In terms of comedy, there was a Seinfeldian era of comedy that I love but got played out. Seinfeld was great, but then after him it was people acting like Seinfeld and making observations that we felt like we'd kind of heard before, and then you're seeing Seinfeldian comedy in commercials. Suddenly everything is observational funniness.
— Mike Birbiglia
Essentially, retweets are like laughs.
Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.
I am intimidating no one in America. No one feels like they are below me in any way. They feel like they are absolutely either at or above my level and 100-percent comfortable talking to me.
I've become good friends with Lena Dunham, and the thing I had in common with Lena when I was 24 is I was as ambitious as she was. What we don't have in common is that I was not as talented. My voice was not as clearly defined.
You get to the end of something, you're laughing, you're like, 'That's funny, and that's funny,' and then you get to the end, and the credits come down, and you're like, 'That's it?! That's the whole thing?! You had me here for that?!' I just don't want to do that.
When I go to bed at night, I wear a sleeping bag. And for a long time, I wore mittens so that I couldn't open the sleeping bag.
Once you start writing something obsessively, it's almost like someone has to rip it from your hands in order for you to put it down.
Pain is funnier than love.
I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.
Sometimes you'll have a heckler who's actually attempting to be supportive, but you don't realize it. Their way of expressing it is kind of confusing.
I've found, being in Los Angeles, it's like living in a live-action Planet Hollywood.
Media is so weird; everything is so accessible now. It used to be this thing where, if you did something on 'This American Life,' this predates me, but when David Sedaris did it, for example, it would just play, people who heard it heard it, and then the book would come out a year later, and people would be like, 'Ahh, I kind of remember that.'
My first car was, as depicted in 'Sleepwalk with Me,' my mother's '92 Volvo station wagon that had 80,000 miles on it, and I had put 40,000 miles on it, so by the time it retired it had 120,000, and I basically killed it. It served me well, and my mechanic was always very angry with me because I just didn't properly care for it.
People are making better and better small budge independent films these days.
Sometimes I take this women's exercise class called Core Fusion at a place called Exhale. I shouldn't say it's a women's class. There's maybe two men.
After I perform 'My Girlfriend's Boyfriend,' it takes a lot out of me emotionally; and, at the end of it, I feel like I know the audience and the audience knows me. It's this weird unspoken bond that we'll kind of always have with each other.
I find my fans are really funny people. Most comedians can't say that about their fans.
Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you don't act out your dreams.
I end up talking about really mundane things with my fans, and then they're kind of like, 'This is boring. I want to go talk to somebody else.' I think I bore my fans to death by over-talking to them.
I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show.
I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote 'The Dark Knight' with Chris, his brother. He wrote 'The Prestige,' the story for 'Memento.'
I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It's like, 'Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?' David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I'm just a nobody. I'm a comedian and a writer.
The thing with film is that it's so wide-reaching compared to comedy. When I release my comedy special, half a million people will see it. If I release a movie, five to ten million people will see it.
I love Broadway shows.
Making a film is beyond exciting. It's so exciting, it's exhausting.
Prose is all about embellishing and describing.
Sometimes, occasionally, people will make out in the audience, completely not aware that there's a human being onstage just yards away from them, who can see them. Sometimes people think that you're on television while you're onstage, so you're not even a person.
My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
I would say that I love pizza so much that sometimes I eat pizza while I'm eating pizza. Like, I'm so content with myself with how it's going that I'm like, 'I should do this more,' not realizing that the mouth is full. I'm just cramming pizza into my mouth.
Someone gave me a piece of advice once, my first manager Lucien Hold. He said, 'If you do stand-up about your own life, no one can steal it.' I always thought that was the best piece of advice.
Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.
It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.
Jokes are so personal, and they bring us together in so many ways.
I sometimes think of not doing Twitter or Facebook anymore, but that's how people find their favorite bands and comedians.
I always live tweet 'SNL.'
Sometimes my fans are too nice.
As a comedian, you want people to like you. That's part of why you're there in the first place: You have this unquenchable need to be liked, and then when you divert from that and take a chance at doing something that has moments of fierce unlikeability, you can hit some real low points.
There are comedians who focus on everything that is external. They focus on politics and the news, what's going on in that city and that night.
It's a difficult line to tread, where sometimes you go to the movies or you watch someone do publicity for movies or TV shows, and they do all the jokes that are good in the promotion of it, and you see the movie, and you're like, 'I kind of get it already. I'm not that psyched about it.'
I'm unable to do the thing that Broadway actors do in plays, sometimes for years. The same exact blocking, the same exact lines. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with that. Every night I'm looking for ways to try something else.
I was very much a late bloomer. That's not to say that girls didn't express interest in me from time to time, but I just, I did not know how to respond to that.
I just like, when you look at people who have long careers in film, they're able to make films that are far away from themselves, because they're metaphorical. It creates more opportunities, I think.
When I was in college, I wanted to write for 'Late Night With Conan O'Brien,' and I was an intern there.
I'm going to end up making twenty films if people let me.
I love Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel.
The moment I walk into a room, I have kind of like the Terminator's tracking system for where the food is, and I can get there immediately.
I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.
Sometimes I'll go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of groceries as though I knew how to cook, which I don't, and as though I was going to be home for the next six days, which I won't.
I'm generally so disoriented during the week about what I'm doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when I'm home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.
