Mike Birbiglia
speaker
192 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 18 Jun
Mike Birbiglia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks.
Welcome. Welcome to the program. We've been talking about this forever. Yes.
But it's true, though. I was watching your episode with Sebastian Maniscalco of this show, and I love that episode. And the things that you guys were talking about, I found really relatable. You were talking about like your kid, you know, my daughter's just turned 10 and your kids are like almost six and nine. Yeah. And it's like talking about like, like missing any of it.
It's like, what's it fucking worth? Because it can just all go in a snap. It's like, we don't know. It's like that thing. It's like, we don't know if we're in the first act or the second act or the third act. We don't know if there's going to be a second half.
and it can happen young too you can just fucking oh I know it happens all the time I walk in across the street it's so horrible yeah that so that special is old man in the pool and then this one's called the good life and it similarly like it's about things that are like the unfunny part of life like it's about how my dad had a stroke like a year ago
And the first joke I found in it was like, it's been devastating, but if I'm being honest, it has calmed him down. And I was a kid, he'd be like, where are my goddamn keys? And now he's like, keys. It is more polite.
But it's been honestly digging into this thing of when I started writing this new hour, It was two years ago, and it was all about what can I teach my daughter? When you're a parent, sometimes you're like, I don't know anything. I max out at age seven. I'm killing it to age seven, and then after that, I'm like, eh, I don't know a lot of this.
But then when my dad had a stroke, it's like, oh, I started thinking about now I have to explain the big things to my daughter. And so that's what the show's all about. So similar in terms of the weightiness of...
Yeah. I'm Bob and Thomas. Yeah.
was funny it was like the i was at aspen comedy festival and the moth which is a storytelling series yeah they asked me and it was like burr and like gene garofalo lewis black handful of people to tell stories and they kind of like taught us how to tell a story and that kind of thing it was like 2003
It was a while ago, yeah. And I told this story. I'd never really told a proper, like, beginning Madeline story before on stage. And I told this story about how when I was in high school, I had my first girlfriend, and she told me not to tell anyone that she was my girlfriend. Because she... Because she had another boyfriend in another town or whatever. And so I'm like, okay.
Because it's your first girlfriend. You're like, okay, whatever it takes. You know what I mean? And then she invites me to meet her parents for the first time. And I go over to her house and we're hanging out. And then there's this other guy there. And I'm like slowly realizing, oh, that's the other guy. Stop. This chick's wild. It was wild. And I think she is, yeah.
But, so, and then at one point, so he, the guy, invites us to go to his house to hang out. And we, I go and I meet his parents and the punchline of it is like, it's very nerve wracking meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents. It's like, you're angry, you're upset, but you also want to make a good impression. And so I told that on stage and like, at the Moth,
And then I had this thing where I was like, kind of similar to when I started doing stand-up in the late 90s after I saw Stephen Wright. I was like, oh, I should write jokes. You know what I mean? That's how I started doing stand-up. But that was the first time, 2003, where I was like, oh, I should tell stories. This is crazy.
The feeling in the room when you tell a story that the audience doesn't know which way to go. Yeah. It was such a rush. Yeah. I know. I started like writing a lot of stories. And then when I sleepwalked through a second story window, I was like, then it was like, oh, this is a show. And I started working with a director. This guy, Seth Barrett.
So this is old hat to me. Cause I wrote, you know, a show about it, you know, and then I wrote a book about it and made a movie, a movie with the Sundance. And it's called Sleepwalk With Me. I have a serious sleep disorder, which some people think is REM sleep behavior disorder, RBD.
And it got so bad when I didn't treat it that I jumped through the second story of a La Quinta Inn in Walla Walla, Washington. So that's true. I'm not, yeah.
And does the fall, is what wakes, like snaps you out of that? So I jumped through. So the dream was, and I jumped through the window, like the Hulk, like the Incredible Hulk.
Because it was the winter. Windows were closed. So I jumped, I had a dream. There was a guided missile headed towards my room. Jumped out of bed. People who have RBD sometimes act out their dreams in really extreme ways. So I jumped through the window, and then I landed on the front lawn, kept running.
Showing 1–20 of 192 · page 1 of 10
Next →