The comedian Mike Birbiglia and his wife, J. Hope Stein, a poet, sat in armchairs for a Harvard Book Store reading early last month, one stop along the way of a virtual book tour. Interviewed by Alec Baldwin for the 2020 virtual edition of the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night fund-raiser, also last month, he has been speaking on screens across the nation about “The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad,” his new book featuring poetry by Ms. Stein.
He whispered something to her. “Yeah, that’s right, I did say that,” she replied.
With her permission to give “full disclosure,” he gestured to the book tour setup and leaned forward. “The other night, we did this, right, same thing, which is we’re reading the couplets, choose your own joke adventure, and then we talk in between, and Jen goes, ‘Um, so I -- I like the bookstore events, but I don’t like when we talk. I like when we read from the book, I don’t like when we, when we talk.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you know, that’s like my whole thing. I just talk.’ ”
They shared a laugh, but Ms. Stein did not waver, sticking to her poetic guns and holding firm the belief that reading, or “premeditated talking,” is the superior activity.
Talking is a good way to describe Mr. Birbiglia’s comedy. “The New One,” his Broadway show that opened at the end of 2018 and inspired the book, is right at the corner of stand-up comedy, one-man performance, and storytelling. And it’s not a busy street. It is his singular talent to talk of first-child fears, feats, and foolery, to convey confusion and sweat among empty Diet Coke bottles, to stand up for an hour and 25 minutes as the bumbling father, and to do so with a meditative grace that conveys his panic at a high pitch -- a paradox.
“All of it's derived from these private journals that I was writing during the pregnancy and during the first year ever of Oona's life,” he said recently of the origin of both the book and the show. The subject, however, was almost taboo in his family. For his wife, whose poetry molds both book and show, family life with their daughter was the one thing she asked him not to talk about in his work.
“And then we were at a film festival, and the festival director asked me to tell a story. And the theme was jealousy. And Jen said, ‘Well, you’re jealous of Oona. You should talk about that.’ And I said, ‘Oh, do you, do you think that's okay?’ And so then she and I sort of collaborated on a story together that week that has lines in it that actually ended up in the show and in the book about how I felt.”
“Jen and Oona loved each other so much. And I was there too. I was like the pudgy milkless vice president of the family,” he said, quoting from the book and show. He and Ms. Stein had to cut the show down from about four hours of material to roughly 90 minutes. They were pleased to be able to fit more of their stories into print, plus more of Ms. Stein’s poetry to shade in the colors.
In quarantine, Mr. Birbiglia has come out with a podcast, “Working It Out.”
“I think the key to quarantine content is that it has to be as entertaining or more than pre-quarantine content. The goal was, how do I make this better than a podcast I would have created before the quarantine? And my answer to that was that I convinced comedians to come on and reveal jokes that they're working on mid-process.”
The guests on his show, along with Mr. Birbiglia himself, walk listeners through how they come up with jokes, allowing the listener to hear them working it out as “a fly on the wall to this process that actually no one really gets to see.” The real-time changes and the thinking on one’s feet that accompany conversation in “Working It Out” are a glimpse behind the curtain of professional comedy, “warts and all,” Mr. Birbiglia said.
“David Sedaris came on, and I was talking about the Y.M.C.A. pool and how strong that chlorine stench is at the pool. Like, I don't know what the hell kind of heinous crime they're covering up at the Y, but something has gone down. I don't know, was there a mob hit in the middle of the night and they're like, ‘Do we dig a ditch? Do we bring the body down to the Y.M.C.A.? I got a family membership. We drop it in the pool, disintegrates in six hours.’ ”
In that episode, listeners can hear Mr. Sedaris tell stories of his own that then help Mr. Birbiglia hone the wind-down of his Y.M.C.A. joke. “And so, in some ways, this podcast is this sort of a fantasy camp of workshopping material with these people who I probably wouldn't have the gall to call and ask to run a few minutes of material by."
A one-man show called “The YMCA Pool” was supposed to tour this spring and appear Off Broadway in the fall, but it was delayed a year, “or God knows when -- you know, who knows.”
Being forced to spend more time with familiar material has changed and refreshed some of his thought patterns about the work. “One of the things that's lately had me thinking is maybe there should be a musical number in the show. Maybe there should be a really spectacular set design that I've been thinking about that's sort of shocking.”
And he has cooked up a whole new batch of material, enough for a new book. “I think you can expect to see another book out of me in the next two years.” He also wrote his first piece for The New Yorker during quarantine, which he thinks might not have happened otherwise.
“In a lot of ways, I think that what the pandemic has highlighted is that there’s no time like the present. . . . Like this week, I had this idea for an opening line of the show, you know, which is: ‘So we all might die soon. So I’m going to attempt to put on tonight the best show I’ve ever performed.’ ”
