Soul Boom - Mike Birbiglia Redefines The Good Life

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Comedian Mike Birbiglia (The Good Life on Netflix) opens up about navigating his father’s stroke, his daughter’s spiritual education, and how meeting the Pope shaped his artistry. Along the way, Mike explores mental‑health honesty, delusional optimism in auditions, and why he believes live storytelling is almost sacred. THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! ⁠⁠⁠Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/soulboom. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Airbnb 👉 https://airbnb.com/host Masterclass (at least 15% OFF!) 👉 ⁠https://www.masterclass.com/soulboom⁠ Quince (FREE shipping!) 👉 ⁠https://www.quince.com/soulboom ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⏯️ SUBSCRIBE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠👕 MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📩 SUBSTACK!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  FOLLOW US! 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 👉 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  CONTACT US! Sponsor Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Work with Soul Boom: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠  Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to So, Boom. I audition for Krasinski's part. You audition for Jim. Yeah. That's amazing. Are you grateful in a lot of ways for some of those closed doors? So much. I audition for V.

I audition for the office. I've auditioned for Kerr. Because it didn't happen in that way, I created my own things. You have to be a little delusional for you to convince yourself it's going well when it's not going well. This is a coping mechanism for me, and I hope it is for you too. I have no expertise in anything else. I can try to make you laugh about dark, bizarre things. That's my only trick.

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. What's funny is, is I urged you to come to my show because I knew that we were going to do the podcast. Yeah. And I was like, if you don't see the show, it's going to be really hard. It's going to be hard because thematically, my show and your podcast are pretty similar.

Yeah. It was amazing seeing your show and realizing why you wanted me to go see it because it was, and it really hit me in the heart hard because I lost my father about four years ago. So fathers and sons, the complexity of fathers and sons, and I guess we're just there, but why don't you just tell us a little bit about the conceit of the good life? Conceits the wrong word. The theme of the good life in terms of your father and what you've been through. Okay, so two years ago I start writing a show about what can I teach my daughter? Because I'm hitting that age where she's, that point where she's nine, this week she turns 10,

and I'm just going like, the questions are a little bit out of my depth. When they're younger, you're just like shooting threes, you know, you're killing it. Yeah. But now I'm just like, oh, some of the plants are green because of chlorophyll. And you're like, a god. Yeah, exactly. At a certain point, I'm like, oh, this is hard. And then about six months into writing that show, which I didn't know what was going to be called,

my dad had a stroke. And he's still with us, but it's hard. I mean, that was 18 months ago. And so it became about what can I teach my daughter? What have I learned from my father? And so a lot of it is kind of flash forward, flashback to my childhood and thinking about my relationship with my dad, which is fraud in a certain way.

Like I feel like my dad was of a different era, is a friendly way to put it. He expressed anger in kind of an explosive way, shout. in ways that I do not, absolutely do not. And I kind of swore when I was a kid I never would. You know, I was like, I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that. And so that's really what the show is about.

And I have to say, like, one of the experiences of working on the show is that as a storyteller, you really have to, for the story to be any good, you have to care about the characters. You have to really like them or be interested in them. And I feel like by spending so much time with my dad as a character, I got to like him more. So in doing the show, you unearthed another level of kind of love, compassion, connection to your dad. Yeah. Wow.

That's powerful. And ironically, through a medium of stand-up comedy that he never wanted me to do, you know. Right? Yeah. So the irony of the whole thing is. So he didn't want you to do stand-up. At all. Desperately not.

Does med school, law school? Yeah, because he's a doctor. Yeah, I say this in the show, but he's a doctor. And then when I was a kid in his free time, he got his law degree. And I joke is, that's how much he didn't want to be a dad. That is pretty remarkable. He's like, what can I do in these slots of time when I would be parenting? So I'm going to work a 50, 60 hour work week.

Yeah. And then go to law school. At night. Yeah. Right. Right. But I really, I do feel like. by writing the show I was able to,

and it's, and it has brought me to a certain piece with my dad, which I, I feel like I desperately needed, because I feel like I was at odds with him for a lot of my life. Yeah, isn't it funny how complicated fathers and sons are, you know,

there's so much I appreciate about my dad, and I've shared on the show a couple of times, one of the qualities my dad has is or had is to just uplift every room he went into. Like my dad, if he came in a room, he'd be like, Mike, it's so nice to meet you. I love your special. Like, wow, your sweater matches your eyes. This is great.

And, oh, you guys have a beautiful studio here. You guys are doing a great job. And, oh, Car Check, the producers here. Like, a compliment, a joke, a comment, something like everywhere he went in. And I just appreciated that so much about him. There's a lot more about him that I appreciated as well. And his love of art and passion for art and story. telling and he always was very supportive of me going into the arts, which I'm so grateful for.

But then, isn't it funny? Like you said, like your dad, like, well, I never want to do that. Like, you talk in the show about your dad. Like, where's my keys? And, like, the whole family goes into a frenzy looking for your father's keys and your mom is saying prayers to St. Anthony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful sequence.

And for me, also, like, my dad taught me what I did not want to do or want to be. Yeah. Because my dad was a very, in a lot of it was a very sad, failed artist. He just wanted to be an artist. Yeah. But he was too insecure, afraid, traumatized to really try it, to really, like, get his books out there, get his paintings out there, pitch himself, network, any of that stuff. He really, he just, he was too, he was too fragile to do that. So in an odd way, I'm also grateful for my dad for what he couldn't do or wouldn't do.

didn't have qualities of because as soon as I kind of made a commitment like, okay, I'm going to try and be an actor, I knew, I was like, well, I'm not going to go down that path. And I know I do need to network and I do need to hustle. Yeah. And I knew need to try and sell myself. And I, unfortunately, and it sucks putting on that the business person as an artist, it's the worst.

Like, I hope you like me, please. Here's my new headshot. We look at my reel. It's a grotesque business. But I'm also really great. to him for his failures. Sure. Is that a weird thing to say?

No, that makes sense. I talk about artistic process and comedy process on my podcast, working it out all the time. And you do notice there's this trend of people who are successful in acting comedy, et cetera, where there is a self-sales and there's a tenacity that almost has to be there. And it's embarrassing. And I certainly have it. And I think most people I work with have it to some degree.

It's like the reason that it's there is that there's too many applicants for the job. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to hand out free samples of hot dogs on a street corner, there's not going to be that many applicants. Yeah, not the many applicants. And they'll roll out the red carpet for you. Like, oh, you want $11 to hand out these hot dogs for eight hours in the, in the ranch. sure you can have that job.

But yes, it is a very coveted job. Yeah. I also think the thing I think about is a lot is Lee Strasberg. Is that who it was? The acting teacher who was in the Godfather Part 2. I think that's Lee Strasper. Yeah. And he plays Hyman Roth, who has betrayed them.

Spoiler alert. And he says that fame is like, this is the business we have chosen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And anytime I hear an actor complain or someone in show business complain, oh, my agent didn't do this. I didn't get the thing.

And how unfair that they got the thing. And I didn't get. Yeah. It's like, you could have been an accountant. You could have gone to accounting school. And you could have lived in Toledo and made $200,000 a year. It had a really nice life. Yeah.

People's taxes eight hours a day. Yeah. But you chose to roll up your sleeves, stick out your elbows and get into this milieu. Yeah. You talk about the business, especially starting out in comedy, as pride swallowing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Especially you see the stand-ups in New York on the street corners handing out the flyers for the comedy shows. Oh, yeah.

They need to sell X a number of tickets or drinks or something like that. Yeah. I've had decades of pride-swallowing work. And even now as an actor, as established as I am, there's sometimes it's like, oh, my gosh, this is so pride-swallowing. Yeah, and I feel strongly that, like, when you're starting out in any artistic, field you have to be a little delusional where you have to convince yourself it's going well when it's not going well because otherwise you would never do it again that's so good that is so true because you're not good i mean ira glass who had worked with a lot over the years and has been

something of a mentor to me he has this line where he says when you're starting out all you have is your taste and you know what is good and then you have to try to figure out how to make what you're doing be as good as your taste. And it's the gap where some people die in that gap. Wow, that's profound. Isn't that deep? Yeah. I am thinking about myself as a young, because I'm back here in New York, interviewing you,

a couple of the things to do this week. And this is where I got started and went to NYU and went to acting school. And I was a little theater actor. and I guess I was really self-delusional because I kept getting all these like shape. For some reason I was good at Shakespeare. I wasn't very good at other kinds of acting, but I guess I could talk loud and pretty

and I could make sense of the verse. So they would like cast a, here's a tall guy and I understand what he's saying. That's good enough for $600 a week. But then I would get slightly better Shakespeare parts year after year. And that was enough to delude me of like, yeah, this career is going fantastic.

But from the outside, people are like, he's been doing nothing but Shakespeare for like three and a half years. You have so many beautiful moments in your special about working things out with your dad. You can see you, the comedian storyteller kind of ironing out the bumpy road that you guys have had. Yeah. There's some just gorgeous moments of connection with a guy that has been almost impossible to connect with. Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about that, a little bit about the healing process? Yeah, it's interesting.

Like this special, so I want to say this is like my sixth or maybe seventh comedy special. And I have always told stories. But this is the first time where I'm telling a story that I'm still living in. So in other words, you know, my dad is still with us. You still go visit him. I go home every few weeks. And, you know, he's in tough shape. And so the last two years I've been talking about it, it's raw.

I mean, my last two shows I did on Broadway, and this one I, I like sustained, you know, 90 or 100 performance runs. This one I did six nights of the beacon, and then that was it. Because I couldn't bring that to the audience every night, you know, because it's painful in real time. So this was the most emotionally affecting one of all of your tails. Yeah, by a long shot. Because it's, like you're saying, it's unresolved. It doesn't feel like I'm fully there with it, you know. But I think, yeah, I think a lot of it was working through what it was that connected me to my dad and made me feel close to him.

And, you know, I say in the show, it's like I have a few memories when I was a kid. I was in the hospital for dehydration, and I was admitted in the hospital. He came, and he rubbed my shoulder for, you know, 15 minutes, and it was like the slightest gesture, but it, I still remember it. And it's like that thing where you go, oh, yeah, we were just weren't very, we weren't a physically affectionate of family. And then I think about that in relation to my own, my own daughter and my wife, and we're the opposite.

I make the joke in the show, we're too much. Whatever too much is, we're going to find out when she's a grown-eyed. something, you know, everyone's always messing something up all the time. Yeah, she'll be in a therapist's office 15 years from now. Like, they wouldn't stop hugging me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They were squeezing me and I couldn't breathe. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I felt suffocated. Yeah, yeah. But, like, but, yeah, and, you know, one of the things that I came to realize, literally, as we were filming it, I thought, oh, my God, my whole existence as being a parent. I've been trying to avoid what my parents, how they parented me. And then at a certain point, you realize, no matter what you do, it's not going to be better. It's just going to be different. So like we went a year ago, I took Una to. Well, it could be better.

Could be better. Yeah, it could be better. Yeah. I would say too much hugging is maybe better than too little hugging. Well, like, I'll give you an example of what may be thinking. of this. So a year ago we took Una to the Vatican because the Pope invited

a bunch of comedians. It was like Chris Rock and Stephen Colbert and Conan O'Brien, all these people. It was crazy. And I say it in the special. And I bring Una around and I'm like, this is a religion I was raised in, all this stuff. And then she goes, wait, but like, who is

Jesus? And I was like, oh my God. I've left out so much. Because I was raised completely Catholic. I knew all this stuff. And I've left this out of her education entirely. And I was, that was a realization for me of like, oh, yeah, well, she wasn't, I haven't raised her in a religious tradition. And that is a deficit, I think. And that is an example of me overcorrecting because I feel like I was so deeply.

Interesting. So you have such a deeply religious upbringing. You have an 11 or 12 year old daughter who doesn't really know who Jesus is. And then you kind of go, ooh, maybe I did swing a little too far into the secular humanism. Yeah, because when I was a kid, I felt like, I feel like so much of my comedy career is a response to the Catholic repression that is common in central Massachusetts where I grew up. Or was when I grew up there in the 80s. Because, you know, I was an altar boy. I went to church every week.

I was fully immersed. in Catholicism. Indctrinated. Yeah, and so much of it was like, you know, and I talk about this in my first, one of my first storytelling albums was called Sleepwalk with me and where I talk about how I sleepwalk

through a second story window many years ago. And I talk about how when I was a kid, my dad would say, like, don't tell anyone. Like I would kind of go and go and go and he'd be like, don't tell anyone that. Like, it was like a very repressive environment. Wow. And I think so much of my comedy

is kind of like, yeah, tell everybody, who cares. Yeah, that's interesting. So your act of rebellion and individuation was to tell everyone everything about you in the petri dish of a family that was like, don't tell people the details. Yeah. That's interesting.

Yeah. And of course, the thing that you discover when you tell people everything or what I've discovered, because I've been traveling around the country and around the world for 20, basically 25 years have been doing this. And you realize that kind of there are no secrets.

You tell people your deepest secret, and they go, yeah, I know what you mean. I've seen that. I know exactly what you're talking about. And you think that you're just ripping your soul wide open. And they're going, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, that's like our family. That's amazing.

Part of it is generational, though, too, I think when my father passed away, there is a singular story that reveals so much about my dad, which was how his mother passed away when he was like nine years old. And it's the most heartbreaking story you could ever imagine. The nutshell version is his mom had tuberculosis and was in a TB hospital. Wow. And then they were going to take her out. And they went to go visit her.

And then she waved to them from the window. And then she was grabbing her coat to leave, slipped, fell on. on the floor hit her head and die. And there's a lot more to the story than that. But I had written up this thing as part of the eulogy. And his sister and his wife, my stepmom, his widow, were just like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't tell that story. He would not, he would not want that story told.

Really? It was like, well, it's true. And I don't know that he wouldn't want that story told. He would want a good story told. Yeah. And, but they really were just like, please. Please, we beg it. And they wrote me.

I still to this day don't understand why they would not want this story about him for people to hear it, for 57 people to hear it at a eulogy. Yeah. I don't understand what that means. Yeah. But I do think it's a generational thing of like we just don't, we don't talk about that. We don't reveal this stuff. Years ago, I went down that rabbit hole genealogy where you look at your own genealogy and you find leaves and all that kind of stuff. Family Tree websites.

And you go back and you start to see like there's people in the family you didn't know about. And there's there's extra cousins and extra this and extra that. Oh, there was a lot going on back then that people that didn't talk about. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, they did say that when they did a DNA analysis of like 23 and me and that there was a lot more incest going on than anyone never knew about. Right.

Jesus. So probably you're the problem. product of incest, but Jesus, I did not see this interview going this direction. Good night, everybody. Thanks for coming. Gotcha! This is a good. That's a wrap. I don't know that we're going to keep that section. Your daughter's at the Vatican asking who's Jesus. You grew up kind of indoctrinated in Catholicism. And here you are meeting with the Pope. And by the way, spoiler alert, the Pope just died. I know. I know. Last night. CNN called me for a interview or something?

I don't have anything to say other than... That's amazing. CNN called Mike Barbiglia for a quote on the Pope. Anderson Cooper's show. Yeah, I just got a text on my way in there. You know, I could understand if, like, Bill Berg got hit by a truck or something and they called you, but the Pope, they called you? No, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I did meet him technically, but it, you know, it's, you know how, you know, meeting people. It's like meeting Obama or something. Yeah, it's like, you don't really spend time talking to him. Yeah, I met the Dalai Lama on it last. at all, but 2.7 seconds. Exactly. What happened to your heart being in the Vatican?

I had an emotional experience with it because I think I did realize that I had spent so many years as a reaction to being overly religious, in my opinion, that I had pulled away from it. And there were so many things that are beautiful about it. I mean, I say this in the show.

It's true, I go, the pope, if people don't know, he's a pretty good pope. You know, he's, I mean, compared to other pop. Sure. If you met him at a party, you'd be like this fucking guy, you know. It's kind of like saying this guy was a pretty good chairman of Solomon brothers.

Like, you know what I mean? No, totally, totally. I mean, some of the popes were not. The institution is very questionable. Yeah, some of the popes were Nazis. Yeah. I mean, actual Nazis. So, yeah, the bar is pretty low.

Right. But this pope, if you, there's a, there's a tremendous documentary about Pope Francis that I highly recommend. And I think he's called a man of his word. And you see the degree to which this person has tried to take a stodgy institution that is the Catholic Church. open their eyes to blessing gay couples and being more like Jesus, which is what I was taught as a kid. And I think that what veered me away from religion through the years was, you know, becoming a teenager and seeing the hypocrisy in the teachings.

Yeah. Because when you're a kid and they teach you about Jesus and he's selfless and he gives his money away and all this stuff, you go, great. This guy seems great. Yeah. And then as you get older, there's a bit of a loss of innocence, I feel like, or really, it was for me as a teenager in my 20s, where you just go like, well, the people who claim to be Christian or align themselves with Christ so easily seem like they're maybe not so on the level

and aren't really aligning themselves with the things that you like about Jesus. Sure. Wait a minute. That's not the thing I like. Yeah. You know, certainly even like some evangelicals, I've watched where you just go, and they're huge, you know, really, really popular. And they're all about capitalism and this and that.

You go, well, how do the, I don't know how to square this. I'm not kidding you. Literally this morning, I was thinking about it. Either an essay or a book about Jesus. Remember Al Gore's an inconvenient truth. Yeah. Like an inconvenient Jesus. Oh.

Because the number of things that he says about like, you know, you want to serve me, give up your things. Yeah. And your reward shall be in heaven and serve the poor. And it almost feels to me in contemporary Christianity, both on the Catholic side and the Protestant side, that it's an anathema to behave like Jesus. I agree. You simply need to believe in Jesus.

It's like, do as I say, don't do as I do. Believe in Jesus and then try and stockpile stuff, try and hate people, piss on the poor, you know. And one of the things that Pope Francis did so beautifully is he always talked about the plight of the refugee. Yes. And he was very much, Jesus was a refugee. How can we have ever more compassion for refugees? And this was a very inconvenient Jesus.

Yeah, J.D. Vance talked to the Pope a day before he died. I'm not saying. I don't know. Yeah. We'll leave it there. Yeah. People can make conspiracy theories as they will. And they will.

And they will. Someone in all seriousness the other night told me that billionaires were controlling the weather as a weapon. Oh, wow. And then I googled it. He goes, look it up. And I did. I was like, billionaires controlling the weather. And it was like, number, newest skyrocketing conspiracy theory here, no proof.

Blah, blah, blah. It's not a conspiracy. It's like, but it's how do you prove that there's not, you know, it's like, doctor. evil, you know, Mike Myers, you know, behind a computer board kind of like, we're bringing these winds to the Pacific Palisades and we'll destroy it all. And then there's the one, birds aren't real. You know that one? Yeah, that was good.

That was all a stunt that I created, but that was really funny. It was pretty beautiful. Have you changed at all your education of your daughter around Catholicism or around the personage of Jesus? I think I've been, I think I've been more aware of it, pointing out churches and and talking about the reason why people worship Jesus. I think I've been more aware of it. And, you know, you know, you try to differ.

She's just 10, but you try to differentiate the religion from the person and the ideals of it. Because the ideals of it, again, are fantastic. Here's where it gets complicated. I go, okay, I was raised Catholic. and there's a side of it that drives me nuts, which is the repressive side of it. A movie that was really cathartic for me was spotlight, Tom McCarthy's movie, which I think is brilliant.

I think one of the best movies. One of the best movies in the last, and one of those rare movies that just like there was an issue and it was kind of like eating away at our society, and then this movie just kind of hit a home run, and it's no longer even an issue. It's just a fact. It's just like this happened.

There's no debating it. The effect that it had. And that movie kind of solidified a social cause. It does. And actually, I didn't think about this still now, but it's resonant even now because reporters, you know, the movie's all about reporters at the Boston Globe uncovering this story. And right now we're living in a moment where reporters and journalists are going to have to be heroes in this moment. It's going to have to be a lot of whistleblowing about what's happening at risk, at their own risk.

But yeah, so that movie I thought really did a good job of sort of capturing what's frustrating about or what's atrocious about the church. But at the same time, I do feel like there's a lot of things I learned from my Catholic school education that stick with me. Yeah, what's that? So Sister Margaret was our principal, of course. You know, you sister Margaret, but and her assistant was Sister Mary Joan. She was kind of hot. I don't think she was, but sure, everyone can have their opinion.

Sister Margaret said to us, nowhere at grade school, you do what's right because it is right. And I think that that's beautiful. It's simple. It's beautiful. I still think about it. But like I think there's a lot of stuff like that. That's pretty rare to come.

coming from a nun because usually you would say you do what's right because God told you to or it's in the Ten Commandments or it came down from on high or something like that. No, I thought that, but I thought, yeah, that stuck with me. And then, you know, the Golden Rule, do unto others. It's like a lot of these things are really positive. Yeah. And pretty basic. Pretty basic. And important.

Yeah. Humanity could still learn a lot from the Golden Rule. Yeah. Yeah. And so then you go like, well, well, maybe it is good that I was raised in that tradition. You know, so I'm, I'm torn on it. And I think, you know, my special, I try to convey that I'm torn. You know, I try to convey the idea that in a certain way, my relationship with my dad and having a communion with him at the end of the show is not, not unaffected by visiting the Pope.

And these things that the Pope says to comedians, you know. What did the Pope say to comedians? He said, laughter is contagious and laughter unites us. and we're living in a time where people are so divided, and you have the ability to bring people together as comedians. And Whoopi Goldberg said this on The View one day, because she was one of the comedians who's in our little group. She said, no one ever cheerleads comedians.

You know? She's like, it's not obvious. The Pope doesn't summon comedians in other eras and go, hey, you guys are doing a good job. Actually, what you're doing is important. And I agree with it. with would be like I think like it was it was meaningful and and he oh and he said this thing that really stuck with me he goes when you when you bring just one smile to an audience member god smiles

and however you take that however you believe in god or don't believe in god the idea of that i think is beautiful yeah even if you don't believe in god the idea that making one person's smile is a meaningful thing to do yeah that's beautiful i'd love to hear a little bit more about about what that Catholic experience was growing up, and then it culminating in meeting the Pope. I mean, were your parents just thrilled that you met the Pope? I certainly went because my parents would want that, you know.

And because my inclination, Jim Gaffigan called me, he goes, hey, Mike, the Pope wants to meet some comedians, and you're on the list, and I'm on the list, and I don't know, I'm going to go. And I go. I said to my God, you know, I have some trepidation about it. these concerns about the Catholic church. You know how Ariana Grande can imitate other singers like perfectly?

And there's all these videos of her singing like other singers. She can do Cher and Madonna, anyone. Can you do stand-up routines as any other stand-up comic? Because that was pretty. I can do it. Yeah, I can do the people who I kind of know well, I think. I don't think about it, though. Yeah.

Yeah. That would be pretty fun to have a wheel of comedians that you spin and then you can. The person who I could mimic pretty well was always Mitch Headberg, who was one of the, One of the late great comedians. He had such a great intonation. He'd say, I'm pretty good at tennis, but I will never be as good as the wall. The wall is relentless. That's great.

He's just like, his voice stuck in my head. Yesterday at LAX, there was an escalator that had broken. Yeah. And an escalator can never be broken. It can only become stairs. All right. And there was a security guard. and had it roped off.

Yeah. And I thought, every time I see that, I think of Mitch Headberg, and I'm like, why did you rope off this escalator? We can just walk up the escalator. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to us.

It's the perfect joke. Yeah. It's the perfect joke because, like you're saying, we experience it all the time. Yeah. You don't have to rope it off. But you started as a one-liner comic. I did.

Yeah. Headberg and Stephen Wright were the first people who I was really interested in. Yeah. And then over the years, you know, I got advice from people who I admired who said, you know, at a certain point, the best thing

you have to give an audience is yourself, your own story. I mean, that's what makes you, you. I mean, no one can steal your jokes if they're about yourself. And I sort of veered in that direction and sort of, you know, that's how I ended up doing what I do. If you started like Stephen Wright and Mitch Headberg with like hard one-liners, Demetri Martin, which I admire that way of doing comedy so much. But you just... transition from that to literally the guy who's most known as the storytelling personal story comic of our generation. So how does that, how does that dial turn? I always thought I had it in me. It's like one of those things where you have a secret suspicion. I think, I think I'm okay

at telling stories. Like I'll be at a party and I'll tell a story and it gets people, you know, like in their gut. You know, I'm making people laugh in their gut. But I'm not doing it on stage. I'm doing like set up punch, set up punch, set up punch, tag, tag. Do you have an example of one of your early one-liners? Like, really simple. This is in the late 90s.

I was working the door at the Washington DC Improv. And I said, I was watching the show politically incorrect. And slash from Guns and Roses was on. And he said that there's too much violence on television. his name is slash. And that would be the whole joke. That was so stupid. But I got a good chuckle.

Yeah, it's a joke. But I would sit in it. You know, it would be that kind of Stephen Wright thing where I would just sit in it. And yeah, and so then at a certain point, I think it was 2003, I did the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, and the moth was there.

And the moth is now a massive podcast. and, you know, they've written, they've done books and tons of stuff. It's huge. At the time, it was a New York-based local storytelling series that was asked to do, you know, have stories there. So they asked me, they asked,

it was like Bill Burr, they asked Gene Grona and Garofalo, Lewis Black, like a bunch of people who were already there. And that was the first time I told a story. And it was a story that was so embarrassing to me, which became the basis of my special, was called my girlfriend's boyfriend, which is in high school I had my first girlfriend, and she told me not to tell anyone that she was my girlfriend. That was the condition of us being together. And so at a certain point, she invites me to meet her parents. And, oh, because she had

another boyfriend. And that was why. And she invites me to meet her parents. And I go to her parents' house and it's going well. And this other guy's there, like hanging out of the house. And I slowly dawns on me. I'm hanging out with my girlfriend's boyfriend. And he suggests the true story that we go hang out at his house. And I met his parents. And I go, it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. And so that was, that story I told at the Aspen Comedy Festival. And it was just a complete epiphany moment of like, oh, this thing that secretly I thought I could do. just tell stories.

I think I can do this. Like, this is better than my act. This is better than what I'm touring. And your act was pretty damn good. And my dad was okay. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to really go into this direction. And then I built my first solo show around the sleepwalking incident where I jumped through a second-story window, which is a pretty good event to happen in a...

That's a good autobiographical thing. thing. So I had that and that was a big moth story and then that ended up being on this American life and that's how I met Ira Glass and Ira Glass really taught me a lot about storytelling. And still does. I mean, you know, like every time I talk to him I'd learned something. He's one of the smartest people I've ever known. Wow. That's incredible.

You should have simply watched Welcome Back Cotter because I remember an episode from Welcome Back Cotter where Gabe Kaplan was trying to figure out his comedy. Maybe it was one of his sweat hogs were trying to learn comedy and the advice was just keep it personal and keep it real and talk about yourself and then they started talking about their crazy relatives.

Maybe it was Ron Polillo as... Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I'll have to look that up. That was an episode. Wow. Yeah, check it out.

I was kind of raised by 70s sitcoms. Yeah. So... I get that. I was just after that. Yeah. I was like, I was like, I grew up on like Cosby Family Ties. Right.

You know, that was my generation of sitcoms. Yeah, just past. And I have very little relation to the guys who reference like saved by the bell and like the 90s sitcoms and stuff like that. Oh yeah. And what's amazing is too, and you're in people's, you grew up in that in the era of the office. Yeah.

You're that for them. So you're just in their life forever. You're in their consciousness forever. Yeah. It's bizarre. Yeah. It is, I just ran into a little gaggle of students over here at the Pliya bowl, getting a protein, a saibol. And the way they look at me, it's not like, oh, this is an actor I admire.

No. This is like, this is a human being that has been in front of my eyeballs for hundreds of hours. That's a man named Dwight, who we know. We know Dwight. We know him. And I'm often called Dwight. You're not called by any of your characters. No.

You're not like sleepwalk guy or any of the roles you've played on like billions or something like that. No, you are Dwight. Are you Dwight? Are you Dwight? Dwight's fictional. Yeah. By the way, our sliding doors of existence is that I audition for Krasinski's part. No way.

Yeah, yeah. I don't even told, I know Krasinski. I don't even think I've ever told him that. You auditioned for Jim. Yeah. That's amazing. Did any get any traction there whatsoever? I don't know.

I think I maybe read for it a couple times. So I think maybe that it's some interest to me. But I, it's so funny, like all these shows that I love, I audition for. Like I audition for VEP, you know, I audition for the office. Like, so many, I've auditioned for curb. You know, things. And it just didn't happen for me in that way. And then because it didn't happen in that way, I created it.

my own things. And now that I've created my own things, I've created my own movies, I've created my own comedy specials, I can't imagine it any other way. Yeah. Yeah. So are you grateful in a lot of ways for some of those closed doors? So much. Yeah.

It's so strange. It's such a strange life experience. Yeah. Isn't it funny how much sense life makes looking back on it? Oh, 100%. And also, like, I think one of the most profound things I've ever heard about acting, is there's an interview where Philip Seymour Hoffman

says this thing about auditions where he goes, auditions are great. They're an opportunity to act for an audience of one or two or three. And it's like, yeah. Oh my God, yeah. That's exactly right.

Here I am. I've been an actor for over 30 years and I never really thought of that and that is pretty fucking built. Isn't that great? Yeah, that is brilliant. You get to do the thing you wanted to do, act. Yeah.

I remember Philip Seymour Hoffman beating me out for a part in a theater role, like, right down the street that I auditioned for. Oh, wow. I did a pretty middling audition, and then I heard that he got cast, and I was like, yeah, that makes sense. He's really great. Even back then, as delude as I was, I was like, he's better than me.

Yeah, that makes sense. I would cast him, too. I think that performance in Synecaddy, New York, is as good a performance in a movie as I've seen. Wow. I love that movie. I've tried to watch it, like three, times I've fallen asleep every time.

I don't, they, it's people, a lot of people wandering around a warehouse looking around, and I, I, yeah, it's, it, I need to give it another chance. Oh, I love that one. Yeah, we were just bumping around on the streets of New York. Yeah, and Phil, Phil Hoffman. I remember bumping into him one day, and he's like, hey, I just got back from Kansas. I shot this movie about Twisters. Oh, wow.

It was a blast. You know, it's not going to come out for another year. Yeah. Yeah. There's a recent series of articles in the New York Times about faith in America and people struggling with the idea of God in America. But it is about how there has been a movement a little bit away from secularism and back towards some kind of faith tradition about the growth of the nuns, which are none of the above, you know, spiritual but not religious, but also the growth of young people and especially young men. returning to institutions like the Catholic Church. And as a response, she wrote to the famous Four Horseman of the Apocalypse atheist, Christopher Hitchens, for his response, like, you know, what would you say to young people that are looking for community and are looking for transcendence and awe in their lives and are finding that in a faith-based tradition? And his response, like, literally made me chortle, which was people could play golf to get.

to find community and people could screen documentaries by Sir David Attenborough and Neil deGrasse Tyson to inspire awe. So his his alternative to a faith tradition was golf and documentaries. I wish he had brought up comedy shows. They could go to comedy shows together. I do think that there is a bit of that, by the way. I do. I think there is a bit of people finding meaning in comedy, music, entertainment. You said in a quote that sometimes you feel like when you're going to get a thousand people laughing in a comedy venue, that it feels like almost a religious experience. It does.

Yeah. To me. I mean, because I feel like... And are you speaking as the comedian or as an audience member? Either. Yeah. Yeah. Because I love going to comedy shows too.

So what's that been like? I just feel like if you have a group of people and everyone... everyone has their phones away and everyone's present and they're right there together and you tell a story, you know, if I tell a story about sleepwalking through a second story window and I'm the only person that's happened to but we're all laughing at kind of our own version of that. There's like a vocal acknowledgement of oh yeah, life is so absurd and we're all here together and we're kind of in a certain way here for each other. And that's why I think live entertainment, as so many types of entertainment have fallen off,

I think live entertainment has stuck in there. Yeah. Because I think people do want to show up at something. I think it's doing better than ever. Maybe not movies in movie theaters, but concert series seem to be going to be. Yeah. And it's getting concerts. I mean, my tour, my last tour in the last two years is the biggest tour I've ever had.

And I think it's because people do like to be in a room with other people laughing, because laughter is one of those things that you can't quite fake. You could fake it for a few minutes. Yeah. You're not going to fake it for an hour. For 90 minutes. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah.

And it's an acknowledgement of, of, you know, a thing that's latent that you're making ostensible. You're bringing up a thing that maybe people were thinking, but. felt like they couldn't say. One of the reasons I really loved your show so much is maybe it's my older age, but sometimes I like going to a show where there's times to breathe. I don't have to laugh all the time. I've got some times to breathe and to just listen to the story kind of motoring along. And then I'm allowed to kind of laugh because there are certain stand-ups that,

and they're brilliant at it. But if they're not getting a laugh every 20 seconds in their routine, they feel like they're falling short. When I started in college, it was at the same time that I was studying playwriting and screenwriting. And so I was doing stand-up comedy. I was working the door at the Comedy Club in Washington, D.C., and I was studying playwriting very seriously. And so those two passions developed at the same time. And so at a certain point, they merged.

And so I do these shows that are like a merge of like solo plays. and stand-up comedy. And in solo plays, you do want moments of your thinking and your feeling. And honestly, like my director, Seth Barish and my friend Ira Glass are two people in my life

who really urge me to find those moments. You know, a lot of times I'll get through an hour of comedy and I'll go, oh, there's not enough moments where we're thinking and feeling. And so I'll have to go, well, what's... Do you ever cut jokes for that? Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, because ultimately you've got to figure out what is the feeling underneath this? There's a famous quote from Ezra Pound, which is only emotion endures. And I think that that's a... I always think about that in relation to what I'm writing my shows or writing movies, is that if you can, if you can,

It's like jokes are great. I love jokes. There's 150 jokes in my show. But ultimately, the thing people will bring up to me in 10 years from now when they see me is the emotional part. The feeling that it gave them. Yeah. Like there's a line in my girlfriend's boyfriend, where I talk about how I never wanted to get married, and I felt so insistent on it.

And the final line is I still got married, and I still don't believe in the idea of marriage. but I believe in Jenny, and I've given up on the idea of being right. And it's not a joke, but that's the line people come up to me and say back to me. That's beautiful. Speaking of your wife, Jenny, the poet, I'm married to Holiday, the short story writer.

So we're both, which is practically like being a poet now because no one reads short stories anymore. Yeah, yeah. So they're... It's a cult art form. Yeah, and it's very low-paying. She'll get a story published and she'll get, you know, $750.

Like, oh, my God, I've got to be. No, absolutely. And if you're, if you're any kind of niche literary artist, you really got to love it. Yeah. And she'll publish a New American fiction and probably they sell, you know, 2,170 magazines. Yeah. What did you learn from your wife, what have you over the years learned from her poetry and attention to language, detail? and the evocation of emotion through language,

how is that kind of tempered your stand-up? We just did, every now and then, Jenny and I will do, and she writes under the name Jay Hope Stein, and sometimes she and I will do a thing that we call jokes and poems. I'll do a joke, and then she'll do a poem that makes her think of that,

and then I'll do a joke that makes me think of that, et cetera. It's a free association of jokes and poems. And we do it a few times, a year. We did it the other day because Maggie Smith, the poet, had a book coming out and they had an event at Symphony Space. Not the actress. Different Maggie Smith. Okay, because she's dead.

She wrote like a very, very famous. And in addition to other things, she wrote a very, very famous poem called Good Bones, which is kind of a viral poem. It's actually on our wall at home. Beautiful poem. But she asked us to do something and we did this jokes and poems thing. And so we're on stage together and she's an introvert and so she's

kind of afraid of being on stage and I'm on stage all the time. But it's funny because I stand there and I listen to her poems and I'm so moved by them and I just go, that is so much better than what I'm about to say. You know what I mean? Like I just go, your art form is less popular than my art form. Poetry is less, is, you know, metrically less popular than comedy. But man, are you better at this than I am? I quote in my book, Soul Boom, William Carlos Williams, who said it is not easy to get the news from poems. Yet men die miserable every day from lack of what is found there.

Yep. So this idea that there is something found in poems that gives us heart-centeredness, connection, inspiration. And I would say maybe in comedy too, you can get some of those same qualities. Yeah, I think, I think especially now in this moment that we're in where people are very divided.

I think comedy has the ability to make a group of people in a room happy for 90 minutes. And like that is something. Poetry and comedy are very similar in that there's a small amount of words conveying a big idea. Right. Yeah, there is a distillation there that has reverberations. An escalator can never be broken. It can only become stairs. Is a poem of sorts. I love that line you have early in your special and you're like, I realize like my personality was simply side effects. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because the side effects of Clonopin. Yes, which I take for my sleepwalking. Yeah, it was like poor motor skills, loss of memory and depression. And then I was like, oh, I just thought that was my personality. Yeah. Yeah. You know, jokes and poems could be a franchise. You could franchise that, by the way. You could do it around the country.

And it's a great way to get poets out there. I know. We're talking about really doing it and finding a venue in New York where we regularly do it. I mean, Jenny's poetry is just a knockout. And she doesn't, I mean, she publishes in New York or in New York Times sometimes, but it's like the amount of poetry she has that people haven't read that just I've read or her peers have read is so, it's astonishing. Yeah.

I have a friend who's a poet who lives up in the Catskills, Phil Party, and it's like, I got a poem in the Michigan Quarterly. And getting a poem in the Michigan Quarterly is, it's so hard to do. Of course. They get thousands of poems and they have to pick like 17. It's the same thing we were talking about earlier. A lot of applicants. A lot of applicants.

Not a lot of splots. Please publish my poem for $300 or whatever. Or less. Yeah. I remember my brother Joe, who I worked. worked with for 20 years. He produces my specials and runs my production company. He got a headline in the onion 20 years ago.

And I think that he got a check for $15. One of the head, he wrote one of the headlines. He wrote one of the headlines. $15. $15. There you go. Yeah. And what was the headline that he got $15 for?

I haven't looked at this in years, but it's, I got out of my phone. Taco Bell's five ingredients combined in totally new way. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. That was like 1998 or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, my brother Joe and I have collaborated for years and years and years. He actually took me to see Stephen Wright when I was 16. Whoa. And our mutual love of comedy is really what got me into comedy. Has he written other stuff for The Onion and other plays? I think you got a few headlines in the onion, and then he's, you know, he was a writer on my sleepwalk with me screenplay. Yeah.

He has jokes in this new special. You know, basically, like, he's a full-time collaborator. Like, we do production stuff together, but also, like, I'll send him audio from the tour, and he'll pitch jokes on it and tags. And, you know, all of these shows are just, like, constantly in a state of motion and change and experimentation until they're filmed. and then they're done. So here's, I got a, I got a pitch for you. Okay. You're working out new material, have him on stage in the corner with a microphone,

and as you're doing it, he can be throwing you. Jokes. I feel like we've talked, he's come on my podcast before. He is, I think he's shyer than I am. I mean, this is the thing. It's like Joe and I, in some ways, my brother Joe and I are very, very similar. But I have. have the screw loose that convinced me that it's a good idea for me to have a microphone.

Nice. Yeah. I just want to talk a little bit more about how certain doors closing opened other doors for you as an artist. Because I think about this a lot in relation to this one story for me, which was I got to meet the casting directors on six feet under. And I just moved to Los Angeles and I wanted to be on six feet under so bad. And I auditioned like three or four times for co-stars, guest stars supporting roles. And I kept getting rejected. And I went in one day to audition for gay choir member number two.

I could tell I wasn't going to get it. And on my way out, there was like a piece of paper that had the breakdown of like roles they were auditioning. and I saw this role of Arthur, who was like this strange, uh, intern, mortician intern, uh,

kind of like Peter Sellers and being there. And I was like, oh my God. No one can do a strange mortician intern better than me. Um, and I went to the casting person why I'd gotten to know a little bit and said, hey, do you think I could audition for this?

And she was like, oh, let me, uh, let me go check with the producer. She really did talk like that. And, um,

she went back and she's like, yeah, sure, you can come. man, here's the sides, here's the script, and go have a sandwich and come back in an hour and you can audition. Yeah. It was one of those amazing things where, like, the skies open and the sun shone down and the angels

blew their trumpets because I was, like, looking at the pages and I was like, I don't even need to rehearse this. Two or three auditions later, I got the part, and I did 13 episodes on six feet under of this really memorable role that got me the office. Yeah. Because Greg Daniels watched me on that show. show and you know i auditioned of course for dwight and had to you know go through my paces but thank god i didn't get gay choir member number two yeah because my and i love that you said that

so many roles that you didn't get cast in forced you to write more deeper better and here you are five or six kind of you know indelible solo shows later that had you gotten cast as like the fourth lead on a multi-cam sitcom that and spent six or seven years doing that and maybe gotten paid pretty well and gotten yourself a, you know, a condo in Tribeca or something like that. But you'd be a much less memorable kind of force in the comedy world had one of those doors that you really wanted to open, opened. Yeah, it goes to this thing that years ago I wrote a piece for the New York Times and it was called Six Tips for Making It Small in Hollywood. And one of the tips was do what you love instead of what you like.

Because what I've found over the years is, you know, when I'm starting out in my 20s, it would just be like I would chase everything that I liked. Oh, this, maybe this. Maybe I'll write for this. Maybe I'll audition for this, you know, anything. And the more I zeroed in through the years into things I loved. Like, I love small independent films, you know, and I've made two of them. It's like I love comedic solo shows and I've made six of them.

You know, it's like, this is what I love doing. And eventually people have found them. I could learn a little bit from that wisdom tip because I still do chase things that I like. Yeah, yeah. You know, and not that I love. Yeah. So, thank you for that. You know, part of what you do as a comedian over the years and especially in this special is there's a lot of,

there's a lot of stuff about brains and medications and different juices and and hormones and secretions and like the the humanness of like what's going on in your brain with your sleep disorder and and when you were a kid you had a kind of a small bladder cancer scare and your dad was a neurologist, there's often stuff about the human body, the frailness and complexity of the human body and our emotional relationship to it. The reason I view towards that kind of stuff is

it's what I'm obsessed with. You know, I think like with stand-up comedy or any kind of writing, if you're obsessed with what you're writing about, the audience will be at least interested. You know what I mean? It's like I'm obsessed with health and wellness and that we're just living in these vessels

and eventually we won't, you know what I mean? And I go towards that. I think that's, I mean, I think that's what interests people in the shows. I think as a comedian, if you're talking about what you're not obsessed with, the audience is going to be bored. That sparks, that deep curiosity is at kind of an internal motor. Yeah. So why are you so obsessed with like brain bleeds and things exploding and how chemistry works in the brain and bowels?

Maybe because my dad was a neurologist. I mean, it's possible. What about the bladder cancer scare? I mean, that was just a terrible thing. You had to have been terrified. When I was, yeah, it was when I was 20. It was blood in my pee. And I was driving home from D.C. to Massachusetts. I saw blood my pee. I told my dad, and I went in.

And that week, they took it out. And I was very lucky. They didn't do chemo or radiation. They thought, let's try without it. And it didn't come back. And I've basically gone every three to six months ever since for cystoscopy. And, yeah, I've just had. So you faced your mortality at 20, though, in a way that few have?

Yeah. And I think that that's part of what made me a commensate. median at all. I think part of it was, I think when you face your mortality young, you realize, oh, I don't have that much time if I have these big dreams to pursue the dreams. I do think that there's like, there's kind of a benefit to facing your mortality young in that sense. So do you have gratitude in a, in a strange macabre, almost for your bladder cancer?

Yeah. Scare? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I feel like there's, if you have something where it's a real true, I think I'm going to die experience. You really have a sense of, oh yeah, it could just go. This whole thing could just go. And I want to be a comedian. So I got to figure this out pretty quickly.

Wow. And I think it put me on, you know, 4X speed, which isn't that healthy. But we're, yeah, maybe, maybe sent me through a second story window sleeve walking. But, but yeah, it's all part of. Caused a different set of neurological disorders. Exactly. Yeah. I think there is so much about life that is distilled in that lesson.

Life is so short and it's so precious. Even if you're not going to die of bladder cancer at 20. Yeah. We're going to die of something. If the statistics prove right in our 80s. So, and that's not that far away for me. I was listening to Atold Gwandae, who wrote Being Mortal, which is a great, great book.

It's about the end of life. And he's a physician. He talks about how he approaches it. And he said this thing in an interview where he goes, what you want to ask people in their older age is, what does a good day look like to someone you love and try to help them figure out how to have that day. And what he said, and I love this, is he goes,

it's a good lesson at any age. What is a good day look like today? Yeah. You know, because you don't know how long it's going to be. Right. Again, going back to the sliding doors analogy, let's say you're at Georgetown, this doesn't happen, and you get a degree in playwriting or an English degree or something like that,

and then you're teaching English at a suburban high school, not that there's anything wrong with that. You could have affected hundreds or thousands of lives by being a great teacher, but you wouldn't have kind of so specifically brought all of these incredibly beautiful and hysterical stories to the audiences of millions. Thanks.

Well, I'll go back to the thing you were saying too. of like what, why am I obsessed with sort of brains and illnesses and all that kind of stuff? Well, my feeling is like, as a comedian, if you can take something that is unfunny and make it funny, you have a really deep bond with the audience. Ooh. So you don't just see it as a challenge. Yeah. Because it is a challenge.

It's a challenge. But you see it also as an opportunity. Like, if I can do this. Yeah. If I can make my father's stroke funny and relatable. Absolutely. We're going to go deeper and farther than other people do with their audiences. Yeah, and also, like, what's the point of doing anything else?

You know what I mean? Like, if you're a comedian and you're trying to bond with people, you're trying to laugh and bond with people, like, why not have it be as close as it can be? And you want to do what you love. Yeah. And so you're doing what you love. But what you triple love is to get laughs. while tiptoeing into some really dangerous territory. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like the most, my last special was called The Old Man in the Pool, and this one's The Good Life. And the most meaningful things, interactions I have are when people come up to me and they say, you know, I've been dealing with the death of my mother, or father, sister in the last few years. And this was the first time I laughed

about anything like this since it happened. I'm like, great. That's all, that's all I can do. Yeah. I have no expertise in anything else. I can try to make you laugh about dark, bizarre things. I don't have anything else. That's my only trick.

Tell me about your history with your mental health struggles that you've kind of referenced throughout your work. I don't know what my diagnosis is per se. although I have to say years ago, and I've talked to him about it, I heard Conan O'Brien describe his mental health as being a high, like a high-functioning, depressive person. And I was like, I think that's it.

I think that's where I'm at. And I think, you know, and he said this, and I'm so related to this. He goes, for years I didn't want to say, I was depressive because I didn't want to devalue my friends who can't get out of bed. Right. Who have it so much worse. Right.

And that's how I have been institutionalized. Yeah. I've always felt that way. I have friends who have dealt with depression so much worse than me. And so I almost never want to bring it up. But I know what Conan means by that because I feel like I experienced some aspects of it. but I do have a side of me that is high functioning and possibly just I have manic aspects of me that sort of get me up and working hard.

Are there any tools that you use to get you through being a high functioning, depressive, or even manic states? Do you meditate? Do you pray? Do you journal? I try to meditate. I journal. Journaling is like my main one.

And how does that work for you? You just re-associate, is it something that's on your mind? Are you ruminating on something? And you want to put pen to paper? I just have a journal basically at all times near my bedside. And it'll be, you know, I'll burn through a journal a month kind of thing. Wow. And I don't even keep track of them.

They're all over the place. Does your wife read your journals? No. I think that's all right. No, I don't think. We've talked about that before. We both, you know, have writing and private things in our writing. And we've both said, like, that would be the red line for us.

Yeah. Is if we read behind each other's backs what our private writing was. Yeah. Like, somehow that would be the red line in a comedian poet relationship. Do you mingle jokes in there? Do you read back through it to kind of see if there might be a few nuggets here and there? Of course I do. I'm an opportunist.

No, I mean, a lot of my last special, the old man in the pool, was based on journal entries that I had written because I have this line in the old man of pool where I say I write my journal every day and I try to write what I'm angriest about or saddest about because I find that if you write what you're angriest and you're saddest about

and you and you start you can zoom out and start to see your own life as a story and if you see your own life as a story sometimes you can encourage the main character to make better decisions. Wow. So it gives you kind of a transcendent perspective, like the 20,000 foot view of the life of Mike Barbiglia when you're able to kind of go back

and read through it. Yeah, because majority of the time, if I write down one of the angriest or status about, a majority of the time a month later, I go, wow, I was really, I was worried about that. It's not that, is this. And then you start to go, well, maybe this isn't as bad as I think Yeah, either. When I first got into AA, I would call my sponsor every day, and it's a long time ago. And then, you know, leave rambling messages or whatever. And he kind of like cut straight to the chase. He's like, I need you to, you need to leave me a message.

Like, who are you mad at? What are you afraid of? Who you mad at? What are you afraid of? And that just kind of really does cut through the clutter. If you can clear the decks on who you're mad at and what you're afraid of every single day, I do find that one gets a hell a lot more clarity. I don't think I'm mad at anyone right now.

Washington, D.C. Yeah, right. That's the thing is it would get political really quickly. What are you afraid of? You know, everything since I've had a child has to do, every fear has to do with the child, right? You just go, I'm afraid. that the world will be worse for my daughter in five years than it is now. That'll be worse in 10 years, 20 years than it is now, or it was five years ago.

And I think that, you know, that's when you start to direct your anger towards the larger government and world. Because you do, you know, you do want, you do want a life for your child that is, that is meaningful. We've been joking a little bit kind of behind the scenes about how my, I'm just, my memory is just not as sharp as it used to be.

And I would say that one thing I am definitely afraid of is cognitive decline. Because I just, I rely so much on my cognition and how I approach the world and what I'm reading and ideas I'm communicating and it's... How are you on lines? Memorizing lines. You know, it's gotten tougher.

Really? I'm not going to lie. Yeah. I used to, you know, in my 30s or 40s, I could just like look at pages and go through it three or four times and I would be boom, boom. But it has definitely gotten more challenging. My friend Chris Getherd, who I've improvised with for years. Yeah, I know Chris. Yeah, he, uh, photographic memory. Really?

Yeah, see, I've been on the road with him. He's putting himself on tape for something. He'll look at the lines. He'll do the audition. I just go, oh, Jesus Christ. Amazing. And I envy that so much. Yeah.

Let's show him the transcript for, um, the good life and have him performing as an understudy. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. So we were talking about mental health a little bit and forgive this question because it's so obvious and on the nose and it's and cliche and it's a little cringy. But the reason it is kind of a cliche because there's so much truth embedded in it, like do you have to be really fucked up to go into comedy? And if so, how does that work?

What is the link between, you know, mental health? imbalance and the need to kind of stand up in front of people night after night year after year and make them laugh it's so funny because Seinfeld who I admire immensely he always adamantly says no correlation you know what I mean no no correlation between mental health carell yeah I don't know steve's dark underbelly very well but sweet guy family guy good family I'm sure there's some some demons in the closet there, but not a particularly tortured person and one of the funniest human beings who has ever lived. So.

You can play drama well, too. Yeah. Boxcatcher. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I've heard the cases made for it. In my opinion, when I'm at the comedy seller in New York City in Greenwich Village and I'm

sitting with six comedians at the table and everyone's sort of shouting about their gripes and this and that. This isn't what every workplace is like. But I love it, though. But if there's six comedians backstage, five out of those six have some pretty serious issues. I think so. And I like it. I mean, I'm from a big Italian family.

I'm youngest of four. Like, I like mixing it up. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know what the correlation is. I will say the best comedians to me are people who are observing. the world and they're documenting it and then they're sharing the best nuggets. You know, Chris Rock is my favorite comedian to watch.

Like when he's at the comedy seller working out new jokes, those are the shows I want to see. Like when he drops in. And I'll just watch that with a laser focus because I just think, you know, what a, what a fascinating, you know, observationalist. He just fierce observations about, existence and being a human beings. And is the mental health issue? I don't know. But these are certainly interesting people. Comedians are interesting folks. Arthur Brooks, the psychologist and

author, he talks about how laughter is a direct cure and a corollary opposite of anguish and pain. that you literally can't be in anguish pain at the exact same time as you're experiencing laughter and joy. So that laughter and joy is kind of like this remedy and for comedians with mental health issues, it's like someone put their finger in dykes, you know, and it's like, oh, pain and anguish,

ha, ha, ha, pain and anguish, ha, ha, that you're stemming the kind of the tide that's ever threatening to overflow, and those are a lot of times the people that move into comedy. I think that my laughter is something that was a coping mechanism for me growing up. And I got pretty good at it. And then I figured out a way to share it with people.

I make a joke where I about the stroke, my dad had a stroke. And then I go, you know, it's been devastating. But I will say, it has calmed him down. And I say to the audience, I go, I just want you to know, this is a coping mechanism for me. And I hope it is for you too. And that's how I feel about it. It's like, I hope it's a coping mechanism. I hope laughter is a coping mechanism.

And then you say, I'm not, I'm not being mean. And it is my dad. It's my dad. If I was making a joke about your dad, that would be too far. Yeah. Yeah. Every guest we ask on the show, what is your definition of the word soul? I think your soul, if I were to guess, because that's all any of us are doing,

is the energy that you bring to any situation. And I think on a daily basis, we're all making a decision to have that energy be a positive energy or negative energy or kind of neutral. whatever it is. And I'd like to think that I'm trying to bring some positive energy. It's beautiful. Mike, thank you so much for coming on Soul Boom. This has really, I've been wanting to sit with you for a long time.

This has been a real treat. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations on the Good Life. It's a beautiful special. And now I've seen it twice. I saw it live and saw it on tape. And it's really pretty extraordinary. and people are going to love the healing laughter that it brings.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Ray. This has been awesome. Thanks. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.