self-effacing comedic storytelling has won him a fiercely loyal fan base over the last decade. But along with his one-man-show approach comes a unique set of problems.
“Honestly, it’s so much trial and error,” said the 35-year-old Massachusetts native, who made his film directing and starring debut in last year’s “Sleepwalk With Me,” based on his show and album of the same name. “I listen to other people, like (‘This American Life’ host) Ira Glass, my brother Joe, my wife Jenny. I’m surrounded by people I really respect and I want a lot feedback, but I ultimately also want to do what I want to do.”
We caught up with the affable Birbiglia in advance of his “Working It Out” small-club shows at Thursday, Sept. 5 through Sunday, Sept. 8, which will precede the winter theater tour for his next one-man show.
Hi, Mike, thanks for talking to me today. How goes it?
Well, it’s getting to be a more stressful day than I thought because my comedy special (“My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend”) came out on Netflix today and I’ve been following the Twitter responses to it.
Are they vexing?
They’re good. They’ve been nice so far. But Netflix is funny because it’s a little bit like a really streamlined, good-looking YouTube in a way. It’s like this thing where you’re going to get an onslaught of comments and star ratings over the course of like, a long time. It’s weird, actually, with my other specials… “What I Should Have Said Was Nothing” ended up being seen by more people on Netflix over the years than on Comedy Central when it originally aired, so it’s an oddly powerful platform.
Are you privy to the number of people who’ve watched it on Netflix? I think that would be fascinating to know.
No, but you can surmise it. People have various metrics of how you can surmise it based on the star ratings.
Like Amazon user reviews?
Exactly, so you don’t know for sure but you have a pretty good sense. And also what happens is touring America or the world is its own best kind of test marketing. People will just come up to you and tell you where they’ve seen you, and my Netflix special is one of the ones they always say. Another one when I travel the world is how wide podcasts go. “I heard you on ,” and I’m like, “Fuck, you’re in Australia and you listen to Marc Marcon’s podcast?!”
You seem to have retained the down-to-earth quality that’s drawn so many people to your work, despite progressively getting more press and a higher profile. Is that difficult to do once your start rubbing elbows with Hollywood and all that industry machinery?
Part of what helps is that I live in New York. I don’t live in L.A. and I’ve resisted moving there. I’m very close with my family I’m very close with my wife. I work and collaborate with my brother. I have a lot of people very hyper-aware of my head not getting too big. I feel like my mom is the person, even when I was struggling… I was in my twenties and struggling and not getting any headway, and even my mom was like, “Your head’s getting away from you,” and I’m like, “No, I’m failing! I’m bad!” But having your priorities in the right place has a lot to do with your family. And the other thing is that it comes down at a certain point to just being honest with yourself and what it is you want, and for me I don’t want to be more famous. I just want to do things that are better than the things I’ve done before. So that doesn’t kind of factor into it.
I’ve never really pictured you as the guy at the stereotypical Hollywood Hills pool party.
The stuff that really interest me… probably my favorite thing this year was “Frances Ha,” which is Noah Baumbach’s movie, and because I live in New York and he’s in New York I know him a little bit. I was able to moderate the Q&A with him when the movie came out, and that’s more exciting for me than meeting Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts or whoever. For me that’s probably the most exciting thing I could do. I just want to ultimately keep getting better, keep making things that are unique from the things I’ve done in the past.
Now that you’ve been doing this for awhile, have you gotten into a rhythm with writing and practicing these one-man shows?
With “Sleepwalk With Me” I developed that over five or six years. “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” took about three years, and this one I’ve been working on for about a year and half. So it’s probably got another year in it or so before I decide I’m going to record it and film it. But it’s funny: whenever I do these “Working It Out” shows you guys can come see me in six months and a lot of it’ll be better and different, but also, “Hey, what happened to that story about that thing?” “It’s gone because you didn’t laugh.” It’s really strange, this specific art form of stand-up comedy, because the audience helps you shape it.
And it’s so immediate. You don’t wait for notes or reviews. It’s all right there in front of you in real time, unlike the Hollywood process.
In my twenties I was doing all these different things to stay afloat — acting in commercials and doing stand-up — and lately I just want to do movies where I have final cut, and stand-up, and that’s it. I just want to do these two things where I get to decide what I’m releasing. When I was in a sitcom process a few years ago with a network I feel like I got pushed around in all these ways by people who don’t know as much about making people laugh as I do, or who haven’t done it as much. Just giving notes on stuff and they don’t know what they’re talking about. And that’s why the majority of sitcoms aren’t as exciting as . There are no notes, just what comes out of his head.
I always wonder this about comics: how do you stay on track when so much of what you do seems to be amorphously structured?
A lot of it is work ethic. I work a full day’s work like people do. I treat comedy writing for myself like a 9-to-5 (job), and then I’ll do shows at night. I’m always looking for what’s working, what’s not working. I’m really kind of obsessive about it. The other thing, honestly, is that I see a ton of movies and I see a ton of plays and I then I don’t watch much TV. People name things in pop culture all the time and all of a sudden I have no idea. I just cannot keep up with TV. There’s too much of it. There’s too much stuff.
And certainly there’s no guidebook for this kind of working schedule, given your style.
I work a lot with the guy who directed both of my one-person shows, Seth Barrish. He and I have been working together for eight or nine years now and I basically had him take a look at the stuff I did recently, had him come to the show, and he’ll say things like, “What if you tried this story first and this story towards the end and you plant this idea early in the show? See how that goes.” And the next night I will and we’ll kind of go from there. But I feel like what I’m doing is ultimately a blend of stand-up comedy and theater, a hybrid of these two forms. If you were going to be really critical of each form you could say one-person shows tend to be not funny enough, and stand-up comedy tends to not have enough heart, so I feel like there’s a blending of those two.
You’ve been really successful with it. Why aren’t there more people like you out there?
I think there’s a demand for it. Sometimes comics, in an attempt to cop some persona of being tough, there’s sometimes a loss of humanity that people kind of see through, and they’re like, “This guy’s not leveling with us. He’s just treating us like we’re an audience and we just feel manipulated.” And I feel like the (stand-ups) who I really connect with are kind of leveling with the audience — people like , , Louis C.K. People who have made a lot of effort to really articulate what they’re saying and express it in a way that’s unique to them.
I have some friends who are huge fans of yours and they fit a certain personality type in my mind. Let’s call them “This American Lifers.” To tempt fate with more broad generalizations, have you found that you have a certain “kind” of fan?
What I’ve noticed about my fans is that I like them. One of the dirty little secrets in show business is you realize a lot of people get famous for things they’re not that proud of, and they have these fans that are lunatics. They come up and they’re like, “I saw you in… whatever!” And they wanna get away from those people as fast as possible. But possibly what grounds me is that I like the fans at my shows and generally when I meet them they tend to be interesting people.
How so?
They’re people who strive to have a certain level of honesty with themselves in their lives and have a certain degree of curiosity about the world. They have an intellectual curiosity and a desire to strengthen themselves and see and do something different than other people are doing. I don’t really have people who… it’s almost like you can’t stumble onto me. It’s not possible, because I’m not anywhere anywhere that’s that high traffic. I’m not on “Dancing with the Stars” or “America’s Got Talent” or something that’s playing at the airport when you’re there. There’s nowhere that I am where you can find me. The only way is for someone to come up to you and go, “You know what I think you’d really like? There’s this guy, he just tells stories and he doesn’t dress them up and oversell them and they’re not that crazy or insane but they’re just funny.”
Do you ever worry you’ll run out of material, given how autobiographical your career is? Or is life pretty much absurd enough that that’s not even an option?
I do think about it, certainly. I think anyone who writes autobiographical work and tells you they’re not thinking about it are lying. But I also feel like there’s the role of the comedian, in my opinion, to take life — which is inherently challenging, hard and difficult, and it’s full of pain and suffering — and it’s our job to take that and make it funny and interesting and liveable. And make people walk away from their night out and be like, “You know, things are really messed up but we can also laugh about some of it. We don’t have to just hold it all in.” And I feel like that’s the medicine of comedy, for sure, and I feel like I don’t think there’s ever going to be a lack of tragedy in the world, and as a result I don’t’ think there’ll ever be a lack of comedy in the world.
It’s an ecosystem, really.
It is, and I had this thing last year where one of the more glamorous things in my life was when my movie was at Sundance and I was on a mountain in Park City skiing. I was like, “This is incredible. This is my moment!” And then I fall down, I break my shoulder in like a ski fall, and I go to the condo and go to the hot tub. I’m in the hot tub and I realize that my cell phone is in my pocket and it’s moments like that where I’m like, “Oh, the pain never goes away. The tragedy!”
Speaking of movies, I know you’re adapting “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” right now. What kind of things did you learn from doing “Sleepwalk With Me” as a film that you’re applying to that?
I feel like what I’m writing right now is just very much directing on the page. It’s a lot of conceived shots and conceived images as opposed to when I made “Sleepwalk.” I didn’t actually think for a long time that I’d be able to direct it, or if anyone would let me direct it because nobody wants to let anyone direct a movie for the first time. It’s a bad bet. The fact that “Sleepwalk” is a success is weird, because it was supposed to be a disaster. That’s what usually happens. So it was a lucky alchemy of very experienced people who worked on movies who ended up making it work. But as I was writing the first one I was writing it for another director. It wasn’t really specific to shots, you know? But now that it’s for me it’s all these instructions for myself on the set, basically deciding things they tell you not to do in script, I’ll do.
Like what?
Like, “Don’t put a specific piece of music because you don’t know if you’ll get the rights.” And I’m like, “Yeah… I know I’m going to need that piece of music.” Or, “Don’t say you’re going to close up on this person because the director might be put off by that because they don’t want to be told what to do.” But I’m like, “Yeah… I’m going to do that.” I’m very, very excited about this film. At this stage there’s no voice-over or talking to the camera, which was a signature of the first movie. I’m intrigued with throwing that away and being vérité and letting the characters exist and breaking with the narration.
I also read something the other day that referred to you as a clean comedian, which is true, but I hardly ever see that attached to your name, whereas folks like Jim Gaffigan, Brian Regan, etc. are basically synonymous with it. How conscious of a decision is that when you write and get up on stage?
I need to get that washed away and change that! I talk about that on stage — early in my career I didn’t curse much and it’s basically because my mom didn’t want me to or she’d be embarrassed, so I didn’t. But I found as a writing choice that it’s a really good choice, because it’s not good to say fuck 35 times in an hour, just as it’s also not good to say antelope 35 times in an hour. It’s just bad word choice. So I do curse sometimes. I don’t have some kind of embargo against it, I just don’t do it much.
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