For a lapsed Catholic, comedian Mike Birbiglia sure loves a good confession. His standard joke format begins with an observation, goes somewhere surprising, and ends with an admission. Early in his new Netflix special, The Good Life, which is about him trying to teach his then 9-year-old daughter what’s important, he tells the story of her ballet performance, during which he and his wife tear up—“because she doesn’t have it.” He then turns serious and adds that he went backstage and told her how good she was. “She goes, ‘You would say I was fantastic, even if I wasn’t fantastic,’” he says. “And I go, ‘That’s true.” Pause. “You’re so much better at logic than you are at ballet.’”
It’s dangerously marshy terrain, trying to joke about yourself via your family, especially when children are involved. It’s too easy to drift into being sappy or brutal. But in this special, out May 26, Birbiglia puts on the extra-long waders and squelches in. A big theme of the performance is the decline of his father, an impressive but often inexplicably angry neurologist. “When I was a kid, I always viewed my dad as larger than life. He was a doctor and in his free time he got a law degree,” he says. “That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad.” But there’s more. “In fairness, we weren’t great kids.” Pause. “We always wanted a dad.”
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The Good Life is the sixth of Birbiglia’s one-man shows, each one more or less chronicling a life stage; this is the one where he’s at the phase of beginning to lose people, whether they’re ailing like his dad, or growing up, like his daughter. Four of his shows have been made into specials, and he’s written and directed two movies. Birbiglia has won a bunch of awards, written books, was nominated for an Emmy, has a popular podcast with big-name guests, and made significant appearances in TV shows and a Taylor Swift video. But curiously, he’s not that famous. Walking through Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City just days before the special aired, Birbiglia says he recently reminded his wife that “it’s a week away from when I’m famous for a month and then not for two years.”
Earlier that morning he had posed like a goose with other geese, climbed a tree, pretended to eat grass, and stood on a public bench in order to help a photographer get a good shot. Despite these antics he got stopped just once in the park, by a gardener, who had heard him on a podcast. While he waited for coffee, a distinguished-looking man looked up from his own coffee to say that he admired the work. And when a young woman on the street asked for a selfie, the comedian obliged while enthusing over her choice of high-end food provider: “Poppy’s! They have two of those now, right?” His lack of fame is not due to any lack of eagerness to please.
There’s something about Birbiglia’s normality and friendliness that might be mutually exclusive with stardom. He looks and acts like a regular 46-year-old male human. His show was taped during a six-show run at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, which was followed by a six-show stint by comedian Nikki Glaser, and since they are friends—he’s friends with most comedians—they did a guest spot on each other’s show. Shortly afterward, he was at his daughter’s school and one of the moms mentioned she had seen Glaser’s show. “I go, ‘Oh, I was on one of the shows,’” says Birbiglia. “And the person goes, “On stage?” He tells the story almost with pride. “I like that. That means I’m being a good dad.”
Birbiglia’s shows are less a series of funny jokes and impressions (although he does a decent Jim Gaffigan) and more a string of loosely connected stories around a central theme, such as how do you live a good life? He’ll often build the emotion to the point just this side of corniness and then plunge the audience into an abyss of dark comedy. Just before he lands the joke, as he sees the turn, he often gives a little smile. After a lot of jokes about his father’s debilitation, he steps out of the narrative and reminds the audience where they are, that comedy “is a coping mechanism.” Watching his show is almost like watching a man try to diagnose and treat his own nervous system—a task usually left to neurologists.
“I do think that comedians are a special type of broken,” says Birbiglia, who has been in therapy since a girlfriend left him when he was 22 and recommended he stop calling her to talk about it. (He sees her therapist’s wife.) The task of the comedian is to turn that pain into laughter. “The job is to make the hurt funny. If you don’t, you will be gone from comedy,” he says. “If you can achieve that magic trick, it’s a gift you’re giving the audience. They need to laugh. That’s why they showed up.”
Birbiglia is so accommodating and reasonable it’s easy to imagine he has been spared the challenges that comedians have faced in recent years, as the wall between offensive and funny has become very disputed. But even he is careful. “The decontextualization of sound and video in the last decade has given anyone who speaks into a microphone a certain new level of self-consciousness,” he says. “It’s like, what does this paragraph sound like? What does this sentence sound like? What does this word sound like? You start to isolate everything and I’m not free of that. I do think oh, OK, could this be cut out of context?”
This decontextualization could be one of the forces that has led to the rise of a new phalanx of avowedly political and right-wing comedians. “Tribalism in the last 10 years has gotten so regimented that if either side steps out of line of what their tribe is saying, they get scolded on the internet,” says Birbiglia. “I think that has radicalized some people. They don’t want to be scolded, so they leave.” He defends Tony Hinchcliffe, who made a joke at a Trump rally about Puerto Rico that was reported in some outlets as a statement. “You can like the joke or not,” says Birbiglia, “but it was a joke.”
Birbiglia could have been famous. In 2008, CBS ordered a pilot based on his life story, with Bob Odenkirk and Frances Conroy. It did not get picked up. Birbiglia calls the process an inflection point. “I had that experience of getting an extraordinary amount of notes on my own personal story, and then having it be rejected,” he says. “I just thought, I only want to be rejected on my own terms.” Later that year his show Sleepwalk With Me, a half theater, half stand-up show about his rare sleep disorder that caused him to walk through a window, opened Off Broadway, with a little help from Nathan Lane. The show did well and spawned a book, an album, and a movie. “I like staying in a small realm,” says Birbiglia. “It’s control, which is a little bit of an Achilles’ heel, wanting that much control.”
John Mulaney, one of his closest friends, doesn’t believe Birbiglia does not want to be famous. “I think everyone wants to be famous,” says the comedian. But he also thinks his friend is already there. “It’s kind of relative, the question of fame, because he’s had successes that maybe some more household names haven’t,” he says. “I don’t know anyone with as much respect in the theater, stand-up, film, and TV world all at once.” It’s not that Birbiglia turned his back on prominence, Mulaney says; he just sought it down a different path. “He made deliberate choices about having a much more interesting career than pursuing one of the agreed-upon mainstream routes.”
Birbiglia grew up as one of four kids about 45 minutes outside Boston. “What I’m realizing as I get older is that my childhood was much lonelier than I realized it was at the time,” he says. “I was this Mike Birbiglia, Comedian, but as a child, so no one got the jokes.” He listened to a lot of Weird Al on car rides and had an epiphany when his older brother Joe, who now helps run his production company, took him to see Steven Wright and he realized he could be funny for a living. At Georgetown he discovered improv. When he left the troupe, he handed the reins to Nick Kroll, who later handed them to Mulaney. When Mulaney was a sophomore, Birbiglia was already working professionally and the younger comic would open for him. “I went from being someone that wanted to do stand-up to someone who was a comedian because I was opening for him,” Mulaney says.
A lot of comedians are in Birbiglia’s debt. He produced and put up the financing for the Off Broadway versions of Alex Edelman’s Just for Us in 2022, which became an HBO Special, and Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees in 2019, which went to Netflix. (His show The Old Man and the Pool was nominated for an Emmy against both of these last year; Edelman won.) His podcast Working It Out, which has featured Ben Stiller, Stephen Colbert, and Hannah Gadsby, is basically a real-time recording of him helping other comedians work on their jokes. “The personal and professional development of people around him is good for all,” says one of his producers, Mabel Lewis, who has worked for him for seven years, since she was 17. “That belief is in his bones.”
Another producer, Gary Simons, also a stand-up, has opened for Birbiglia on his live tour and says Birbiglia helped him “get past at the cellar,” which is comedy-speak for getting approved by Estee, the booker at New York City’s Comedy Cellar, where a lot of stand-ups get their start. In the past, Mulaney has tried to persuade Birbiglia to do more stand-up. “It was always important to me, having been so influenced by him, that people kept it front of mind that he’s also just a f-cking great stand-up comic.” Birbiglia has a great Sinatra story that he’s never told. “I’ve asked him, ‘Why don’t you do that?’” says Mulaney. “He goes, ‘It doesn’t fit in the show I’m doing,’ and I go, ‘Oh, just do an hour where you tell random stories!’”
But it does not seem to bother Birbiglia that, while many of the people he has worked with and nurtured have gone on to become huge stars, he has not. “I did a whole movie about jealousy, called Don’t Think Twice,” he says. It’s about what happens to an improv troupe when some of the members get called up to do a famous TV sketch show, probably based on Saturday Night Live. Birbiglia wrote and directed and says that process exorcised most of those feelings for him. “After I made it that movie, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a useless thing to put yourself through.’” A testament to his no-hard-feelings ethos is that he cast Maggie Kemper Rogers, the ex-girlfriend whose departure put him in therapy, as his love interest—at the suggestion of his wife.
One of the secrets to Birbiglia’s ability to resist the siren song of stardom may be his wife Jen Stein, who, under the name J. Hope Stein, is a poet, an occupation whose practitioners have taken a vow of non-celeb-acy for decades. “She has no interest in self-marketing and every interest in the art form, so that really grounds me,” he says. There are other similarities too. Like a poet, Birbiglia works on his comic bits in minute detail until they’re exactly as he wants them. “We’ve witnessed so many waves of people going up, people going down, people going up, people going down. And I feel like the thing that I’m really proud of is that I get a little bit better every year.”
Recently, his wife suggested a new outlet. “She goes, ‘You should do improv again.’ She goes ‘When you do improv, you’re actually happy,’” he says. “I go, ‘But I haven’t done improv for 10 years.’ She goes, ‘Exactly.’’’ Recently he has done a few sets with the comics from SNL’s Please Don’t Destroy. It’s an interesting development, since Birbiglia chose to stay small so he could have more control, which is what you have to let go of when doing improv. But he loves it. “It’s the most joy I have,” he says. Perhaps it’s because improv is also about being goofy in a way that makes the people around you look good, which is what Birbiglia is famous for.
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