[silence]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The New York Times said, "Mike Birbiglia's Broadway show, The Old Man and the Pool, about aging and mortality, was 'baked to golden perfection'." Vulture's Kathryn VanArendonk called it 'standup comedy at its essence'. You get a chance to see it on Netflix. As we learn in the one-man show, Mike is not the old man, but he did see an old man at the pool, and it made an impression.

Mike started spending a lot of time at a Brooklyn Y because his doctor told him he needed to start doing cardio five times a week for his health. The only problem is Mike hates going to the public pool. There are naked old men in the locker room and an overwhelming chlorine smell, and well, pee in the water, but for the sake of his health and his family, especially his daughter, Oona, he gets in the pool.

This renewed focus on serious health issues unfolds as it reveals the discomfort we can feel when we have to face really big issues, end of life, why it's hard to say 'I love you', and how your world can change in a split second. The show is called The Old Man and the Pool, and it just started streaming on Netflix. Mike Birbiglia joined me on All Of It last year when the show was running at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. The first question I asked him was about the many times in the show where he addresses the audience directly, and why he enjoys breaking the fourth wall.

Mike Birbiglia: It is just joyous. It's just a joyous experience to do it every night with a different scene partner, and the scene partner is your audience.

Alison Stewart: You have gotten very good about being very open about things in your life. You're very open about your various health issues. You're open about mental health on stage. When you're writing your show, do you have an internal sense about when to stop, when to go a little farther, when to pull back on personal information?

Mike Birbiglia: The super unfiltered version gets heard by my director and dramaturg, Seth Barrish, who-- I would say I've written, this is an 80-minute show. I would say the uncut version is five, six hours. You know what I mean? It's so much writing and so much-- The role often of a dramaturg is to hear what you are trying to convey and then say, "What I'm getting from what you are saying is this." You go, "Oh, okay. Actually, I was meaning to convey something like this, and so maybe I should rewrite towards that."

A lot of the stuff, sometimes it gets so personal that it's like, "No, that's just you. [laughter] That no one else is experiencing that." The sweet spot, I think, for comedy is finding something where people see themselves or hear themselves in the writing, and that's the goal. Theoretically, that's why people are laughing.

Alison Stewart: Is there a crossover between the work you do for your stage work versus your standup?

Mike Birbiglia: Oh my God. There's a huge crossover, but basically what I do is, I've been working on The Old Man and the Pool for about four years. What I'll do is I'll start by just putting on stage the funniest stories, the things that I'm obsessed with. I think that the job of a writer really is write about what you're obsessed with, because if you're obsessed with, chances are some other people are obsessed with it and you can find a common ground, common interest in that.

It starts out with, "What are my obsessions?" It's like, "Oh, I have this funny wrestling story from high school where I never won a wrestling match my entire career. I have this funny story about going to the YMCA pool after I hated going to the YMCA pool as a kid so much, and I vowed I would never return." Then I start putting these things on stage, and at a certain point, Seth, my director, and I will take a look at it and go like, "What is this?" What is this now and what could it be?" That's where the process begins.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, one of our producers saw some of the material that ended up in the show, you working it out at the Comedy Cellar. This is a hard question, but how do you feel when it's a story you love and you're rolling it out at the Comedy Cellar and it just, crickets, but you love it, but you-- [laughs].

Mike Birbiglia: That's so funny.

Alison Stewart: -"Hey, this is me and my life, people."

Mike Birbiglia: I take sections of four-minute, five-minute sections of the larger show, and I bring it to the Comedy Cellar. The idea is that it's very scientific. I'm pounding out the specific beats and punchlines to make sure that it's comedically sound and then in the larger 80-minute version, that it's structurally and story-wise dramatically sound. When I'm at the Comedy Cellar and if something doesn't work, it oddly doesn't hurt my feelings.

I came up in comedy clubs. When I was 19, I started working the door at the Washington DC improv, and so it would be George Lopez and Margaret Cho and Dave Chappelle and all these comedy club headliners from the 1990s who were killers. They're crushing, crushing, crushing, crushing. It was a real education in that. I would open sometimes, and sometimes I would just see people and bring them their food, but it really taught me that you can watch one of the best comedians in the world. You could watch Paul Mooney and you can watch him die on stage. He's one of the best probably comedy writers ever. He wrote for Pryor. You know what I mean? That was a real education for me.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Mike Birbiglia. We're talking about this in a, not clinical, but in the processy way of the way you make a show. Again, it is about your real life. Is the writing something that helps you cope with some of the bigger problems? Or is this something that helps you personally to write about the stories?

Mike Birbiglia: I think it does. In the show, I referenced that I write my journal every few nights because I find that if you write down what you're saddest about or angriest about, you can start to see your own life as a story. When you see your own life as a story, sometimes you can zoom out and encourage the main character to make better decisions. There's a few journal entries in the show that are pretty intense and they're pretty serious and things that I have written.

I actually do find that to be very helpful and I find the process of putting it on stage to be very helpful because also, I found this, this is my fifth solo show. The first one was Sleepwalk With Me at Bleecker Street Theater in 2008, and that was all about my very, very serious sleepwalking disorder where I jumped through a second-story window. I find that if you tell people the thing that you're most embarrassed about, you're most self-conscious about, what I find is typically more often than not, people go, "Oh my God, I have something just like that." Then you listen to the thing that's "just like that," and it's nothing like that.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: There's some frequency that they're picking up on?

Mike Birbiglia: Precisely. They're seeing that you are baring your soul to them, and in some way, hopefully, it makes them feel the permission to bare their soul to the people they're close to. It's funny, it's like there's so many things culturally right now where people have these tools for self-projection of an image or on Instagram, TikTok, or whatever it is, like, "This is who I am." More often than not, it's not who they are. I would say almost always. [laughs] I would say my role or one of the things I try to do with these shows is just do the 'it's no filter'. Hashtag no filter.

Alison Stewart: Yes. The idea that even we are grown-up people, and you still look at Instagram and intellectually you understand this is somebody's highlights reel of their daily life, but it can seep in. I don't think anyone's completely immune to that.

Mike Birbiglia: Not at all. No. I think it's a very odd-- This is for a whole other show. I certainly think that I've written about this privately and I feel like maybe the next show might be about this, but I think there is going to be a reckoning with that downstream at some point, because what I find is that, my director, Seth and I, we've taught storytelling workshops and things over the years.

What we find is that with people who are older and middle age, they're more comfortable telling stories about themselves that are compromising or show their flaws, and that with some of the younger high school, college age, it's like the stories are very sharp and they're well told and they're really smart, but they're maybe not revealing things that are vulnerable. I think a lot of that is this cultural construct we've created, which is that you can't present with flaws.

Alison Stewart: That's super curation. Right?

Mike Birbiglia: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I think it might be creating, I don't know if it's life experience dysmorphia, like body dysmorphia, only for your life, like your life is supposed to look like this.

Mike Birbiglia: You're absolutely right. I think that's absolutely true. Of course, it ebbs and flows. I'm sure it'll go in the other direction, [laughs] I hope.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Mike Birbiglia. The name of the show is The Old Man and the Pool. We learned in the show you had this tough conversation with, it wasn't even that tough. Your doctor's like, "Hey, you've got to exercise more. Your health's in trouble." What actually went through your mind when you first had that conversation?

Mike Birbiglia: It's so strange. My last show was called The New One and it was at the Cort Theatre now is the James Earl Jones. It is on Netflix now. People want to see it but it's all about having a child and my reluctance to have a child. I feel like one of the reluctance I had to having a child was actually that I have all these things wrong with me. I say in the show, my body's a lemon. Now that I have a child, there is some part of me that, when I'm getting news that's like, "Oh, you have type 2 diabetes--" I've gotten a lot of weird, tricky, not weird, tricky diagnoses. I often just think of my daughter. I just think about when I was a kid and how much I took on myself when my parents were having health problems, which is just so hard.

Alison Stewart: What was challenging about making lifestyle changes for you? Even though you had the star of Oona there. "I'm going to do this for my family, my North Star," but it's the day-to-day of it.

Mike Birbiglia: Well, it's so funny. There's a line in the show where I say, "For me, I tend to prioritize things that'll keep me alive in the short term over the things that'll keep me alive in the long term, because if I'm not alive in the short term, I definitely won't be alive in the long term." I just feel like sometimes we're all living out these Bugs Bunny existences where we're holding down water coming in through the ground and then another hole spouts up next to it and the water's coming out of there. In the show, my example is, I had mold. At our house, we had black mold in our apartment, and then we had to move out.

In real life, there's this scaffolding on our building [laughs]. During the pandemic, I don't talk about this in the show because it's too hard to explain. In the middle of the pandemic, basically, the Department of Buildings said that our building, our apartment building that we live in was compromised and it needed to be essentially rebuilt from the inside. We had this weird thing called interior shoring, which means the whole building was held up on metal stilts. I'm sure I'm getting this wrong and there's an engineer going, "Mike, that's actually not what that is." We had to move out and there was scaffolding on the building for, partly because of the pandemic, literally years. We were just the bane of our neighbor's existence. That's why you don't exercise [laughs], because you're just like, life just is taxing.

Alison Stewart: You're trying. You're just trying to get from morning to night [laughs] in one piece and keep everybody alive that you're responsible for keeping alive. [laughs] A lot.

Mike Birbiglia: Of course, you're dealing with your parents aging. My parents are 82-years-old. It's just a lot.

Alison Stewart: Playing zone defense with parts of your life. [laughs]

Mike Birbiglia: Exactly. That's the thing. Everybody's life is a lot. One of the things that I've had in the pandemic, I basically aged from 41 to 44 during the pandemic. Wow. Are those different ages? [laughs] At the beginning, I was like, I had been touring for 20 years and I was just like, "Oh yes, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life." Then, post-pandemic, I toured last year 30 cities with a version of the show and then I'm like, "I don't think I can do this anymore." My body is like, "No, Mike, no, we're not doing this."

Alison Stewart: Oh, buckle up for 50, buddy.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Just letting you know.

Mike Birbiglia: Wait, what happens at 50, what happens at 50?

Alison Stewart: Maybe I'll be talking to you then. I hope so. I'm going to [unintelligible 00:14:38] then. Yes, no, 50. Whew. That one's a winner. My guest is Mike Birbiglia. The name of the show is The Old Man and the Pool. It was interesting in your show because so many people come to see you again and again and they've been following you and your life through the course of these one-man shows and obviously your standup. I'm curious what it's like for you. All you have to do is say 'sleepwalking' and half the audience has a recognition factor.

Mike Birbiglia: They start laughing.

Alison Stewart: A, as a writer, how do you balance that there's half the audience who might not know that. Then, what is that like for you on stage as a performer to have to react to that reaction?

Mike Birbiglia: It's funny you should mention that because that was a calibration issue that my director Seth and I spent probably like three or four months on, which is that I have this very serious sleepwalk disorder where I jumped through a second-story window when I was 25. For a period of time, it was just on the road playing to people who were my fans and knew my work and were just coming to whatever show I was doing. Then we took it to Berkeley Repertory Theater, we took it to Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Steppenwolf in Chicago, and all of a sudden it was just feeder goats. They don't know. They don't know that story. I had to create a construct where I said, "I was at a nutritionist and she said, 'how's your sleep'?" Then people started laughing, who know that.

The people who are laughing, you know the larger answer to that one. People who are not laughing, the short version is, and then I just do the whole thing in 40 seconds and then I go, "The long version is, ah, I got a bad case of the jumping out the windows," and then we move on from it. There's just this sense of like, all I'm trying to do is balance off people who have seen the other shows and people who haven't seen the other shows, and you're all welcome.

Alison Stewart: There's a moment in the show, and I'm not giving too much away. You start talking about someone who has passed away as part of being in the swimming pool, and people start laughing. I know it's part of the show but you call out people for laughing about this person's expiring in the pool. What have you learned about human nature doing that section of your show?

Mike Birbiglia: Oh my gosh. Without getting into too much detail on it, [laughs] there's a thing where when I was workshopping material for this show, I would find sometimes, because it's all about death and mortality and all these things, that sometimes I would tell a joke or I would say a setup to a joke and people would laugh so hard. It actually shocked me. I was like, "Whoa, that laugh is too aggressive. That is off-putting." I would vocalize that to an audience. I would go like, "Hey, that's a little too much." Then the more I would say it, the more they would laugh. Then my director, Seth, and I thought, "Well, that's a really funny thing to talk about. Why are we laughing when we talk about death?"

There are a lot of reasons we're laughing because we're uncomfortable. We're laughing because it's all so absurd. Life and death and how we die and how we treat people's bodies after they die. All this stuff. I think one of the things that has been so rewarding about the show is that, honestly, it's just a conversation starter. I get a ton of messages in my Instagram and stuff like that from people saying like, "This was so healing for me because I lost my dad a few years ago and I felt like I was laughing with my dad." A lot of people have said they brought their 12-year-old son or daughter and they were able to talk about things that they weren't comfortable talking about before.

I do these hybrid shows. If people don't know my shows, they're a hybrid between storytelling, standup comedy, and plays. We try to check the box of all three. Our goal is to make people laugh for 80 minutes but also to have some call to action. The call to action in this case, we don't decide what the call to action is, but we were finding that the call to action is typically like, "I went home and I called my parents or I called my kids, or I told this person I love them or I started to value things that were smaller." I referenced the great Warren Zevon Quotes when he was dying of terminal cancer in the show. I say, he was on the Letterman show. Letterman said, "What can you teach us about life and death?" Warren Zevon said, "Enjoy every sandwich." It's so simple, but it's worth reminding ourselves, "Enjoy every sandwich."

Alison Stewart: Those 12-year-olds might be coming because you're in the new Taylor Swift video.

Mike Birbiglia: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I just wanted to say that for people who don't know. You played Taylor's son in the video for Anti-Hero. Quickly, are you a Swifty?

Mike Birbiglia: Oh yes. Huge fan. Oh my God.

Alison Stewart: What direction did you get to play Taylor's son?

Mike Birbiglia: Well, speaking of bonding, when the Folklore album came out, it was just a huge bonding thing for me and my daughter and my wife. When Taylor asked me to-- I know Taylor socially through just a little bit through Jack Antonoff who's a close friend of mine and has been for a long time. It was just a fluky thing. She was writing that song, it just so happened that I met her, and in her head, it clicked. She had seen me in some other stuff, but yes exactly. It clicked like, "Oh, this could be the nightmare version of my son in the future."

She texted me like, "I think it would be funny if you wore a blonde wig and played my nightmare son. It was a dream, she's obviously a generational writer and generational talent and beyond nice. Just beyond kind to everyone around her.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit of it.

[MUSIC - Taylor Swift - Anti-Hero]

"She's laughing up at us from hell"

Movie excerpt:

What?? What does it say?

It's the worst

But who got the beach house!?

She's having it turned into a cat sanctuary

What!? Cats don't even like the beach

What about the rest of the assets?

I flew all the way here from Ibiza

To my children, I leave 13 cents.

No, wait, wait, wait, wait you guys.

There's probably a secret encoded message that means something else

Yeah, yeah, yeah that's what mum would always do.

"Ps: there is no secret encoded message that means something else. Love, Taylor"

Okay, great, well good job Chad. You finally pushed it too far.

What are you implying by that?

I think she's implying that you haven't hesitated to trade on mom's name

Excuse me?

Ummm, do you not remember your book 'Growing up swift'

And your stupid podcast "Life comes at you swiftly'

Which I'm pretty sure you are recording for on your phone right now

Chad

Alison Stewart: That is acting [laughs]. That was my conversation with Mike Birbiglia. We had no fun at all in that conversation. The Old Man and the Pool is streaming now on Netflix and that is all of it for today. Tomorrow, a new biography focuses on the incredible life of war correspondent Maggie Higgins who became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for frontline reporting, but was haunted by accusations that she used her feminine wiles to get the story. Author Jennet Conant joins us to discuss her new book Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins. That's tomorrow. I'm Allison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.