Comedian Mike Birbiglia, <em>My Girlfriend's Boyfriend</em>

, might make one wonder what the difference really is between a theatrical monologue and stand-up. But there's really no time to ponder such aesthetic distinctions during Birbiglia's performance, because you're too busy howling. It certainly feels like theater, and Birbiglia is awfully entertaining for a guy who, at first glance, comes off as the good-natured preppy fellow who amiably pumps the keg at frat parties.

But behind that easy-going facade lurks a lucid incisiveness that pounces on the frustrations and absurdities inherent in romantic relationships and life in general. We recently spoke with Birbiglia about his hilarious new play, which concerns his agonizing adventures in adolescent dating, adult Relationships, and automobile accidents. (And for those who missed his previous theatrical hit, Sleep Walk With Me, a live concert recording of the show was released yesterday.)

Hi Mike, how are you? I'm just dealing with the opening night madness.

What madness? Just so many people that came to the [show], all these friends and family, I'm dealing with all the people, the people who couldn't make it, all the emails like, "Sorry, couldn't make it!" and, "That was great!" and, "Tell this person I said this!" It's a lot of follow-up to the opening night. And then the reviews all came out today, or most of them came out.

I didn't see the reviews—did you? I've seen a few of them. The Associated Press was really good. They were all really good, the only one that—there was one that was just kind of like comparing it to Sleepwalk. They said they liked Sleepwalk better. I'm like, "Cool!" [Laughs] You know what I mean? That show's not running right now. You can see that one again sometime but you should compare me to other shows that are running right now, because that's what the options are for the readers.

I hadn't looked at it that way. I liked it better. I liked Sleepwalk, too, but I liked this better. I don't know why, I'm not a comparison guy either, but it seemed that just because you've gotten more experience with theater and have more life experience, it seemed to me, I don't know, more rich. But maybe my memory is deceiving me and they are equally funny. Thanks for saying that. I mean, I feel that way, but I guess that's how all artists feel about their most recent work. I just feel like it's more mature and it's more—at the risk of sounding pretentious, which inevitably in all interviews anyone sounds—it's a little more for adults. It's a little more mature. I love Sleepwalk, but it's a little bit more like—a different experience.

Do you have hardcore fans in the audience who are yelling out for Sleepwalk? [Laughs] No! That would be the ultimate heckle, right? "THE OTHER SHOW, DO THE OTHER SHOW!" That would be crazy. Although, I have had that over the years in some shows, where I'm doing a new hour, I'm doing a new show that I'm workshopping, and people will be calling out for some joke from Two Drink Mike or Secret Journal, and it's like, "Yeah, I'm actually not doing that right now, we're doing this whole other thing..." Sometimes you can't win, people get mad when you do old stuff, people get mad when you do new stuff. I was talking to the late Mitch Hedberg once about this. I was opening for him, in central Pennsylvania at a theater, and it was all these superfans and they were just shouting like, BANANA!, or whatever joke they wanted to hear.

I get that at a concert when you want to hear your favorite song again, but for me, if I hear a joke a couple times, I'm kind of done with it. Absolutely, that's how I feel about it. That's a paradox Mitch had to deal with. He would get these people shouting, and then he would do the joke and people wouldn't laugh, because you don't really laugh because there's no surprise. They would just applaud. And in a way applause is the kind of the enemy of the comedian. Laughter is the comedian's best friend and applause is just kind of like...You can ask people to applaud and they'll applaud. You can say, "How many people are from New York?!" and they'll fucking applaud. You know, there are like 150 kind of happy tricks to get people to applaud but there's no real tricks to get people laugh.

Joan Marcus

It seems like this play is still fresh for you. I have a copy of the script here. Like an actor does lines every night, you are also doing basically the same thing every night, I think. That's true, yeah.

Is it a challenge for you to keep it fresh? I do writing as a constant work-in-progress. When I handed in my book, a week later I called up and I was like, "Can I make some more changes?" And then I was able to—I went to the well on that one probably two or three times until finally they were like, "No." The album for Sleepwalk is coming out this month with Comedy Central Records. We recorded probably six months, eight months ago, and there's still stuff in it where I go, "Oh, you know, that sentence would be better if I'd said, a hotel and not the hotel." It's as minute as that, in terms of my obsession with the idea of things being better. I actually think that the show will be better by the end of the run because I'm always thinking about not major tweaks but minor tweaks. And finding new things.

I recently shot a short film with one of the other actors, the great actor J. Jay Saunders and we didn't even know each other before, and ended up sharing a car ride four hours back from Western Mass, so we had a lot of time to talk. He said something that I thought is very true of theater: If your performance isn't better at the end than it was on opening night, then you are doing it wrong.

One of the things I was wondering: this is classified as theater, it's a play, but when you are conceiving it and doing it, how does it differ from stand-up? How do you differentiate between the two forms? It's a good question. It's not cut-and-dry in the sense that, you know—it's basically theater when we (my director and I) make a decision. This is when we're going to put the title on it. This is when we're going to bring in a set designer. This is when we're going to bring in a lighting designer. We're going to fashion this and present it as a play. When I'm doing segments of it on tour, because I'm perpetually touring as my job, when I'm doing this stuff as stand-up, it's really to kind of feel out where the laughs are, because I think actually stand-up is one of the absolute best ways to get to the heart of what is interesting about a subject to people and not just to you, you know? So, it kind of just, it's like, my stand-up in a way, I'm kind of workshopping a one-man show two or three or four hundred times, which most playwrights don't have the luxury of doing. Most playwrights are able to workshop it [for] a week in Chicago, four weeks in Denver, that kind of thing. Take a look at it, do a re-write. But I re-write every night. It's an unusual process.

Do you see yourself writing multi-character plays in the future? I have, I was a playwriting major and screenwriting major in school. Right before I wrote Sleepwalk with Me, which was my first produced show in New York, I had written a multiple actor play called Baby on Train, and then when I wrote Sleepwalk with Me, it was a multiple actor play. I've actually never said it in an interview, not that I've intentionally withheld it, I just never think of it—you've seen Sleepwalk with Me, right?

Yes. So the character who is Abbie, which is not her name in real life, I called her and asked her (while our break-up was really quite fresh and too fresh to me to ask this) I asked her if she would be in the play of Sleepwalk with Me with me, play opposite me, playing my version of her, and it was going to be this whole kind of commentary where she had her side of the story. And she said no! So I was like, "Well then I'm going to do it as a one-man show."

It's to your credit that you didn't put her photo up on stage as sort of a shrine. It didn't become Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Which it could have slipped into very easily.

What does your wife think of the new play? She really likes it. She's very supportive of me. She's been to six or seven of the previews, and she was at opening night last night. She's lucky, she has the best lines in the show. People are saying how wise she is, the hero of the story, and I'm just this doofus who's just like, "Hey! I don't know nothing about nothing!" and she just comes in and saves the day with her wisdom. But she's really supportive. She's a writer, as well, so she's my closest confidante when it comes to all of my work. And those are things that she really said.

Was there anything in there that you had to cut because she wasn't comfortable with it? Not as much that, but there were things where I would tell her a story and be like, "And then this happened and this happened...". She would be like, "That's what you think happened?" And I would be like, "Yeah...what do you think happened?" And then she'd tell me, and I'd be like, "Okay, I'll re-write that." But yeah, usually her memories, I think, were more interesting than mine, they were more detailed. She has a remarkable memory so that was actually really helpful.

Is the play as autobiographical as it seems? Um, yeah. The only thing is, there are certain liberties an autobiographical writer, in terms of time passage and sometimes "amalgaming"—if that's a verb—the characters, because you just don't want to be like, "Oh and there's this other guy Stu, but Stu, he was helping us buy a cat...but anyway the real story"—you can't introduce forty characters in a show, you're probably wiser to introduce ten, so you don't confuse people as you're trying to tell a story. So you say well, "This person said this, and then my other friend said this, and then those two friends become the same friend, because...I don't have the time in the play to bring you into the boringness and minutiae of my existence.

Although sometimes, you'll see a one-person show and critics will say, "That person really needs an editor. Tell that person, your life isn't that interesting! We didn't come to see a reality show." So Seth really helps me with that, it becomes all about framing and consolidating stuff. But I never exaggerate when it comes to like—let me put it this way. The things that make you gasp are true. The moments where the audience goes, "Oooh!," those parts are true. To me that would be emotionally or intellectually dishonest, if you're making people gasp with something that is not true, but if you are passing over something to get to the heart of the story, then that seems to be fair game.

What about you and the Andy character stopping people from getting married?
It's very true. The sentiment of, we would stop other people from getting married: true. Whether or not we stopped or put a hold on three to five marriages, that may be an exaggeration. But it's really just a laugh line. I think we tried and failed with three to five people. I think stopped one or two, actually. But we were certainly very adamant about not getting married.

Has he now gone on and become domesticated? [Laughing] Yeah, he's married. He got married shortly after I did. He was at the opening last night with his wife.

Do you normally not wear a wedding ring? That's part of the show, because it tips the end as to where the show is going. And my wife thinks it's really romantic that in between the 4 and 8 p.m. shows on the weekend, I put on my wedding ring.

Has anybody else who may know that they are a character in it come to see it, like the police officer in the accident report? No, although I had many, many—I've workshopped this for two or three years—I've had many conversations with police officers about what happened, and very in-depth conversations about,"How could this have happened to me?" And actually, when you break down the semantics of what I was up against, I could not prove that the other person was wrong. I shouldn't say I couldn't prove—it would be very, very difficult to prove that the other driver was at fault, because there were no witnesses.

This is getting into really small stuff but there was one witness and I couldn't get in touch with him. I kept calling him, but I think he was just kind of living, he was like a drifter, actually, so he just kind of disappeared. And then, there were no witnesses to him speeding, even though he was clearly speeding, and you can't prove that someone is speeding if there were no witnesses to it, and then there were all those details about him being drunk, but then when he was arrested like four hours later, he blew under the legal limit, which doesn't make any sense. That's part of the reason why it felt like Chinatown, where I was just like, "This guy clearly has a lot of money, made a few phone calls, [said] 'I'm in jail, get me the hell out of it here, to his lawyer.'" That's what I think happened, I'll never know what happened. And at this point I think people reading the article are completely confused. I don't know if you should even force this on people.

I guess my point is, you have people in the play and it would be interesting to know if you ever got in touch with them or if they ever got in touch with you. I suppose now that the show is open and there's more being written about it, you may hear from people like Amanda. Yeah, I was thinking that, I was thinking that the other day. A friend from high school came the other night who knew all of the people and he loved the show, he stayed around and we talked about it afterward for a long time, but we didn't talk about Amanda and we didn't talk about Keith Robins. Neither of those people came up.

Is it painful for you to revisit these memories in public or by revisiting them do they lose their painful edge? It's only painful at the outset. Those tend to be the stories that as I'm working with Seth Barrish, my director, or as I'm working with Ira Glass, it's usually the stories we end up developing are the stories where initially I'll say, "Well first of all, I would never tell this on stage, but this happened," and that usually ends up being the most interesting story.

The story about Amanda, I don't know if it'll matter to the reader, but the girl who kind of broke my heart in high school, I was so embarrassed by that story and how it went down. I didn't even tell my friends that story for like ten years. It was only in my late 20s that I started saying, "Oh, this thing happened in high school", and people would laugh. And I was like, I guess I'm onto something with that. And now, I'm able to laugh at it.

What's funny is that, all these things that happened to me, that in retrospect are so funny, you're always like, "Ah! It's so funny, I was so stupid! And I'm so smart now. Stuff like this is never going to happen to me again!" And then another year goes by and you look around and you're like, I did some stupid stuff last year, too. And then you kind of realize that it's actually you. You're the problem. You're the reason that all these things are happening.