If you didn’t see Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me, which marked his off-Broadway debut in 2008, you can read the collected book of autobiographical comic essays, or listen to the audiobook. You can watch his later shows—My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (his fantastic valentine to commitment-phobia) and The New One (his unexpectedly emotional ode to parenthood)—on Netflix.
But if you’re a fan—or simply a fan of story-driven stand-up comedy, not unlike Alex Edelman’s Just for Us (perhaps the best one-person comedy show I’ve ever seen, and produced by Birbiglia)—you should see Birbiglia live. He’s brought his latest show, the terrific The Old Man & the Pool, to the Vivian Beaumont; what the theater lacks in legroom it makes up for with a crowd of Birbiglia-age theatergoers who are trying to reconcile their boomer parents’ fragility with the prospect of their own mortality, and who also likely put off their annual checkups and recommended screenings for fear of receiving some kind of reprimand or bad news. (I’m just spitballing here.)
After a couple doctor visits where he learned that “these items in the physician’s office that I thought were decorative are quite functional,” Birbiglia was forced, reluctantly, on a path to improve his health. He ultimately settles on swimming—which unearths memories of childhood YMCA visits and musings on the amount of urine in a public pool (apparently there have been studies, and…well…you don’t want to know)—and keeps it up, for a while. Then: “Why do we stop doing the thing we know we should be doing?”
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Birbiglia is on tour in the Midwest when his doctor informs him that he has Type 2 diabetes. In fact, he’s on his way to retrieve a pizza delivery from his hotel lobby when he gets the news. “The thing about co-morbidities is that sometimes they team up to form a single morbidity,” he says. Suddenly, pizza is a lot less sexy—if you know Birbiglia’s work, you know how he feels about pizza—and he’s back in the over-chlorinated water at the Brooklyn YMCA. He even gets advice about his diet: “If you haven’t gone to a nutritionist, I’ll save you the trip. They know the same stuff as us.”
If you’ve never seen Birbiglia, you’ll quickly realize that his comedy is pointed but never cruel; though he mentions his wife, Jenny, and daughter, Oona, frequently, his prime target is himself; his pacing is near-perfect (only one bit, right at the end, runs out of steam); and a left-hook packed with emotion and sincerity often comes when you least expect it. “I feel like we don’t choose what we remember about our own lives,” he says about seeing his father, hospitalized, after an emergency angioplasty, “but what I remember the most about that day is that it was the first time I saw my dad as a person.”
Why do we stop doing the thing we know we should be doing? Birbiglia never explicitly answers, but we know this: He got back in the pool. So—what’s your pool?
Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & the Pool opened Nov. 13, 2022, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and runs through Jan. 15, 2023. Tickets and information: mikebirbigliabroadway.com
