Mike Birbiglia On His Netflix Special ‘The New One’ And Why His Comedy Is So Theatrical

Mike Birbiglia isn’t afraid to dive deep into his own life for his brand of theatrical, personal comedy. He talked about his sleepwalking disorder in Sleepwalk With Me, which became a scripted film he directed, and talked about his marriage to poet Jen Stein in the show My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, both of which played off-Broadway. After veering into the world of jokes with Thank God For Jokes, he veers into the personal again with The New One. In the special, which was recorded during its Broadway run earlier this year, Birbiglia examines why he never wanted children, went into an existential crisis when Stein got pregnant, then had to deal with being a third wheel in their family after their daughter, Oona, arrived.

Birbiglia sat down with Decider to talk about the new special, how movies like The Ice Storm influenced his writing style, and why he prefers the theatrical one-man show format to straight standup.

DECIDER: How old is Oona now?

MIKE BIRBIGLIA: She’s 4-and-a-half. And she’s great. She’s great. It’s funny because [my wife] Jen always goes — because we’re in like such a good phase right now, and I’m like uber-present and hyper-involved in everything — and Jen just says to me — because you know I did 40 final performances in Los Angeles — and Jen’s always like, “Isn’t it weird going to your show and you’re digging in and performing this existential crisis of when she was 6 months old, and it’s like she’s 4-1/2 and we go to the beach, and it actually is like a real joy?” [Laughs]

At what point did you say, okay, I want to start talking about all the conflict I had around having children, and then your wife’s pregnancy, and then the first six months of being a father?

MB: I wasn’t going to talk about it. Me and Jen have been married 11 years, but [this is] the first time where Jen said she didn’t want me to talk, about having a child. Jen’s very private. She’s a poet, as I say in the show, and we actually wrote a book together that comes out… It’s a book that come out in May that expands upon the show, that’s a mix of poetry and stories together; it has the same name, The New One.

But she’s very introverted, legitimately, she doesn’t like to tell people private things, and so I wasn’t going to talk about it, I was sort of in this phase where I was like, “Okay, I guess I’ll talk about something else,” and then I did Thank God for Jokes because it was like more conceptual, actually. It’s really about jokes. I mean, I’m in there and Jen’s in there, that one, but it’s really more about the idea of jokes in this era, and then we worked on Don’t Think Twice, the movie. And then we went to the Nantucket Film Festival, and they asked if I would tell a story for the storytelling night, which the theme was jealousy, and Jen goes, “Well, you’re jealous of Oona, you should talk about that.”

I had piles of journals filled with feelings that I had experienced in that stage of time. A few of those things are still in the final version, like “They loved each other so much and I was there, too,” and “I was the pudgy, milkless vice president.” At that point, I just started writing it out, doing increasingly longer pieces of it.

And then at a certain point, I would ask Jen questions, like “How’d you feel when Oona had this milestone, like crawling?” or whatever, and then she’d go, “Well, I have this poem about that,” and then she’d show me, and I’d go, “Oh fuck, well, I can’t write something better than that, so can I just say this on stage, and I think that will be better,” So it ended up being a real collaboration. It was hard, because you’re talking about something that is so sensitive that you could barely talk about it in therapy, never mind in public.

You’re leaving yourself very raw, and you’re also leaving yourself open, which as a comedian, I’m sure you’re used to.

For me, though, it was more open than I’d ever been, and it was more sensitive than I’d ever realized. Like you’re saying, like you’re leaving yourself open, it’s more broad of a topic, and as a result, more people feel ownership over it. You know what I mean? In other words, I think part of the reason why it’s gone bigger than on my other shows is because everyone has kids or is a kid of a parent. There’s an entryway into the show for anyone, they’ve all will either have a parent or been a parent, and so it’s very personal.

Not everyone has a sleep disorder and not everyone’s married, not everyone has been in a car accident or hit by a drunk driver or whatever the thing is; with this, it’s a very broad theme, but then it’s also emotional in both directions. Some people go like, “Well that’s my exact experience, oh my god, you wrote a show about my life,” and then other people are like, “That’s not my experience.” I’m like okay, that’s great, that’s great, too, that’s fine.

In general, the feedback has been phenomenal, and it really does feel like healing in a certain way. So many couples come up to me at shows and they’re just like, “We haven’t talked about this in three years, you know what I mean, like things like that,” or everybody’s like “We just started talking about things that we never knew we were going to talk about.”

The extent to which this has like tapped into a thing, it’s a lot more than I’ve experienced before. My last show is Sunday [Editor’s Note: he performed it on November 24], and I’m going to be glad to take a break from it because it’s a lot. It’s a heavy burden to bear, it’s like people’s emotional baggage from children and their parents, et cetera.

And you dare say something that like says like, “Oh, I’m a little overwhelmed,” and all the know-it-alls will come down on you for it.

Yeah, yeah, of course. And speaking of that, the know-it-alls of that universe, there’s a whole industry of people telling you how to parent correctly. So, like I’m [entering] a territory where people are like, “The correct way to do this is this,” and I come along, and I’m like, “The incorrect way to do it is this.” And it’s funny because some people I think are confused by that. They’re like, “but he didn’t tell us the correct way!” and I’m like, “I don’t know the correct way! I’m taking swings in the dark over here! I still don’t know, I’m just trying my best.”

Right, and look, she’s still alive and speaks full sentences, so I mean, how bad could it be?

Yeah, exactly, she’s phenomenal, she’s the best. Yeah.

When you do these one-man show type formats that you do, It’s a very kind of not circular, it’s a concentric circle type of style where…

Sure. Circle back to it, circle back, start on the idea, circle back to it, and go to another idea, circle back to the first idea, yeah.

Is that something that you saw other comedians do, or did you say, “Hey, because I’m doing this in kind of a format that lends itself to a little bit more artistic way of seeing these things,” as opposed to just straight standup?

It actually goes back to the theater, it doesn’t go back to standup, as much. When I writing my first solo, Sleepwalk with Me, in the mid-2000s, 2005, 2006, or maybe 2004 even, I went and saw every solo show on and off Broadway. I saw I Am My Own Wife, I saw Bridge and Tunnel, I just saw so many solo shows just to see sort of what was out there and how this is done, and I learned a lot. The one that I really liked most is The Tricky Part starring Martin Moran and directed by Seth Barrish, and so I approached Seth Barrish and just said, “This is the kind of thing that I want to do.”

That show had that [sort of] format, which is essentially teasing a larger story at the top of hinting at a larger story, and then going in different directions, and then returning back to the larger story and telling you a little bit more.

It’s also a cinematic format. Take a movie like The Ice Storm, for example, the Ang Lee film, that steals that same format.The opening shot is Tobey Maguire on a train arriving to see his parents after a long night, and then we realize in the end that that shot is the shot of the act, it’s the final scene. I get emotional even thinking about that. That’s one of my most emotional film experiences I’ve ever had, seeing The Ice Storm, and I haven’t thought about it in a long time.

I studied screenwriting and playwriting in college, and that’s what I thought I was going to be, I was convinced I was going to be a playwright or screenwriter, and then I found out there’s no jobs in that, that’s not even really a job, it’s something that people aspire to while they’re doing something else that can pay the bills. So I was like, “Okay, well, I know I can do standup comedy because I’d been doing open mics and things like that,” and I understood that I could drive my mom’s station wagon around the country and be an opening act at comedy clubs and make like 300 bucks a week and I could live on that, I could live on almost nothing.

So that’s what I did, and then along the way, I was able to figure [things] out; I eventually got Sleepwalk with Me off the ground, and then that opened the door to three more shows, so here I am, 10 years later, and I’ve made four of these solo shows.

What advantage do you find in that format over doing straight standup?

MB: The advantage is that people listen more. They know that every word is important to the next word and to the larger story, and selfishly, the acoustics are better. You don’t have like clanking glasses and like people talking to people, talking to the waitstaff to order something, and all that kind of stuff. When I switched to theaters, I actually hit this point early in my career, like 15 years ago, where I was on a couple of like bills where I was opening for the Comedy Central Live Tour in 2003, ’04 , whatever, with Mitch Hedberg, Lewis Black and Dave Attell in a triple bill. And I was just the MC, and I was killing as the MC because it was at big theaters, the Opera House in Baltimore and the Warner Theatre in D.C., and I was like, “Oh, this is so much better for me.” So I called my agent, who I’m still with to this day, and I go, “I know that I don’t have enough fans to fill a theater, but I got to figure out how to get in the theaters because I think that what I’m doing lends itself to theaters much better.”

It’s funny because in England, there’s actually like a whole universe, there’s like a whole ecosystem of incrementally small, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger theaters that allows for people to grow with these solo shows. You play 100-seaters, then you play 300 -eaters, then you play 500-seaters, and they’re not clubs, they’re theaters. I’m friends with like Simon Amstell, for example, and he sort of came up through that, and I think Daniel Kitson came up through that.

I imagine that Russell Brand came up through that, too.

Yeah, and I think that that’s why a lot more of the British solo shows have more of an arc, have different types of experimentation within them, which is sort of how I got involved with producing Jacqueline Novak’s show at Cherry Lane, and now it’s at the Lucille Lortel, is like she was opening for me on the road, and we talked. She and her boyfriend, Chris Laker, who’s another great comedian, were opening for me for two years, and we would talk about different possibilities of what she could do, and one of them was just like that she just needed more time to express these big ideas, and so, you know, I produced that show, so that was sort of part of the same thinking.

When you do a cycle like this and you’re done with it, what do you usually do as your next move, do you try to do a straight standup set, do you stay away from it for a while and do other things?

A lot of it is I get on stage and figure out what it is I want to talk about based on what’s in my notebook; I carry a notebook everywhere, and it’s I start going up and throwing some things on stage. So now, I have three shows in my head right now that are completely in their natal form, and none of them have to do with children, but like I’m always jotting something down in my notebook, and then it’s kind of a fight to the death to see which one wins.

A good example of something that didn’t win: A few years ago, after I made Sleepwalk with Me, people were like, “What’s next?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, I think I’m going to do a film version of My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend like I did with this,” and then that ended up in the fight to the death in the notebook, and it was like, “No, no, I have no time for that, I told that story, and I told it well, and I’m moving to another thing,” and that’s how I ended up on Thank God for Jokes, and that’s how I ended up in Don’t Think Twice.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Mike Birbiglia: The New One On Netflix