Earlier today, I had the chance to interview Mike Birbiglia for a 2nd time. The first was just about 2 years ago and can be found reprinted here. In this interview, Mike talks about the success of his Off-Broadway show 'Sleepwalk with Me,' a book he is working on for Simon & Schuster, future projects, personal comedy history, and his upcoming tour entitled "I'm in the Future Also" the third stand-up tour that Comedy Central has produced with Birbiglia headlining, the first to be exclusively in theater venues. Dates for the 20 city tour which begins September 16th can be found here or here.
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I don't want to take up too much time because I don't know if you have a lot of press to do today.
I think I only have three or four interviews. I'm mostly just writing a book that takes up most of my time.
OK I didn't know if you could talk about that or not. I read about that on your Twitter and wasn't sure if it was something that was in development or something you weren't talking about yet.
No, no. I'm writing a book for Simon & Schuster, it's tentatively titled 'Sleepwalk with Me and Other Stories,' and basically, if you've seen 'Sleepwalk with Me,' you get the gist of the main event of the book which is the sleepwalking incident I had. It's a lot of personal essays, the kind of stuff I've been doing on 'This American Life' this year and just true stories from my life.
You mentioned that it's based on 'Sleepwalk with Me,' which you just finished about 200 shows of Off-Broadway.
Yeah, I think 199 or 198. We did eight months which is an outrageous number of performances. It's funny because we left on a high note, it was selling out every night and people in the theater community were like, 'Why are you closing?' And I'm just like, 'Cause I don't wanna do the show anymore.' In the theater world, that's very counter-intuitive to the logic of theater. If you have a hit, you run it forever, you do 'Sleepwalk with Me' for the next nine years and then you tour it to 40 countries but I was kinda done with that, it sorta feels like 'Groundhog Day' after a while.
You broke from that last weekend and transitioned into your first shows back in clubs. Have you been able to get right back into it?
I did three club weeks this summer. Cincinnati, Dayton, and this week Lexington, Kentucky to prepare for my fall tour because I want to have a new hour of material for the fall tour.
And have you found, with this fall tour you're doing a lot bigger venues, more theaters instead of comedy clubs, that 'Sleepwalk with Me' prepared you for that or was it just natural to do theater size shows at this point in time?
I've always liked doing theater shows better ever since the first two theater shows I've ever done which were opening for Mitch Hedberg, Dave Attell and Lewis Black for the first Comedy Central Live tour. I did six dates on that, and a bunch of dates on the Friends of Bob and Tom Radio Show tour in theaters about five years ago. Ever since I started doing theaters, the first night I ever even did a theater, I called my agent Mike Berkowitz who I'm very close with and I just said, 'We gotta figure out how to get me in theaters because this is way better for what I'm doing.' The audience response was a thousand times better. I think it's because people listen in theaters vs. in comedy clubs it's something of a mixed bag, people eating broccoli poppers, drinking 57 Chevys, they're on a date, they're trying to get laid, they're at their bachelorette party or have a dildo on their head. At theaters you don't get that. At theaters, people are coming to see the show. There are comedians who are better at clubs for sure, and I'm not one of those comedians. I'm better at theaters.
I was passed along a really interesting interview you did with The Onion a while back and in it you mentioned when you first came out with 'Two Drink Mike,' you were doing shows to promote that but people wanted more material and you had to fall back on 'Sleepwalk with Me' stuff and incorporate it but you'd always had it as a one-man show type of thing. Is that something you were always prepared to use as a theater piece?
Yeah, I had written 'Sleepwalk with Me' independent of stand-up comedy as a one-man play. I had written, I've been writing this book this summer so I've been going through the chronology of the last ten years with a fine tooth comb. Before I wrote 'Sleepwalk with Me,' I had written a one-act play with three actors called 'Baby on a Train,' and I had produced it in New York for six performances or something, and I was the co-star of it and I really wanted to write plays. When I was in college I was a playwriting/screenwriting major. When I was 19, I got really into stand-up, and really into Woody Allen movies, and movies in general at the same time and so my thinking was that I should try to do stand-up comedy and then get to a point where I can write my own movies and plays. 'Baby on a Train' was my first stab at that, it's a 30 minute one-act. It's not great, it's not amazing but it's pretty good. Then I wrote 'Sleepwalk with Me' and the reason I started using 'Sleepwalk with Me' material in my act is that there were a few jokes that were in it that made me laugh a lot every time I read them, and I thought this could be stand-up if I wanted it to be, I think I can just throw that in my act. The line that specifically made me go, 'That could definitely be in my act,' was about how I lost my virginity at this Bed and Breakfast and it was run by these two gay men named David and Leon and 'It was a really cute partnership because David cooked breakfast and Leon fucked David.' And I was like, 'That's such a good stand-up joke,' but I plucked maybe ten or twenty minutes from 'Sleepwalk with Me' and just started doing it as stand-up and it was going really well, as a matter of fact a lot of that stuff was going better than the 'Two Drink Mike' stuff so I felt I was onto something and started doing more and more to the point where I was essentially touring with 'Sleepwalk with Me' under the guise of stand-up but not using the name.
That's something a lot of people have recognized, your ability to weave all your different material together and deviating towards longer stories but being able to return to the original joke and it's something that makes your show unique in that it doesn't feel like the same show every night. In that same Onion article, they mentioned you did four nights at Caroline's where you revisited each of your CD's, 'Sleepwalk with Me,' and then took requests on the final night. What was it like to revisit that material and did you find yourself presenting it differently now that your style has developed on its own?
Yeah. First of all, it was really hard to revisit 'Two Drink Mike,' since 'Two Drink Mike' is just jokes and so I had a lot of note cards to remember all these jokes. And sometimes people request jokes from shows that I don't know the joke anymore so that's awkward. And that happens a lot with my E joke, about being offered E at a dance club and I don't even remember the joke. I think I just blocked out that period of my life, it was this really rough patch after I had a hard break-up.
Does it go the other way as well, where it'd start with one of those old jokes but would remind you of a personal story that allows you to open up or pick up on something and expanded it or mine the humor from it?
That happens a lot. As a matter of fact, I'm writing a new one-man show right now tentatively called 'The Accidental Marriage,' and one of the stories I'm revisiting is that actual dance club story that I was just referencing. The reason I'm revisiting it is because it was in this period of my life where I was just really lonely and sad and I wrote this joke at the time that never saw the light of day but I always remember, which was, 'They say that being single teaches you things about yourself and one of the things I've learned is that I'm very lonely,' and I've always thought that was a really funny joke but when I was telling it at the time, it was so raw that the audience would just sort of go, 'Awwww, poor guy,' and that's not the audience response you want in comedy, you never want 'Awwww, poor guy.'
But to finish the thought, for this new show, I'm actually blowing out the story from that era in my life which is that dance club story from 'Two Drink Mike,' I think the real story that was going on was that I was really lonely and depressed and sure that I'd never meet anyone again in my life and I was just hopeless. I was in Atlanta and this guy who was in charge of taking me around town was like, 'This town is a major party town, there's women everywhere, it's all crazy and there's all these clubs,' so I was like, 'Alright, I guess I'll go to the dance club, I dunno, that's what people do I guess, they go to dance clubs.' So we splurged on two really nice hotel rooms at the W cause we were gonna go out and party and get girls, bring home these girls, all this stuff. And I went to the dance club and basically I spent the whole night talking to this girl who I realized by the end of the night was just an ecstasy dealer trying to sell me ecstasy, and I was so socially misfiring and not reading cues that I thought she was interested in me. I wake up the next day and this guy who was in the adjoining hotel room with me was walking out with a girl the next morning and he's like 'What about that girl you were with?' 'Yeah, she was an ecstasy dealer.' To me, that's the more interesting story, but during 'Two Drink Mike,' I wasn't telling stories like that.
Going back to where you mentioned you wrote a lot of plays, and got into stand-up around 19 or so, I read somewhere that you had seen your first stand-up shows at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, which is where you'll be performing at the end of the month.
I did, yeah, when I was 16 or 17.
Have you been on that stage before or do you have any anticipation for getting on the same stage where you first saw stand-up comedy?
I've never performed on that stage and yeah it is very sentimental for me. I saw Steven Wright, he was the first person I saw. This summer, to evoke the memory of it, I went to see Steven Wright again at the Melody Tent, and it's fifteen years later. I've been visiting a lot of places from my childhood and meeting up with people who I grew up with and talking about the past and all that stuff for the book and I have to say I've been pretty disappointed in that as a tactic for evoking your past cause it seems like the Cape Cod Melody Tent fifteen years ago, or for that matter, the Shrewsbury Pizzaria or Craigville Beach from fifteen years ago, it's not the same as it is today, nothing stays the same, so when you're going there now, you might get the hint of something but really you're not, it's a bit of a forced effort.
At the Melody Tent, you'll have Joe Wong opening for you. Is he someone that you learned about in Boston or did you see him from his performance on Letterman?
It's kinda funny, the Comedy Studio is one of my comedy homes. They just run a great ship there. I started out there, they gave me a lot of stage time, they gave me a lot of support, so whenever I'm in town, I'll try to swing by there and do spots and every now and then. I think once or twice, I said to Rick Jenkins who runs it, 'I'll come early if any comics want to ask me questions about the New York City comedy scene, road comedy or whatever,' and he was like 'Great!' And so fifteen or twenty people came, and Joe Wong was one of those people, and he asked I think every question. I'd never seen his comedy before but he has such a strong accent and some of the questions he asked I didn't understand and had to have him repeat it a bunch of times but it was memorable. I never saw his comedy, I didn't know he was a good comedian, and then one night my wife and I were watching Letterman and he came on and I'm like, 'That's the guy from the Comedy Studio! This is ridiculous!' And he was so funny! I think that Letterman set, I sent him an email about it, I sent Rick one to pass on to Joe was one of the best Letterman sets I've ever seen so I was thought I should get him involved with some of the tour dates.
You always seem to bring people you came up with, be it John Mulaney or Nick Kroll, or people who are good friends of yours, like Lynn Shawcroft. Do you have anyone lined up for this tour or will it be more localized as it happens?
Well the person who is doing most of the dates on this tour is Henry Phillips. Henry is an incredible comedian who plays guitar really really well. He's actually a music composer in addition to being a comedian and he's so funny, just amazing. He had an independent film he wrote and starred in called 'Punching the Clown' this year that was critically acclaimed. I saw it at the Gen Art Festival in New York and I loved it. Great, great movie, it's semi-autobiographical about him as a touring act and Henry will come along for a couple weeks, Mike MacRae is doing the Texas shows, he's done Letterman, he's a great comedian. Auggie Smith is doing Seattle, Portland. Auggie is completely original and very spot-on about a lot of political stuff I find. Geoff Tate might do some of the shows. Geoff is hilarious, I ran into him in Dayton and I did a guest set and he just crushed, his act is great. I always try to keep an eye out for people coming up, there are some people who were really good to me, Tom Papa was really good to me, really helpful when I was starting out, Mitch Hedberg, Kathleen Madigan. Definitely, stand-up comedy is a field where you have to look out for people coming up and I think when you do that you're looking out for comedy as an art form. Mulaney toured with me probably the most of any one comedian and he was always thanking me when we were on tour, but i'd say to him at the time- it's kind of selfish [of me] "I'm bringing you on tour because you're great at comedy and that's good for comedy and that's good for everybody." I think that most people, including myself, I needed help when I started out. My act was not that mainstream so I needed someone to say to club owners, 'I know he doesn't kill, but he's gonna be really good so you should really keep an eye out for this guy cause he's gonna be great,' and that's what I try to do as well, is pass that on to club owners and bookers.
If you have a chance, listen to the Jeff Garlin interview on the Adam Carolla podcast. There was a great part where they talk about aspiring comics, and advice for aspiring comics, and I don't know if it was Garlin or Carolla who said, 'The bottom line, people will say you need connections, you need a break, you need this or that, but when it comes down to it, you need to be so good that they can't say no.' All you can do is write and write and write and write until what you're doing is so good that they can't say no. I'm cribbing from Jeff and Adam who I think were referencing someone else, that to me really set off a lot of bells in my head where I was like, 'That's exactly what you should tell aspiring comics. That's precisely what it's about.'
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