Where art and business intersect is a challenging hurdle for a lot of people, reconciling the fact that not everyone is going to make it in the same way. Yeah, you have to be a little selfish, probably.
Mike BirbigliaYou need to know what doesn't work to know what works. It's especially true in improv and stand-up.
Mike BirbigliaI'm a whitebread cracker. That's my favorite white person slur: "whitebread". The other day, someone came up to me and said, "What's up, whitebread?" And I was like, "That's not even an insult. That's just my race plus a food. I can do that, too, black bean soup! Stay out of this, Asian chicken platter!"
Mike BirbigliaI feel like people have more in common than the news reports. People getting along doesn't sell very well in the news. I find that to be deeply depressing. I don't even talk about it on stage, because it would take too long to explain. I'd have to spend an hour on it to get people to understand what I'm saying because it's so instantly polarizing. Because cable news has kind of set up a construct where you're for or against something immediately. So if I said something about it, people would be for or against me immediately. And I don't want that.
Mike BirbigliaSometimes when my fans come up to me, they think it's going to be entertaining, like I'm going to tell jokes or do bits, and then instead of that 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.
Mike Birbiglia