Behind the Scenes of Mike Birbiglia’s New Special ‘The Good Life’

I
n his twenties, the comedian, director, and actor Mike Birbiglia learned to play the guitar because of its theatrical simplicity. “I always admired people who could walk into a bar and just… that’s the show,” he tells me. He liked the idea of not having to tech beforehand. No sound check. No cast. “I am the — this is the show. And I feel like this one’s the closest to that. You can walk into a bar and go, Mike’s gonna tell a story.” 

“This one” is Birbiglia’s new one-man show The Good Life, and in terms of production, it’s a far cry from telling a story in a bar in every measurable way. For one thing, we’re not at a bar, we’re at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan, a lavishly designed space that seats almost 3,000, complete with Rococo flourishes, fresco-style murals, and velvet everywhere you look. But Birbiglia is right, The Good Life is just a story, and on the first night of its run at the Beacon, I meet him as he’s getting ready to tell it. 

When I arrive to the Beacon, a guy named Gary with a lanyard around his neck and the eager bearing of a college tour guide greets me behind a dungeon-like door. We wind up four flights together and there, sitting in an armchair, eating salad from a biodegradable container, is Birbiglia. One of his producers, Mabel Lewis, has her head down over a phone. Someone named Jack has texted, and she reads aloud: “ETA is 5:59, clown-face emoji.” The show starts at 6.

Birbiglia munches away unconcerned. His wife, Jen Stein, is perched on a loveseat across the room issuing calming wavelengths. Stein is a poet, and she seems like one. She gets up to pour mineral water into Birbiglia’s mug. He tells me that “Jack” is the record producer Jack Antonoff, who is a close friend of Birbiglia’s and a musical collaborator on much of his work. They met in 2013 at Bonnaroo, which Birbiglia describes as “like war, with music.” He rattles off Antonoff’s resume as though there’s any chance I haven’t heard of Jack Antonoff.

This is something Birbiglia loves to do — brag about others. During the hours we spend together before and after tonight’s show, he will talk up a list of people including but not limited to: Gary Simons, the guy who led me up the stairs, who is one of Birbiglia’s producers and a comic in his own right; Lewis, the producer with the phone; the Broadway set designer Beowulf Boritt; the scenic artist Irina Portnyagina, who painted the pastoral scrim that hangs behind Birbiglia during the show; Ben Stiller, who kindly “lent” Birbiglia the editor he worked with for Severance; that editor, Geoffrey Richman; the director Seth Barrish, whom Birbiglia has worked with for years, including on his beloved one-man show and 2012 feature film Sleepwalk With Me; his brother Joe Birbiglia, executive producer of Birbiglia’s podcast, Working It Out, and this new show; Saturday Night Live’s Ben Marshall, with whom Birbiglia puts on an improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater called Please Don’t Birbiglia; the person who baked the cake for tonight’s afterparty. 

People he will not brag about: himself.

The Good Life, streaming May 26, is Birbiglia’s sixth comedy hour, and his fourth with Netflix. Over this six-night run at the Beacon in March (an East Coast stand that followed four nights at the Largo in L.A.), crews will film three shows. Then a bunch of those people Birbiglia’s bragged about will crash-edit the footage into a special just a few weeks later. But on opening night there are no cameras. It’s an early-ish live show on a Sunday. The audience features a lot of white people in light sweaters, and everyone is looking forward to being home at a reasonable hour. The comedian Hasan Minhaj, the surprise guest opener, describes the crowd as having “big LinkedIn energy.”

Birbiglia climbs through the frame around Portnyagina’s massive Hudson Valley School-style oil painting and looks admiringly at it as he takes center stage. The set is an easy stand-in for this moment in Birbiglia’s career: ambitious without being flashy, all in the execution. Mike’s gonna tell a story.

The Good Life gets its name from an incident with Birbiglia’s nine-year-old daughter, Oona. On the way home from school one day she apparently paused in front of a weed store called The Good Life in their Brooklyn neighborhood and asked, “Dad, what is The Good Life?” Birbiglia describes the hour as, simply, “a show about me and my daughter and my dad.” And in a sense that’s accurate. The Good Life is about normal stuff: growing up, getting married, having a kid, watching that kid get older, answering uncomfortable questions from that kid about your and your wife’s drug use, watching that kid break her arm at a horrible-sounding indoor gym called Urban Air, watching your parents get older, watching yourself get older.

But to say it’s just about that would be like saying Knausgård is about Norway. The Good Life is a fantastic story, affectingly and assuredly told. Taken together with the obvious joy Birbiglia gets from the team he’s assembled to bring it to life, the show supplies something of an answer to the question built into the title. 

“No one will let you get through a story. They interrupt. Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to get back to the thing!”

Where Sleepwalk With Me, the show that made Birbiglia a household name, was wild and thick with action — it centered around his diagnosis with a rare sleep disorder that led him to jump through a second-story hotel window in the middle of the night —The Good Life, like Birbiglia himself, is deceptively understated. Both Barrish and Birbiglia agree that The Good Life is the comic’s most personal work yet, “which is odd,” Barrish tells me, “because talking about jumping out of a window is, you would think, as personal as you’re going to get.” Together with his 2017 special The New One, and his 2022 hour Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & The Pool, you could see The Good Life as a third panel in a triptych that traces not just the plot of his middle age, but the arc of his massive skill as a storyteller. 

“[David] Sedaris has this thing, which I think is a good point about storytelling,” Birbiglia says, “which is that when you first start telling stories you have better stories because you have more of them. But then you get better at telling them.”

I DON’T THINK IT WOULD offend Birbiglia to say that there’s an abiding dadliness about him. The Mike Birbiglia we meet in his comedy is a middle-aged Brooklyn dad who is doing his frazzled best to navigate an uncomfortable world. It’s not just that he mines his domestic life for material, although he does. Nor is it about his “teddy-bear physique,” as the New York Times put it in a review of his 2018 show The New One at the Cherry Lane Theater. It’s not even that despite his decades working in nightclubs, no one has ever offered him cocaine — or so goes a bit in The Good Life. (That’s true, by the way. Almost in awe of his own squareness, he tells me, “Whenever I tell people that as a factoid, they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’ It strains credibility.”)

Although Birbiglia often casts himself as a mumbler plagued by problems he’s only medium-solving, you get the sense, when watching him, that he doesn’t want to lay his haplessness on too thick. Birbiglia has a tendency to look down and forward a few inches while he’s telling a joke, maybe with his hands in his pockets, then slowly bring his head up and look around at the audience as a bright, sideways smile spreads across his face. On anyone else the look might come across as smug — instead, he just seems to be enjoying himself. He comes off more like a reliable and sturdy parent to his audiences, who have cultivated a secure attachment to him. 

There’s also a dadliness to his apparent belief in the value of A Hard Day’s Work. Nowhere is this more in evidence than on his podcast, in which Birbiglia and other comics he admires or has mentored or has worked with talk shop. He likes to have (as-of-yet!) lesser-known comedians on — a recent episode featured Simons — but is just as likely to talk with Stephen Colbert, Tig Notaro, or Seth Meyers. They often work out jokes — and, yes, life — together behind the mic. It’s a soft landing place for comics and writers, but the rigor that producing good material requires doesn’t suffer for that softness. (In a typical Working It Out exchange, a May episode opens with Please Don’t Destroy’s Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy expressing mock surprise that Birbiglia knows how to use Instagram before they go on to talk through the lifecycle of an SNL joke.) It’s an endearing listen.

After the show, Birbiglia’s nearest and dearest head down to the basement of the Beacon for a reception. Think light beer, string lights, pizza, a cake with a callback to a joke from the show on it. The gathering has the feel of a birthday party for a large and busy friend group. Birbiglia says that “98 percent” of his friends are comics, but the crowd in the basement doesn’t support that figure. He’s invited plenty of  “civilian” friends to hang out, including his friend Rob “Broccoli Rob” Meyer, whom he met at the playground where they both take their kids, and who gets a little shoutout in the show. (The aforementioned incident at cursèd Urban Air takes place at the birthday party of Broccoli Rob’s kid.) But I also spy Keegan-Michael Key, Bob Odenkirk, and Ira Glass milling around. 

Birbiglia doesn’t stop working at the reception. He asks a member of the crew why the house lights were on so brightly during Minhaj’s opener. He and Marshall discuss logistics for Wednesday night’s show, when Marshall will be the secret opener.

Earlier-career comedians, at least the ones Birbiglia works with, are eager to pull me aside to tell me how supportive Birbiglia is. Simons, his producer, says he reached out to Birbiglia over Instagram on a whim after he won a stand-up competition at their shared alma mater, Georgetown. Birbiglia had won the same contest 23 years prior, when he was an undergrad. Birbiglia offered to grab coffee — and a few hours of work a week. A year later Simons was “doing five minutes” opening for Birbiglia on the road.

Lewis has been working for Birbiglia since she was 17. “I emailed him saying that I was obsessed with him and I would love to schlep his dry cleaning for a summer,” she says. Before long, Lewis was crawling Bruce Willis-style into the rafters of the Cherry Lane Theater, where she was responsible for the most dramatic scenic moment in The New One, when a cascade of stuffed animals and toys falls onto the stage around Birbiglia.

According to Simons, Birbiglia treats meetings with his small team — usually his brother, Joe, Simons, Lewis, and another producer, Peter Salamone — as a kind of “open mic,” testing out new material and taking in their feedback. Lewis gives me an example. A couple weeks before the Beacon show, Birbiglia ran a joke by Simons and Lewis that he was thinking about telling at the Comedy Cellar that night. Simons said it was like he was “pitching” it to them. “‘He was like, ‘What do you think of this?’” It was a joke about a friend being unable to remember something because he was so high, and the friend describes himself as “microdosing.”  

Lewis summarizes the punchline: “Mike says, ‘No, I think you were dosing… I think you were macrodosing… I think you were overdosing.’” Lewis wasn’t wild about the joke, but Simons liked it, so Birbiglia brought it to the Comedy Cellar to see how a crowd would react. 

Birbiglia loves performing at “the Cellar” because he loves the club, but also because the audience is full of tourists who usually don’t know who he is. “It’s like a New York tourist attraction now,” he says with genuine delight. “People just go, literally, even when they don’t have tickets, they take photos out front of it.” It’s more like they’ve shown up for the concept of stand-up comedy than for any stand-up comic in particular. The effect of this is that Birbiglia can tell which jokes have “true bounce,” meaning, what generates an authentic laugh from strangers. That’s harder to get when he’s on the road and the people showing up are real Birbiglia heads. Macrodosing must have gotten true bounce, because it made the cut at the Beacon.

Sometimes, Birbiglia keeps the material he’s working out to the “inner circle, for sure,” says Lewis. But that’s not typical; he’ll often try his work out on “anyone who will listen. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Why are you telling your contractor about the joke you’re working on?’”

THREE WEEKS AFTER opening night, Birbiglia, Barrish, the director, and Richman, the editor, are in a studio in the Financial District trying to decide if they should cut the word “macrodose” from that joke about the friend who’d gotten too high. 

They’d recently gathered a bunch of people, focus group-style — mostly friends of friends who had no connection to Birbiglia or even familiarity with his work — to watch an unedited cut of The Good Life. See what got “true bounce.” Now they’re comparing notes and editing the footage for Netflix. Richman sits behind two giant computer monitors atop an enormous desk that’s directly below an even bigger monitor displaying the rough cut. It feels like if a La Quinta Inn business center had a cockpit. 

Birbiglia is perched off to the side of the room on a gray ottoman that’s pretty obviously the least comfortable thing in the room, but he claims is “great, actually.” He lets me spread out on a matching gray couch. Barrish reclines in an office chair next to a basket of the kinds of snacks you might find in an Uber. (They go untouched.)

The word “storytelling” has a corporate mouthfeel to it these days, but it’s also the best word to describe what Birbiglia does when used in the traditional sense. It’s not so much that Birbiglia wants to expound, but he does get irritated when in the flow of normal conversation, it’s impossible to finish a whole anecdote. “No one will let you get through a fucking story,” he says. “You know, you talk with your friends, socially, you’re like telling a story and they interrupt. ‘Oh, that’s like that time I went fishing!’ Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to get back to the thing!” To him, this is part of the appeal of the stand-up show: No one interrupts. So I’m surprised to see how much joy Birbiglia is taking in the constant interruption that the editing process demands.

The worry over the cut in question is that someone in the test audience had said that by the time they heard the macrodosing joke, it was seeming like the show might be all about drugs. This poses a storytelling problem for Birbiglia. Drugs are a narrative device he invokes a lot in The Good Life, but they’re not the point of the show. Birbiglia, Barrish, and Richman wanted to adjust the rhythm of the show’s first section to underline that. As they’re working on a bit about the D.A.R.E. program — which I won’t ruin by trying to recreate — they try a bunch of different permutations of the joke. They get stymied by a “Frankencut” that ends up losing a word. But Richman is not worried. (“We can take the word ‘drugs’ from anywhere.”) 

This kind of work is important to take the show from stage to streaming. For one thing, there’s the time pressure: If you say it’s a comedy hour, it needs to actually be an hour long. Then there’s the barrier to entry: The Broadway audience bought tickets, hired a sitter, they’re invested. They can’t suddenly decide to switch over to Love on the Spectrum. So the rhythm is crucial, and the work is painstaking. Barrish, Richman, and Birbiglia wrestle with the drugs/macrodosing/D.A.R.E. Frankencut for over an hour and are elated when they finally make it work. They’ve been in the studio for two weeks and it’s been like this the whole time. In the two hours I’m there they get through almost four minutes of tape. 

Mike’s got to head out. He collects his “I <3 NY” umbrella and his notebook, but then hovers at the threshold of the studio for a while, seeming not to want to leave. He decides to sit down on the couch for a few more minutes, and hands me his phone, where he’s jotted a few joke ideas down on his notes app on the way to the studio. It reminds me of something Lewis told me at the afterparty: “I know a lot of artists,” she said, “and no one I know is like Mike, who’s constantly being like, ‘This is what I worked on this morning. This what I did two seconds ago.’” The jokes are pretty good. I don’t doubt that they’ll get better. 

OK, now he really has to head out. He tells Barrish and Richman that he thinks they can lose 15 seconds in the section just after the Frankencut. He’ll explain it all later. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says. He’s nowhere near done.