TEDDY, SET, GO Birbiglia gets up and at ’em.
Stand-up comic Mike Birbiglia is attempting to explain how his new Off Broadway show Sleepwalk with Me—previewing at the Lakeshore Theater Thursday 11—is different from his Sleepwalk Across America Tour of last April. The material still follows Birbiglia’s struggle with rapid-eye-movement-behavior disorder (sleep–acting out), but he says this version is in the storytelling vein of Richard Pryor—or maybe even Spalding Gray. In fact, Birbiglia’s producer, actor Nathan Lane, has a great quote explaining just how Gray he is, Birbiglia tells us during a recent phone chat…if we don’t mind holding while he finds it. Actually, we have to hold whether we mind or not: He’s got another call.
A few minutes later, the 30-year-old New Yorker apologizes. “We’re in the middle of a lot of stuff right now”—including logistics for the show’s October opening at New York’s Bleeker Street Theatre. “It’s like Barack Obama said in one of his books,” he adds, as his celeb name-check count (Pryor, Gray, Lane) jumps to four. “Going to the Senate was like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose. He’s excited to get the water, but it’s, like, a little bit too much water.”
Birbiglia, luckily, isn’t all that parched to begin with; he has a gift for engaging, theatrical storytelling. In Sleepwalk with Me, he doesn’t just tell his tales of personal injury and broken TiVos; he relives them. In one brief bit, Birbiglia recounts dreaming about discovering a jackal in his bedroom. While asleep, he jumped onto the bed; onstage, he hops up on a chair, one leg in the air, striking a fearsome, awkward martial-arts pose. He continues the story in that stance, even as his legs start to wobble; when his awakened girlfriend assures him there’s no jackal, Birbiglia barks back, groggy and just a bit too loud: “Are you sure?”
But the best examples of Birbiglia’s wit are found on My Secret Public Journal Live, a September 2007 stand-up album based on his blog of the same name. It chronicles tour happenings, family tidbits and porn-virus encounters that would surely embarrass anyone else. Birbiglia owns the humiliation, peppering his well-paced stories with conversational turns. Before launching into an anecdote about a charity golf auction show he bombed, he genuinely pleads with the audience: “It’s important to me to remind you,” he says, “that you’re on my side.”
Before his Secret Public Journal days, Birbiglia’s jokes were surface-level: Mike is poor; Mike has a tiny apartment; Mike’s cats are gay. Still, they were quite funny, earning him prestige at the Montreal Comedy Festival when he was just 23. About 20 meetings in Los Angeles followed with all sorts of industry folk‚ yet nothing developed. “The thing about people from L.A. is that they lie—a lot,” Birbiglia laments. “I came back and thought, What do I really want to do? Ideally, I’d like to be a comedian, and my best shows tend to be when people show up who are coming to see Mike on purpose”—i.e., not just any ol’ comic. So he started collecting e-mail addresses and promoting his shows with silly anecdotes garnered during his tour, like how his brother Joe makes for a bad entourage member; that morphed into the journal, which blasts 30,000 in-boxes every two weeks.
It worked: In January, Birbiglia blogged that he was working on a sitcom script based on his entries. The show became a CBS pilot in which Birbiglia plays a struggling stand-up comic (sound familiar, Seinfeld fans?). Sadly, it wasn’t picked up, which Birbiglia found out just before this year’s upfronts in May. But, he claims, that may have been for the best. “I can get on stage and say whatever I want,” he says. “When you’re dealing with a company that has advertisers, they’re essentially beholden to them.”
Of course, Birbiglia isn’t exactly offensive—you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a few four-letter words in his act—but given that sleepwalking deals with a lack of control, his material is darker than most; honed by a theater director, it’s sure to smart. “On the DVD commentary for Bring the Pain, Chris Rock”—that’s name-check No. 5, if you’re counting—“was talking about how the audience booed him in the first five minutes. He’s like, That’s a good thing. You want them to agree with you on a lot, but it’s good to jab them with stuff they don’t agree with, too. You can see a comedian for an hour and walk away—some people are famous at this—and go, ‘I have no idea of anything he just said.’ And you were laughing the entire time. That’s kind of sad.”
At this rate, it won’t be long before people start name-dropping Birbiglia.
For more on Birbiglia, read our interview with him or our review of his album My Secret Public Journal Live.
Birbigs tirelessly performs Sleepwalk with Me Thursday 11.