When a comedy special arrives on Netflix in its finished form, viewers don’t typically get to see all of the excruciating work that went into making it a polished piece. But for anyone who has been listening to Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast over the past couple of years, it’s all there.
“I was doing it privately,” he says on this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “I feel like it’s something that’s kind of unspoken about stand-up, that for the most part, we are in communities of comedians who kick around joke tags: ‘Hey, what if you did this with it?’ And ‘I have a similar story about this, and you know you could use that if you want to,’ or whatever it is. And we kind of just put it out there with audio rolling.”
In his second appearance on The Last Laugh, Birbiglia talks about how this process helped shape his latest Broadway show-turned-Netflix special, The Old Man and the Pool; shares his thoughtful response to the “emotional truth” controversy that came for his friend and fellow comic Hasan Minhaj; breaks down how he handles criticism of his own work; and a lot more.
ADVERTISEMENT
Birbiglia decided to make his own mortality the focus of his new show, mostly because he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I’m just so focused on obsession. What are you obsessed with? And if you’re obsessed with it, then chances are you have a pretty funny take on it. And a worthwhile take,” he says. “And I feel like the thing that at that point in time I was most obsessed with was death.”
Among the various ailments he discusses on stage are the bladder cancer he survived in his late teens and the type 2 diabetes he developed as he entered middle age—along with a passing reference to the sleepwalking disorder that became the basis of his breakthrough film Sleepwalk With Me.
“It’s weird, sometimes with these shows, they get so personal that I’ll be on stage thinking, am I saying this to strangers, what am I doing?” he tells me. “It’s almost like I sometimes become the people who are criticizing me in my personal life, who are like, what are you doing? And I’m on stage and I’m thinking, yeah, what am I doing?”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
You talk in your show about zooming out to see your life as a story so that you can encourage the main character to make better decisions, which I thought was such a great encapsulation of what you do on stage. Is that something that you’ve always done? Is it something you had to learn how to do, to step back and see your life in that way? And is that helpful?
I think I had to learn it. Man, when I was in high school and a lot of college and in my twenties, I had a lot of anxiety. I would have this shortness of breath. I talk about it a little bit in the show, where I feel like I can’t catch my breath. Through the years, staring in my twenties, I started to see a therapist. And then at a certain point, I started to write in a journal. And that was when I made that observation. When I started writing in a journal, I felt like, oh wow, I actually do feel better afterwards. And now I always recommend it to people, because I’m like, it’s the least expensive form of therapy, writing in a journal. Write down what you’re saddest about, angriest about, feel most strongly about, because more often than not, you start to go, oh, it’s actually not so bad. I’m furious about this. I’m angry about this. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s not too bad.
I believe you turned 45 this year.
True story.
How do you think of yourself and your place in the comedy world? Because you inevitably start as sort of a young, upstart comedian and there are all these people to look up to, and you’re emulating other comics. And now there are people below you who are looking up to you.
I had that with one of my favorite comics, and she’s come on [my] podcast a couple times, Taylor Tomlinson. When we first met, she goes, “My sister and I used to watch you when we were in middle school!” And she’s a fully realized, fantastic comedian. The idea of middle school, that’s so long ago, right? But in some ways, I feel like I have a foot in both universes. I’m at the Comedy Cellar quite a bit, working out jokes, and I cross paths with a lot of people in their twenties who I feel a kinship with and then I cross paths with people like Chris Rock and Colin Quinn, who I feel like I have a certain kinship with, too. I don’t feel like I’m in one camp or the other. I just feel like I’m somewhere in the middle of those two things.
So one story that has been big in the comedy world recently that I wanted to touch on with you, because I know he’s a friend of yours, is Hasan Minhaj and everything that went down with the New Yorker piece. It made me think of your work because you are both very much storytelling comedians who do one-person shows. I’m so interested to hear your perspective on it because for me, when I first heard there was this article, my initial reaction was like, what’s the big deal? Comedians’ premises aren’t always based on truth. Then, when I read the article, it actually mentioned this podcast and his appearance on it, because he was telling me those same stories as truth in an interview setting, which felt a little different.
Oh!
And they used that as an example of where he was blurring the lines. But I’m just curious for your perspective. The pushback was sort of like, why are we fact-checking comedy? But I think there was some really interesting stuff that came up in it. How did you react to the whole thing?
I mean, my feeling is, I love Hasan, I love his comedy, he’s a friend. I thought his video response was tremendously well done. That’s sort of just my feeling about it. I just think he explained it really well.
Did it make you think at all about your own work, in terms of how you deal with those issues? Like, do I bend the truth here a little bit or do I exaggerate or do I conflate things?
So with my own shows, I always think in relation to, when I’m telling a story, would I feel comfortable telling that same story to the people who are there? So every now and then I’ll have something where I’m like, I have to get this right. For example, I talk in my show about having type 2 diabetes and reversing my type 2 diabetes. And for me, I was like, oh, I gotta make sure that that’s true. Because what if someone saw the show and they were like, “I’m gonna reverse my type 2 diabetes like Mike,” and then they can’t, it’s impossible? So every now and then I’ll have something like that where I’ll think about that.
And of course, I have these outlandish things that have occurred in my life, like jumping through a second-story window sleepwalking. And that’s another thing where it’s like, I don’t want to mislead people with my medical issues. But then there’s the other side of me, which is, I am in some ways like an Irish storyteller, where every time you tell a story it gets a little longer. And I think memory works like that, too. I think that the more you tell a story, the more you remember things, and sometimes I look back and I go, maybe it wasn’t like that?
There was this great This American Life story, years and years and years ago, that was brilliant. It was about this couple, where one of them remembered this massive historical event. It was something like John Lennon being shot, or something really extreme. Because they lived on the Upper West Side where it happened, and one person was like, “We were there,” and the other person was like, “We were not there,” and they’re both convinced of whatever their truth was. So I think that there is something to that. As a storyteller, my main commitment is to telling a good story. And I think every comedian sort of arrives at how much they’re comfortable embellishing a story or not. A story that’s not embellished by a single word is the wrestling story in The Old Man and the Pool. I don’t embellish it at all. And it’s my favorite story to tell because it’s like, if I were under oath in court, that would be how I described it. I’d say it’s like a paperweight being pinned by paper.
Do you feel like you’ve received criticism as a comedian that you’ve taken to heart, or that’s changed the way you’ve approached something? It could be from a professional critic or from an audience member telling you something.
Yeah. I mean, I’m always interested in feedback. When I do a joke on stage, if it gets a big laugh, that tells me something about what people experienced. If they gasp, that tells me something about what people experienced. If someone complains to me after the show, if they come up like, “Hey, that hurt my feelings,” that affects the way I feel about it. I remember years ago, I used to workshop a ton of my material at Union Hall. And someone came up to me after the show and said, “Hey, I don’t like how you said this.” And I thought about it. And the other one was an email. Someone wrote to me. They said, “You told this one joke and I don’t think I’ll ever come to one of your shows again.” And I wrote back, “Here’s the reasoning for the joke, and here was the thought process. And I might do the joke again, I might not, but I totally hear what your point is.” And the person wrote back like, “OK, I will return to your shows.” So a lot of comedians aren’t interested in what the audience has to say. I’m actually very interested. Because ultimately, the shows are about the audience. It’s my stories, it’s things that I’ve observed, but really it’s about, what do we all have in common?
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
