Mike Birbiglia, dressed for success.
Mike Birbiglia remembers when the room was a lot smaller. He’s headlining Saturday night at the Warner Theatre, where he’ll tell some stories he’s considering for inclusion in his next one-man show. But he cut his teeth at the DC Improv in the late 90s, while a student at Georgetown University. By the time he was 25, he’d done the The Late Show with David Letterman , released his first album, and had his own Comedy Central special.
Birbiglia’s act grew more distinct and involving a couple of years ago, when he began to segue from traditional stand-up into more personal storytelling. His struggle with REM behavior disorder — which manifested with him in the form of sleepwalking and worse — became the basis of Sleepwalk with Me, a one-man show that ran in New York for nearly 200 performances before closing last June. He’s now adapting the show into a nonfiction book and a movie.
Birbiglia, 31, blogs at My Secret Public Journal. DCist caught up with him by phone at his New York apartment in late August to discuss joke-telling versus narrative, oral storytelling’s blooming vogue, and how, after conquering late-night network TV and cable, he finally broke into the glamorous and lucrative kingdom of public radio.
You’ve been at this for a while, but I think you found a new audience when you started showing up a lot on This American Life about a year ago. I think the “Fear of Sleep” episode is the first one where I remember hearing you. The story you told was a piece of your show Sleepwalk with Me, but several others have followed in the last year. How did you become such a prolific contributor to the show?
I had been friendly with The Moth organization for years, and I had done their [live] show a few times. I’d done the sleep story there, and I thought it would be really good for This American Life. I was always a big fan of TAL, but I never could seem to get in touch with them. It’s just hard. They’re inundated with requests. But I knew this story was worth bugging them about, so I did.
