Mike Birbiglia Quotes

The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.

Falling in love is a completely transcendent experience. It's like eating pizza-flavored ice cream

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

I think if anything, the fact that it's popular right now makes me go: "Well, I guess I'm going to start doing something else then in the next few years." I dunno, it almost feels hackneyed at this point. To start a premise by saying, "I did this awkward thing." But then again, awkwardness and feeling alienated are always going to be a part of comedy. Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

I have this habit of asking 'why do you want to do it?' and then interrupting them to say, 'here's why you want to do it.' Because it's in the 'yes...and' spirit [rule of improvisation].

I think the cleverness is inadvertent.

I think the reason why I'm so alluring to networks is because on the surface I'm like a quintessential relatable, boring white guy. A great many sitcoms have been anchored by a boring white guy, so I feel like what they want to mine from me are my more generic qualities.

I almost can't even put to words how happy I am that I got married.

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.

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

I like 'Donnie Darko;' it's a cool take on dreams and sleep.

Backup dancers are completely respectable. They're the studio musicians of dance.

Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.

Sometimes 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.

It had that kind of open-ended fear to it - like that feeling you get when you're driving and you see a cop. And you're not speeding. You don't have drugs. But you're just thinking, I hope he doesn't notice I'm driving.

Essentially, retweets are like laughs.

My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.

Every comedian comes to a fork in the road where they have to decide if they're going to make jokes about other people or make jokes about themselves. I chose myself.

I've been selfish over the years, and other people who have made it have too, but I can only speak for myself.

I 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.

I thought if I could do stand-up comedy well enough, I could parlay it back into films - like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen did. They merged principles of comedy and drama together, and that's what my first film really was, a stab at that kind of comedy.

So I went to a club the other day, which is timely because my self esteem had been hovering right around 'normal' and I had been meaning to knock it down to negative 1000.

I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.

I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn't. I'm still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister's frequent flier miles just six days before.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

I feel like we can prove in real time the old trope that comedy is tragedy plus time.