Mike Birbiglia and Me

The Best…

…Comedy Special I Watched This Week

The Old Man & The Pool — Mike Birbiglia
Streaming on Netflix

In June 2020, comedian Mike Birbiglia launched a podcast called Working It Out. The premise was that every week, he and another comic or professional storyteller would talk for an hour and work out new material together.

As a fan of Mike’s work — and since I was alone in my apartment, working from home and worrying about the state of the world in Apocalypse Era New York City — I was eager for this new show.

I listened every week as he talked shop with almost every funny person I’d want to hear from: John Mulaney and Tig Notaro and Maria Bamford and Rami Youssef and Aubrey Plaza and Fred Armisen and Quinta Brunson and Bill Hader and Neal Brennan and Sarah Silverman and Keegan Michael-Key and… you get the idea. (Mike’s podcast is where I discovered Alex Edelman’s one-man show, which I wrote about in July.)

As the weeks turned into months, I left New York for an apartment in New Haven, where I listened to Mike as he continued to work out his material — jokes about childhood experiences at his local YMCA, his emotionally withholding parents, reaching middle age, being a father, dealing with illness, and facing mortality.

During this time, I got myself a girlfriend. A Covid vaccine arrived. The world started opening up again. I broke up with the girlfriend. I bought a house. I spent a month in Tokyo for the Olympics.

In October 2021, Mike came to College Street Music Hall in New Haven for the start of a fall national tour. (From backstage, he posted a photo on social media indicating that he had gotten takeout from Sally’s, Pepe’s, Modern, and Bar, the grand slam of New Haven apizza.)

That night, my friend Matt G. and I put on our masks — required by the venue at the time — and celebrated the return of live performances and communal events.

The show, largely composed of jokes I had heard Mike trying, refining, and trying again on his podcast for more than a year, was unlike any comedy experience I had ever had. After receiving what felt like exclusive access to the long process of artistic creation, I profoundly appreciated hearing the material in person.

The jokes in that set would soon take shape into a one-man show Mike first called YMCA Pool before changing it to The Old Man and the Pool. All the while, he kept churning out podcasts and honing his bits, talking with Hannah Einbinder and David Cross and Atsuko Okatsuka and Zarna Garg and Jessi Klein and… you get the idea.

Meanwhile, I kept listening.

By August 2022, I had worked the strangest Olympics of modern times (the pandemic-stricken Winter Games of Beijing), had been honored to give the graduation speech at my old school, had ridden out my first bout with Covid in a hotel room in Budapest, and had been told that I was being laid off from my job at NBC Sports.

Shortly after receiving this last piece of news, I was in Los Angeles for a few days. I was there to reconnect with the city I had left a decade earlier, to see old friends, and, unexpectedly, to grapple with my suddenly uncertain future.

As it turned out, I was also there to see Mike Birbiglia again. He was now touring The Old Man and the Pool and had come to LA’s Mark Taper Forum for a series of performances. Naturally, I bought a ticket and made the drive downtown from Santa Monica.

The show I had seen in New Haven the previous fall had been a relative lump of clay that Mike had shaped into the beautiful, funny, and emotional work of heartfelt storytelling I witnessed in LA.

In the ensuing months, the podcasts and the tweaking continued. Larry Willmore and Chris Gethard and Vir Das and Nick Kroll and Kate Berlant and… I know, I know.

As Mike brought the show to Broadway in the fall of 2022, I started building a freelance producing/writing/acting business. When the calendar flipped to 2023, I launched this newsletter. I started playing pickleball. I ate meatballs in Stockholm and pizza in Oslo.

Which brings me to the present. The video version of The Old Man and the Pool, shot during Mike’s run at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, launched on Netflix a few weeks ago. Though it was an instant streaming hit, I didn’t watch it at first.

Part of me thought, Well, I saw it in LA, I’ve been hearing the jokes for three years, I’m good. But I think my reluctance was due to something else.

With everything that’s happened in the world and in my life since Mike talked to Ira Glass in the first episode of Working It Out back on June 15, 2020, maybe I didn’t want to put a period on a sentence that’s taken more than three tumultuous years to write. Maybe by not watching the Netflix special, I was sparing myself from having to reckon with it all.

But deep down, I knew I wanted to document this unusual journey I’ve been on with Mike Birbiglia and share it with my friends. The only way to do that, of course, was to overcome whatever was holding me back and experience The Old Man and the Pool one last time. So, on Tuesday night, I finally did.

And you know what? It was wonderful.