With his Emmy-nominated Netflix special The Old Man and the Pool, Mike Birbiglia digs deep into our sense of mortality and meaning, while literally lying on stage in true confessional comedic style and going out with a ‘bang’. Birbiglia has honed his career out of deep honesty and the importance of “sharing secrets”, as his work has traversed such revelatory topics as reluctant fatherhood and terrifying health scares. Looking back at the path that led him to his ‘specials’ specialty, Birbiglia explains his reluctance to venture into sitcom territory, his love of working with This American Life producer Ira Glass with whom he made the film Don’t Think Twice and Sundance hit Sleepwalk With Me, the SNL star who pushed him in college, and the importance of paying it all forward.
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DEADLINE: Congratulations. You went from taking The Old Man and the Pool on Broadway to an Emmy nomination. This feels produced like a play more than a stand-up special. And the ending…
MIKE BIRBIGLIA: The ending’s wild. Well, first, I should speak to the theatrical elements because my director, Seth Barrish, I’ve worked with on all five of my solo shows. Sleepwalk With Me, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Thank God for Jokes, The New One, and then The Old Man and the Pool. And then our set designer Beowulf Boritt has won multiple Tonys. He won a Tony again this year. Hana Kim is our projectionist, and she won a Tony this year for the first time. So the people, Aaron Copp is the lighting designer. Toni-Leslie James is the costumer. There’s a lot of attention paid to making these shows, hybrids of theater and stand-up, and in the Netflix version comedy special at the same time. And so I think we’re all proud of it, that it’s a unique type of thing.
DEADLINE: Tell me about developing the ending and then also I’m really interested in the choice you made to lie down during the show.
BIRBIGLIA: Yeah, the ending. It’s funny. I think part of the reason the ending became so specific is that usually for my comedy specials I spend about three years on them. And this one I spent about four years on because of the pandemic. And the ending was this thing where I kept trying, “What if the ending is this? What if the ending is this? What if the ending is this?” And then at one point I said to my director, Seth Barrish, I go, “What if it was just blank?” And he goes, “Try it.” Which is our mantra with these shows. “Let’s try it. Let’s put it on its feet.” And then the first time I did it, people gasped. And I was like, “Oh, that’s really interesting.”
DEADLINE: I jumped in my seat on my couch watching it.
BIRBIGLIA: [Laughs] It’s just one of those things where, whether it’s a comedy special or a movie, it can have some kind of imagery that is metaphorically what the whole thing is. One of my favorite movies of all time is Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Because in some ways it’s so much about that exhibit, the Museum of Natural History of the squid and the whale, and it serves as a metaphor for these characters dealing with their parents’ divorce and all this stuff. And yeah, I get choked up even talking about that.
DEADLINE: About the metaphor in Noah Baumbach’s work, or about making this work generally?
BIRBIGLIA: Yeah, about The Squid and the Whale. The type of things I’m drawn to, the type of movies and the types of plays I’m drawn to, I’m so drawn to, that when I’m creating something, I’m attempting in some way, shape or form to [blend] comedy with drama.
DEADLINE: Tell me about some other things that you are deeply drawn to?
BIRBIGLIA: The other one is most of James Brooks’s movies. Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment are major touchstone films for me. I can watch them over and over and over again. It’s in the family, I guess, but I feel that way about Greta Gerwig’s movies too. I feel that way about Francis Ha and Lady Bird and I get choked up at Barbie as well. I like films that can entertain you and specials that can entertain you, and then the emotion of the piece sneaks up on you. I mean, Barbie‘s a great example. I went into that being like, “I love Greta Gerwig, but you’re not going to get me with a Barbie movie.” And at the end I’m just like, shhh
DEADLINE: I know that early on you had some thoughts of going into screenwriting, and what’s really interesting to me is how streaming has changed the landscape for comedians giving them more of a platform for specials. If there hadn’t been streaming platforms, what do you think you might have ultimately done with your writing?
BIRBIGLIA: It’s so funny. When I happened onto Netflix years ago, around 2008, 2010, when they started streaming, they licensed a special I did called, What I Should Have Said Was Nothing, and I didn’t even know. It was just a special that I really cared about, but was licensed by Comedy Central and then licensed to multiple different places, including Netflix. And all of a sudden people were coming up to me going, “I saw your special on Netflix. I love it.” And I was just like, “What is Netflix?” And then I got really invested in it, and I said to my agent, “We have to do the next special at Netflix. It’s fantastic.”
And in some ways for artists like me, it was the perfect place, when HBO for years had such a specific taste and aesthetic. I don’t even know if it’s this now, but for years it was just edgy. It would be specials by Patrice O’Neal, Bill Burr, which by the way, were great, but they just weren’t what I was doing. I was doing these narrative autobiographical shows, and they were like, “Yeah, that doesn’t quite speak to what we do.” And then Netflix came along and really embraced what I’m doing. And at this point, I think I’ve done five or so specials on there.
DEADLINE: You once made a pilot sitcom, and you’ve talked before about how now you wouldn’t want to do a sitcom. Why not?
BIRBIGLIA: In 2008, I made a sitcom pilot for CBS, and it was based on my life. And the cast was phenomenal. It was Nick Kroll and Bob Odenkirk and all these people who were fantastic. And I think artistically it was death by a thousand cuts. By the time we made the thing it was so far from what I was doing on stage, even though it was based on what I was doing on stage. And then it didn’t get picked up, and that was… I desperately wanted it to be picked up, and then when it wasn’t, I thought, “Huh…” Hollywood, I think, is so good at certain things, and not always great at the other things. And one of the things they’re so good at is producing. Just the way in which Hollywood is so tenacious about season after season after season. And I was like, “Well, why don’t I apply that to what my shows are?”
And I came back to New York and I worked with Eli Gonda and some other folks with producing Sleepwalk With Me, my first solo show, with the same tenacity that they were doing that pilot in Los Angeles. And I find that the more creative freedom I have, the more anyone has, I think, the closer you get to conveying your comedic voice to people. And I think it’s better for all consumers of comedy because it’s closer to the authenticity that people crave. People come to stand-up comedy for authenticity, I think, often.
DEADLINE: There are moments in The Old Man and the Pool where you really lean into the sadness and take risks and it pays off. Tell me about mining your health situation for this confessional material. I loved how Seth Meyers said on your documentary Good One: A Show About Jokes, words to the effect of, “Not all of us are lucky enough to have these good material health crises fall in our laps.”
BIRBIGLIA: Yeah. Stephen Merchant was on my podcast this week, and he’s a comedian I really admire so much. Between The Office and Extras, those are two of my favorite all-time series. And it’s so funny because we talk about this exact thing. He once walked through a plate glass window at a party, Sarah Silverman’s party. By accident, he had taken an edible or something, and he just was walking outside and didn’t realize there was a window and he just walked through it. We were talking about how even in moments like that, where it a crisis and it’s sad, as a comedian, there is some part of your brain that is still going, “It’s good material. There’s something there when I get on the other side of this.” And it’s the old adage, comedy is tragedy plus time. And a lot of the job of the comedian is writing down everything, everything, knowing that eventually you’re going to feel differently about it.
DEADLINE: As with your journaling process.
BIRBIGLIA: Yeah. Those journal entries that I project in the show, they’re real. I mean, they’re little excerpts from my actual journal, and at the time that I’m writing them, they’re very sad. And then in hindsight, they are in some ways the guideposts for what the show The old Man and the Pool is about.
DEADLINE: When you filled in for Jimmy Kimmel when he had Covid, people must have suggested you do talk-show hosting full-time? You host a podcast now, so why not host a show? Have you thought about that in any determined way?
BIRBIGLIA: Probably for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve had this inclination that you can try to do things you like, or you can try to do things you love. And if you try to do things you like, you’re going to be met with a lot of people who also want to do things they like. But if you try to do things that you love, your passion is going to possibly will that thing into being, with some luck.
DEADLINE: Well that’s a truth bomb for us all isn’t it?
BIRBIGLIA: So, the things I love, I love a stand-up special that makes me feel something. Like Jerrod Carmichael’s special Rothaniel, I’ll always remember watching that and thinking about where I was, and my wife and I watching it together and talking about it afterwards. I’ll always remember seeing Squid and the Whale or Francis Ha or Broadcast News or all these things. I want to make things where people still think about it 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and not just have it be an ephemeral stand-up special.
DEADLINE: But I think some people aren’t fortunate enough to ever really love anything they do.
BIRBIGLIA: Sure. I think that’s true. And I think in a certain way, you’re lucky if you are moved by something so much that you’re like, “I want to make something like that.”
DEADLINE: Back at Georgetown, you entered ‘the funniest person on campus’ contest and won. Do you think that changed your trajectory or would you have done this anyway?
BIRBIGLIA: I think so. Victoria Jackson from SNL hosted that contest, and then I walked off stage and she goes, in a really high-pitched voice, “You’re going to be a comedian.” And it never left my head. This is this person who I watched on television be hilarious through my childhood, and they’re telling me that I’m going to be a comedian. I couldn’t believe it. And along the way, I’ve had a handful of people give encouraging things like that. Steve Martin says some encouraging things that are really meaningful to me. And I try to pay that forward. I’m a producer on Alex Edelman’s show and he’s in the [same Emmy] category, with Just For Us, and I tried to be encouraging when he approached me, because I just think those kinds of encouragements are really significant. And I was lucky enough to get them along the way.
DEADLINE: I first came across your work through This American Life, and you were a very singular voice on that show. What do you recall as being the most standout experience of working with Ira Glass and being a part of that?
BIRBIGLIA: Well, it’s funny. That actually is one of the things that Ira has so generously given me over the years, among so many things. It’s just encouragement of, “No, no, this is what you’re meant to do. This is what you’re supposed to do.” And also, when my show or a movie, because we’ve worked on two movies, Sleepwalk With Me and Don’t think Twice together, when something isn’t hitting the mark that he believes that I’m capable of, he’ll say, “I don’t think it’s there yet.” I remember early versions of Don’t Think Twice. He just goes, “I don’t think this is a movie.” And I was like, “Well, what do you mean?”And so I think I’m lucky to have a friend like that. So many really smart people who were seeking out something maybe a little different from stand-up, or a little different from regular storytelling, found me through that. And it’s been my rock through my career.
DEADLINE: You talk very honestly with real vulnerability about your reluctance and uncertainty about having kids. I imagine you’ve had a lot of people thank you for your honesty over the years?
BIRBIGLIA: I think, yeah, that show particularly, which was called The New One, definitely dealt with this idea of, “I’ve never wanted to have a child. Here’s all the reasons no one should ever have a child. And then here’s the way I was right, and then here’s the way I was wrong.” And that’s the way it turns into a 180 and becomes emotional at the end. Pete Holmes comes on the podcast for the third time, I think, in early June, and he’s a great comedian. And we always talk about how if you’re not telling secrets on stage, then who cares? If you’re not telling secrets, then why are we even sitting in a room watching you speaking into a microphone? I want secrets and I want it to be funny, and I want to feel better on the way out than I did on the way in. Because it’s also this thing where you just go, “We’re just on the planet for such a short amount of time, why are we keeping these secrets?” We’re all experiencing the same madness of being alive. How strange it is, how strange aging is, how strange it is to raise children and all this stuff. And so if we don’t call out what that actually feels like, and we’re just pretending with our Instagram selfies and things that we’re living our best life, it’s like, who cares? It’s just a lie to me.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you?
BIRBIGLIA: I’m filming my next special in March, and I’m really excited about it. I’m on tour right now. I’m doing a 50-city tour of America. I’ve been on for essentially about a year and a half.And then I’m writing my next movie, which I’m hoping to shoot next fall. That’s a little bit in the vein of Don’t Think Twice. And because I loved making Don’t Think Twice, there was something about making it—working with Gillian Jacobs and Keegan-Michael Key and my cinematographer Joe Anderson—it harkened also back to my improv roots from college. And I just think I’d like to make a whole series of movies and I’d like to make a whole series of comedy specials and just get a rhythm going of these two things.
DEADLINE: You’re directing, writing and producing?
BIRBIGLIA: Yes, I’m doing all those things.
DEADLINE: Are you acting in it?
BIRBIGLIA: I don’t know. I’m not going to act in it, unless they twist my arm and say, “You have to do something in it so that people know it’s you making a movie.” Which happens sometimes. I can’t tell you anything about it other than to say it’s about friends. I just think I’m really obsessed with small movies about relationships. There’s a certain type of movie, whether it’s The Big Chill or Hannah and Her Sisters, where it’s friends and family, and you get a sense of like, “Oh, this is like my family. These are my friends.” And that’s what I feel like the next movie’s going to go deep on.