story window sleepwalking, which eventually I did. And which, if this is sort of news to anyone, I wrote a book called Sleepwalk With Me. I made a movie called Sleepwalk With Me. I have a comedy album of that name. And so I was sleepwalking for probably since college or so, since I was like maybe 20. And I started writing the show "Sleepwalk with Me," and it was about living in denial, you know, being in a relationship where I knew it was over and I didn't want to deal with it. Doing stand-up comedy where you're kind of in denial of bombing with audiences. And then there's the metaphor of I had a sleepwalking issue and I was not seeing a doctor about it, et cetera. And then I was working on the show and I was doing versions of it at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City. And then I was on the road at a series of colleges in Oregon and Washington State, and I was at a Walla Walla, Washington motel called La Quinta Inn, and then I jumped through a second-story window.

It nearly killed me. I went back for like the 20-year anniversary of when it happened this past January with a film crew, and I did a show, and I talked to the ER doctor who put stitches in my legs and took the glass out of my leg.

Mining the hell out of your malady.

Oh yeah.

Like just really, just filling up that notebook with just this grotesque test curiosity that people have about what does this man do in his sleep?

You have to though, right? Like 20-year anniversary jumping through a second-story window and living to tell the story.

People are interested in this for sure. It is human and there would be all sorts of curiosities around it.

Yeah, and so anyway, I went, I did a show, but it was fascinating. It was this really unlikely outcome that I lived.

I want more details though. So for the uninitiated—

Oh yeah.

How do you come by sleepwalking and what are the specifics of the things happening to you while sleepwalking that have nothing to do— before we get to the second story window.

So I would have dreams, for example, I was living with my girlfriend at the time and I would have dreams that, you know, there would be a hovering insect jackal in the bedroom, and I would jump on my bed in real life, and I would strike a karate pose, and I would say to my girlfriend, "Abby, there's a jackal in the room." And she said, "There's no jackal. Go to bed." And I'd say, "Are you sure?" And I would go to bed knowing there was a jackal. And this would happen a lot. I mean, this is— and in hindsight, it's like really tied to anxiety and stress, and then also just a sleepwalking disorder I was later diagnosed with. And it got worse. So I remember one time I dreamt I was in the Olympics for some kind of arbitrary event like dustbustering, and they told me I got 3rd place in the Dustbuster Olympics, and I stood up on the 3rd place podium and—

Congratulations.

Yeah, thank you.

Bronze medalist in dustbusting.

And then the officials reconsidered and they go, "No, actually you got 2nd place." Oh no. Over to the second place podium.

Oh, promotion.

Yeah, the second place podium is wobbling. I wake up, I'm falling off the top of probably like a table of this size, of this height, about a 3-foot, 4-foot table in our living room. Fall on the floor hard, like on top of what at the time the DVR was called TiVo. You remember TiVo?

Yes.

Broke, it breaks the TiVo into pieces. My girlfriend wakes me up in the morning and she goes, "Michael, what happened to the TiVo?" I said, "I got second place." And it's a long story. But, you know, I always say when I tell this story, I go, at that point I thought maybe I should see a doctor. And then I thought maybe I'll eat dinner. And I went with dinner for years until, you know, the event I referenced where I jumped through the window. But it really, like, it really was, denial and also like a certain degree of not facing something that was straight ahead of me. Like I was sleepwalking. I was going, "This is not good." And yet I wasn't dealing with it.

Well, what was happening with the anxiety that you weren't dealing with, which is, I mean, there are two different things. There's the medical of the sleepwalking, but there's the metaphor And the reason the one-man play was so widely regarded is because it had deeper themes than just the curiosity of sleepwalking. You were sleepwalking through life and you're sleepwalking through your anxieties as well, correct?

Certainly, yeah.

I mean, getting up in the bed, karate, a jackal, floating jackal, like that's not a sane person while he's not sleeping, right? Like in terms of what his anxieties are doing to him.

No, I think I had an extraordinary amount of anxiety. And I think that, you know, part of it, look, none of us, you know, the eye can't see itself. It's, you know, we can't ever fully understand ourselves or why we do things. But when I was about 20, I had a bladder tumor. I talk about this in "Sleepwalk with Me." I had a bladder tumor. And I found out because I was driving home for Christmas break from college and I pulled over at a rest stop and there was blood in my pee and I was like, this isn't good. And then I go in and they did a cystoscopy. They put a camera through your penis to look into your bladder.

Can you please stop doing that with your arm and your hand? You're making me uncomfortable. I understand what you're saying is clear without the need for a pantomime. Yeah, yeah, no, the words actually matter. I got it, it's fine. And your general discomfort, actually do it more slowly.

So anyway, they saw a tumor and they took it out and they did a biopsy on it. It was a malignant tumor. So I had to go for, you know, cystoscopy for years, every 3 months for years and years and years. And I do think there is something to this idea that when you are face-to-face with death that young, it changes the way that you see everything. So like, I think when I was in my 20s, I had this sense of like, well, I'm gonna die soon. You know what I mean? So I gotta get this career started, you know what I mean? Am I in the right relationship? If not, I gotta get out of this. I can't quite say it. I feel like I was dealing with a lot of that.

You said extraordinary anxiety. What does that mean? Can you, like when you say the anxiety is extraordinary.

Yeah, like I, for example, I would have a hard time breathing or I felt like I did. Like I would have shallow breathing and then I would, You know, like we were saying, I would sleepwalk and I would, I mean, I would work for hours. I mean, I would do, you know, I would do standup or write until 3, 4 in the morning and then I'd be up for a temp job, you know, answering the phone at like a pharmaceutical company at like 7, so I was on very little sleep. And I had no idea what my own future had in store for me. So it was a very, it was a strange time.

Can you walk me through the combination of your ambition with your anxiety? Because you're having, this is such a tough grind driving around in your mother's car, air mattress, all in pursuit of, am I gonna be able to feed myself doing this? Am I, have I invested too much in this thing that's crazy? Is everybody right that I shouldn't have done this? That this, that it was my dad right that this is no way to make a living?

Yeah, and I think that the, I'm trying to think of how I'd put this. It's kind of like the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the Richard Dreyfuss character, he's like making the mashed potatoes into a formation.

I need to connect with the young audience and you're referencing a 1977 movie.

I'm trying to think of it.

But there aren't any others like this. So in "Marty Supreme," no, I don't know.

Yeah, no, it's, but I do think like, there's something where if you see, like if you see a thing, and if you see a thing for yourself, it's hard to unsee it. And so it can become an obsession. I think that's what happens.

With mortality?

No, I think like artistically. I think like what happened was I was like, oh, you know, there's a, I had a sense where I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna, I'm able to connect with audiences in such and such a way, and I need to do this right away." And so there was like an urgency to it. And I don't know any other way to describe it.

The way you're describing though, an urgency based on I'm going to die soon.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe, I don't know.

Do you lose these? Like, is there anxiety involved with the idea of something being in here that can't be retrieved if it's lost?

Yeah, I've saw, a little bit, but I think like, I find that like I have so many notebooks and I have so many files open on my computer that my sense is always, even if I lost this, it wouldn't, It wouldn't be that different from, you know, a typical Tuesday in the sense that like, I'm always misplacing, you know, I have an office with a stack of these things, you know, so it's like, there's ideas in those I'm not using.

But do any of them get thrown out? Do you, are you, so you are a hoarder?

Hoarder.

You're a hoarder of all of your jokes. I can find all of your jokes somewhere in the house. Do the loved ones make fun of the room? That these things are in, or is it—

No, no, I think it's respected, but it's, yeah.

Well, it's gotta be respected. It helps pay for things.

Sure.

The poetry business isn't going great.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm just telling you, it's a crazy career.

Yeah.

To choose to be a poet. I know, true. Come up with a crazier one in terms of just unlikelihood that anyone will pay you for this.

No, it's one of those things where all the people who are doing it, they gotta love it.

You still love this the way that you did at the beginning? Or do you know too much?

No, I think so. It's funny, I was doing like a new 45 minutes at the Comedy Cellar the other night because I hadn't done a proper new 45 since I filmed the Good Life special. And you do have that thing after you film a special where you go, "All right, well, I might have another special in me, but I also might not." And there's really no way to know. And so, that was like 2 nights ago, and I was like, "Oh, this is pretty good." 45 minutes of new material?

Yeah.

Since your last special.

Yes.

But that takes a long time. That takes how long? You've gotten this—

That was like 9 months.

So you, and that's a pretty refined process for you, correct? Like 9 months, you've gotten it pretty sharpened if you've got a fresh .45 off of your special.

Yeah, but I, but yeah, 9 months is pretty good. But in this instance, I've been writing my next movie, which I, which, so my focus has been split on writing that.

You've described comedians as a special type of broken. What special type of broken are you?

I think that, I think it's that we are able to be knocked down and then get up, and then write about what it felt like to be knocked down and get back up in a way that doesn't make the audience feel bad. You know what I mean? Like, that's a pretty interesting skill.

I feel like I just broke you with that question. That could be. I got back up though. Because you say though that when you, your comfort with failure, the wry smile on your face when you talk about the despondence that is the failure where you're sort of laughing at both the cruelty in it and the profession you've chosen because you're like, yeah, a lot of despair here. And then you hit one out of the park every once in a while. But there's a, like I'm living, I'm swimming in their occasional successes. Obviously if you've got 45 minutes of new material, but nobody knows is what went into those 9 months of you traveling around trying to get it to where it is now. So now you trust it, but yeah, that, that's— I don't think that most people— we cover this ground a lot here, but I don't think that most people understand that what goes into a special— your 9 months for you is you've cleaned it up, you've gotten it efficient. My guess is at one point in your life you didn't do it that fast.

No, no, no, certainly not. I mean, my first special was an accumulation of like 5 years of trial and error. And now, like, you know, it's like a year and a half or 1 to 3 years. It's much faster.

What do you have? Do you have a joke that you've been working on the longest? Like, is there one joke in the arsenal that is something that you can cite as something that you've been trying to get right for X amount of time that— would seem absurd to the average person?

I have a joke that hasn't made it into anything, but always makes me laugh, which is, I say, one day my wife said to me, she goes, "Sometimes I feel like you're not happy." And I was like, "Right, like I was never happy. Like when we met, I wasn't happy. I thought that's what you were into, you know? And I thought that's what you thought was cool about me." I'm unhappy, but I'm hilarious about it. And then we got married and that was amazing, but I'm still not happy. Then we had a child and that was transcendent, but I'm still not happy. I'm happily married, unhappily alive. And that's a fun run because the audience kind of goes through, phases of, I would say, like liking me and disliking me and relating and not relating. 'Cause it's kind of like a whole journey.

Uh-huh.

You know?

And it's efficient and it's simple and anyone can connect with it.

I think it's true and it's a thing, even if you don't feel that all the time, most likely you might have felt a version of that.

What has been the most fun film experience that you have had? Like just fun in doing it. Let's throw Billions in there even though it's not film. Sure. But Popstar, —Or Trainwreck.

Or Trainwreck, yeah, or A Man Called Otto. My own films, Sleepwalk With Me, I wrote and directed, and then Don't Think Twice, I wrote and directed, and I'm about to write and direct one soon. I can't really talk about it yet, but that's like a thing I've been working on.

You're embargoing it right here? This is the place for newsbreaking, sir. This is the place where you have to give people a little more. I don't think I can. It's a big secret? You're embargoing, you can't talk about it yet, it's under wraps.

Yeah, but it would be disingenuous if I said I wasn't working on it, 'cause I'm being completely honest. But I know there's too many people involved, it's like moving parts. But I think the most fun I had working on a movie was Don't Think Twice. It was Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Tammy Seger, Kate Micucci, and we played an improv group called The Commune where where we all get to audition for Siren Live. It's called Weekend Live in the movie. And then Keegan, our best friend, his character gets cast and the rest of us don't. And it's sort of about what happens in life when you realize you're not gonna, not everybody gets what everyone else gets. Life isn't fair in that way. And the reason it was the most fun was that I felt like it was the sum total of all these things that I'd been working on for a long time. Like, I— my first exposure to comedy was in an improv group in college, and so I did that for a bunch of years. And I'd always wanted to write and direct movies, and I got really lucky where Keegan and Chris and Gillian and Kate and Tammy were all just game for finding it, finding this movie and going for it and improvising and taking chances.

And yeah, I would say that was the most satisfying. And then on my first movie, it was just hard because it's really hard to direct your first movie, like really hard. I mean, because you— There's no training for it. I mean, you can go to school, but it's like, it doesn't really train you to teach, to direct a movie.

When I've talked to directors about this, they, seasoned directors, what they say is the director's just the place where all the problems go.

Yeah, that's right.

It's the same for CEOs. CEOs say the same thing, like where you think they have so much power, what you want is to have all the power, and it's just where all the problems go. It's all the responsibility.

Right, but then, And what's interesting is on Don't Think Twice, what you're saying is building into sort of my own understanding of it is you enjoy the problems because it's all part of this vision you had for the movie in the first place. And so when someone's poking holes in and saying, "What are we going to do? We don't have a location for this," your brain actually solves that. Because when you envisioned the movie, you didn't just envision one set location or one group of characters, you actually envisioned what the themes of the movie are. So you're able, you're probably the only person who's able to actually kind of roll with the punches on it.

In terms of career achievement, where you feel best about doing something, where does this one rank? Closing out the touring of your one-man tour at Carnegie Hall?

Hmm. Like, where does the movie rank?

No, just the feeling. The feeling of your most fulfilled emotional moments about you finally getting to somewhere with a vision of yours. When I say the specifics of you You performing a one-man show and it being Carnegie Hall, I would assume there's some fulfillment in that. Do I have it wrong? Is it not on the high end of greatest achievements you've felt that are fulfilling?

That was fulfilling, but for, it's funny, for reasons that I've not registered until you mentioned it, that was the end of the My Girlfriend's Boyfriend show, which I ran in New York for about 6 months off-Broadway, and then we did the final show at Carnegie Hall, and then I handed out ice cream in the street afterwards to all the people who came, like in kind of old-fashioned ice cream hats and all this kind of stuff. And it was all kind of an homage to Andy Kaufman, who kind of did a similar thing years and years ago.

And you look the part. You look like—

I look like an ice cream scooper.

Like a soda jerk from the 1950s.

Yeah, that's true. But anyway, it was, in hindsight, it was very meaningful 'cause my parents came to the show. They don't always come to my shows. They came to that one. And my dad did see, it registered to him. I think he kind of got it 'cause he grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Bushwick. Brooklyn in the '50s. And so the idea of his son performing at Carnegie Hall and then, you know, handing out ice cream in the street afterwards, like, I think that that made sense in a sense, in an achievement prism, through that prism.

So it's not the Carnegie Hall part of it. It's not the idea that it's your, just your dad seeing you give out ice cream in the streets and sort of see that his son was doing what he wanted to do.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Like that.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not even making that connection until now. I mean, I think so much of this stuff is later. You don't know what you're experiencing when you're experiencing it. Just later you look back and go, "Oh, that was actually meaningful." 'Cause of course I didn't even know that, you know, 15 years later he would have a stroke and I would never be able to connect with him in the way that I was connecting with him in that era.

Not just that era, but over that specific thing, right? That's not just seeing your son happy, that's seeing your son's dreams come true.

Yeah, that's right, yeah.

Like when you're making the specific point of saying they didn't come to all my things, but on that one they're seeing me outside of Carnegie Hall selling, you're giving out ice cream in the street. Like whatever doubt there was around your choices once upon a time can't be doubted from, like wherever it is that it was unsafe to tell you, felt unsafe to tell you to chase laughter to pay for things. That's right. A father would be proud there, would love that his son is happy. It makes sense that you would look at it that way now and then.

Yeah.

But it escaped you in the moment.

Oh yeah, certainly. Yeah. Yeah.

Why would that be though? I would think that at our most joyous moments, we would feel joy. We wouldn't need necessarily clearly the perspective of, and then my dad had a stroke, especially if you're coming from, I had a tumor when I was 20. And so I've had my life altered in how present I am because everything reminds me that time is short.

Yeah. I mean, I think I, you know, you get bogged down in logistics in the moment. Like, do we have enough ice cream?

That's what happens though, right? Like life happens. That's always getting in the way of doing— do I have enough ice cream is a —funny way to look at, like, because that— I don't know where— because I asked you the question about where it ranks because I would think it would be personal fulfillment, but you're turning it around and you're making it about a connection with your dad and other things that don't have— Yeah. I just think Carnegie Hall, something you made, widely critically acclaimed, totally yours, I would think that that would feel like joy and achievement in the moment. Somehow. Like some— it doesn't mean that you're joyless. Like there's nothing quite like the laugh, right? You get the laugh from the audience. It's instantaneous. It's joyous. You do not have to question it. Everything else gets complicated. It gets murky to make.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And I have to say, like I did two shows on Broadway. I did a show called The New One in 2018 at the Cort Theater. And then at the Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, I did "The Old Man in the Pool" in 2022. And those were so hard at the time, but in hindsight, I'm so glad I did them because so many people will come up to me and say, "Oh, I saw you at Lincoln Center. I saw you." Yeah. And it connected to me in this way, and, or I was just having a kid at the time, or we were just, we were trying to have a kid. And you end up like, Yeah. Accidentally falling into people's personal story of their whole lives. I mean, that's the thing that's interesting about these shows is like, by accident, I ended up cataloging like 20 years of my life. And so I have fans from 20 years ago. Who go, "Oh, when you wrote 'Too Drunk Mike' about being single, like, I was single. When you wrote 'My Girlfriend's Boyfriend' about falling in love, that's when I fell in love and got married.

And, you know, when you talked about having a kid with the new one, that's when I had a kid. And now that you're talking about your dad being in the final years of his life, my parents are in that too." And so it's pretty intense.

They come along with you, and it's a community of strangers. You were talking about the, intimacy of just making strangers laugh with personal connection. Now you're talking about doing it over a lifetime.

Yeah, and it's deep. It's deep. You know, you feel like— they feel like they know you, but the inverse is you feel like you know them too.

They cease being strangers.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, that's what I've noticed. I've done a radio show for a little over 20 years, and when I meet our fans and they start start to tell us the story of however it is that they came to love our show, there are certain things I can then immediately know about them because I've met so much— so many of them.

That's a perfect sentence.

And it's wonderful. Like, it's a wonderful connection to have because otherwise you're just speaking into a microphone. At least in part, these people do know you because they know your work. They know the pod— the podcast is extra intimate, right? They get to see more of you. It's sprawling. It's less sculpted. That's the most intimate thing that you do, right? It also creates the most intimate audience. They're—

Yeah, well, you're in people's ears.

But they're not, they feel less like strangers than someone who perhaps consumes your work another way.

Yeah.

Because the podcast has changed the entirety of the comedy business. Like you've adapted well, but what you've seen happen to the comedy business over the last 15 years with the podcast, you like that, right? You view it favorably. Verbally because it's altered things?

I think it's been good for comedy as a, yeah, absolutely.

You guys have all learned that you can all do radio shows. That's all that happened. Like you guys allowed other people to do the radio. That's right. And then because you guys have thoughts over the course of a day, you could sit down in front of a microphone in front of an hour and it might not be your special or your show, but you could entertain people for an hour. Or if you turned it on based on just your life experience and everything else that you've done over 20 years.

Right. Yeah, yeah. No, it's been really interesting, 'cause I sort of swore I would never do a podcast, do a radio show. Not because I don't love radio. I actually love podcasts, I love radio. But because I always thought there's a lack of control. Like, you can't sculpt it. You can try, but you can't sculpt it week over week over week. You just have to let it fly and what goes into the episode goes into the episode. And so in that way, it is more intimate. It's more vulnerable.

Was there anything other than the pandemic that made you realize, why would I call into Bob and Tom when I could just be Bob and Tom?

00:58:14

Well, yeah, I should reference Bob and Tom, 'cause that was, yeah, when I was starting out, my first break was in radio. It was going on Bob and Tom's show in Indianapolis, which was syndicated all over the place, and doing jokes and then traveling around the country and people would show up to hear me do those jokes or tell those stories. And so that was extraordinarily intimate, and they gave me my own call-in segment on the show. I called my secret public journal. And yeah, so that was a huge, huge break. But yeah, I think I always, I really always resisted being a radio host or a podcast host because it honestly felt unwieldy. Like if you think about how many hours you've been on the radio, you couldn't even attempt to listen to those hours.

No, it is unwieldy.

It's outrageous.

But where you come from though is so, sculpted, like, I'm grateful that no comedians figured out earlier that you guys could do this because you could absolutely very easily, almost any of you who are good at what you could, what you do.

Right.

Could sit in front of a microphone for 3 hours a day. Let's say sports is the place you've decided to do this and be funny around sports and the daily news that sports is giving you because you guys are endless content fountains. Like you guys, there are no comedians that I've talked to away from from the microphone, away from performing, who aren't interesting. You guys are all, you're all spending so much time thinking about life that you have interesting thoughts about 1,000 different things. Most people don't.

You know, it's true. A good example of that too is Ron Bennington, who I see at the Comedy Cellar sometimes over the years. And, you know, he was a radio personnel for years and years and years. That's how I knew him. I didn't even know he was a stand-up, and then a few years ago, I saw him at the Cellar, I go, "This guy's a killer. This kid, he's unbelievable." But yeah, so there's a lot of crossover.

I hope you know that the comedians also know you're a killer, right? 'Cause I was impressed when Sam Morrill just went to watch a show of yours from the back, and he was just sort of saying, "The guy's a killer." Oh, that's nice. But what you were doing, you know you're one of them, correct? Is that correct? Like, that you grind so much that other comedians notice how much you care about being good on stage?

I appreciate you saying that. I think so. You know, it's like anything. Some days you go, "Yeah, I'm one of the people," and then other days you go, "Look at all those people. They're doing a great job." You know what I mean?

And then you're doing a karate stance and fighting a jackal. In your sleep.

I'm day, you know, it's a cycle. It is.

Tonight, 12 hours from now, you're like, what? It wasn't just a jackal though. It was some other insect that became a jackal, correct? Is what it was.

Yeah, hovering insect jackal. Yeah. But Sam, of course Sam is brilliant. I mean, a lot of these young comics are great. I was watching Joe List the other night. He's a riot.

And you're embracing the newcomers. Yes, because it's very, it's well, but it's It's very easy in a competitive field to get threatened by all those things, no matter how confident you are, no matter how successful you are, because there are a whole lot of young people doing it differently now too. There are any number of people your age who are lamenting or railing against the podcast.

Oh yes, certainly. You know, and the Comedy Cellar in New York is amazing for that because they really do, they do give a lot of comics a shot. That's where I found, well, it's where I met Sam Rael, it's where I saw Ethan Simmons-Patterson and Matty Weiner and Robby Hoffman and a lot of these comics who are, these young comics who are exploding right now.

I appreciate the time, I appreciate the work. The Good Life is the name of the special on Netflix. What do you want people to know about that?

The Good Life is about my dad and how he had a stroke, and I tried to find the humor in that. I think that if people laugh, then it's a success.

How hard was it to find the humor in that?

It took a couple years.

It seems like there's a degree of difficulty on making some of that funny and ringing 45 minutes —of material out of grief?

Yeah, yeah, and with that, it was a lot of times with things that are hard, it's like finding one joke that works, that breaks the audience open. So for that one, it was, I couldn't get an audience to laugh about my dad's stroke, believe it or not, in the early onset of it. And then one day I said this joke, I go, you know, my dad had a stroke and it's devastating, But if I'm being honest, it has calmed him down. It's like when I was younger, he'd be like, "God damn it, I'm eating pretzels!" And now he's like, "Pretzels." Can't say that's not a little better.

If people want tickets and tour dates, I'd normally send them to your website, but I don't know how to spell how it is that you spell your website.

B-I-R-B-I-G-S dot com, birbigs.com.

All right, so do that more slowly for the people, we'll put it on the screen as well.

Yeah, j-a-r-b-i-g-s.com.

I was afraid to mispronounce it. I'm sorry to turn you into a bit of a piano bar where I just tell you to do the thing there to promote your thing.

Thanks for having me on.

Thank you for doing it, I appreciate it.

Thanks.