Mike Birbiglia won college humor prize; the rest is history
The western suburbs bask in starshine as a Shrewsbury comic and a Waltham rock band start to make a name for themselves across the country -- and the world
Growing up in Shrewsbury, Mike Birbiglia often felt misunderstood. Then, in high school, his brother took him to see comedian Steven Wright perform at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, and, suddenly, his life made sense.
''I thought, 'Oh my God, I can't believe somebody gets paid to walk on stage and talk about the stuff that I talk about all the time,' " Bribiglia said. ''When I mention these things to people, everyone thinks I'm crazy, but when he gets on stage, people clap."
Now it's Birbiglia who gets paid to talk about all that stuff. A veteran of ''The Late Show With David Letterman" and ''Late Night With Conan O'Brien," he is now touring colleges nationally for Comedy Central as Medium Man on Campus.
If you didn't catch him recently at Boston University, you can listen to his new CD, ''Two Drink Mike," released by Comedy Central Records. Last month, his second 30-minute special premiered on ''Comedy Central Presents."
Birbiglia said his father, Vincent, a neurologist, and his mother, Mary Jean, a nurse, weren't all that pleased when he announced that he wanted to make his living making people laugh.
''My parents didn't even know what a comedy club was," said Birbiglia. ''My father said, 'Comedy club? What do they do there, strip?' "
Birbiglia, who is 27 and lives in New York City, attended Catholic schools for 10 years. They included St. John's and St. Mary School in Shrewsbury -- where he won author of the month in second grade for his poetry about bears.
''I was an altar boy," said Birbiglia in a recent sketch. ''And the answer is no . . . I wasn't molested . . . because I think they knew I was a talker."
He said as a child he wanted to be a comedian even before he knew what comedy was.
''I wanted to be a short Jew," he joked. ''My parents would say, 'We're Italian,' and I'd say, 'Stop your kvetching.' "
Birbiglia, the youngest of four children, likes to tell his audience, ''My family's not real Italian . . . we're like Olive Garden Italian."
Woody Allen is one of his idols. He says a lot of today's movie comedies leave him cold. ''I laugh during the first half, but once the joke is done I'm like, 'OK, now what?' " He likes the way Allen's movies use humor to advance the story, not just for the sake of a laugh. Someday, he said, he'd like to make movies.
Birbiglia's climb up the laugh ladder began in 1997, when he was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington. He summoned the nerve to enter the contest for funniest person on campus -- and won.
''It was one of the seminal moments in my life," he said. The prize: $200 and a chance to perform at the D.C. Improv.
He opened for Dave Chappelle. After the show, the Improv folks invited him back to perform. They also handed him a mop.
''For three years I sold tickets, ran food to tables, and developed my act," Birbiglia said.
After he graduated, he moved to New York and took gigs where he could get them: Queens, New Jersey, upstate New York. He'd arrive back to his apartment between 3 and 4 in the morning and have to start work at 9 as a secretary at a temp agency.
To hone his craft, Birbiglia types out his acts verbatim. ''After a set," he said, he looks over his script and plays back the show in his head ''to evaluate what went well, what didn't, and what I can improve upon."
Eventually, he started playing the Manhattan clubs and got his break with an appearance on Letterman's show.
''It was the perfect meeting of my dreams and my reality," Birbiglia said. ''To be on the show of someone I view as a comedy god, performing my own material, was really beyond surreal."
Birbiglia makes himself the butt of much of his humor, as in the title sketch of his new CD.
''When I drink, I become another person," he says. ''Last year I went out drinking and I met this girl and she gave me her number, but the next day I didn't want to call her because I didn't feel like she met me. I felt like she met two-drink Mike.
''Two-drink Mike likes to dance and knows a magic trick; zero-drink Mike likes biographies and has serious opinions about wildlife."
Lately, he's been telling stories about sleepwalking -- a problem that has become so serious for him that he says he's seeing a doctor.
He's working on a one-person show called ''Sleepwalk With Me," about how his dreams reflect his fears.
''I would run away from things," he said, recalling an instance where he woke up in a hotel hallway. At his doctor's suggestion, ''I actually now sleep in a sleeping bag."
He cites Freud's book ''Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," which says that in dreams we do what we feel we can't do, and with jokes, we say what we feel we can't say. ''My show is about my relations between jokes and dreams."
But it is out of his waking life that Birbiglia finds most of his material. Like the drug dealer outside his Manhattan apartment, the thought of which launches him on a riff that runs from Snapple to heroin to amazon.com.
As one of his fans, Alex Costa of Waltham, said while waiting to see Birbiglia at BU: ''I love how you never know where the story is going to go."
For more on Mike Birbiglia log on to: www.birbigs.com and www.comedycentral.com. Susan Chaityn Lebovits can be reached at Lebovits@globe.com.
A few of Birbiglia's zingers
Mike Birbiglia on . . .
George Bush: ''I feel like whether you like him or not, Bush seems like a fun guy -- like he's the kind of guy you invite to the barbecue because you know he's going to start the Wiffle ball game. 'Yeah -- Wiffle ball Tony's here! All right! It is so on!' Then one day somebody says, 'We're going to put Tony in charge . . . of everything.' "
Sex: ''I wish I were better at drinking because I love sex -- which is weird, because I usually only like things I'm good at . . . like badminton and drinking hot chocolate. . . . Some people are really confident about sex -- they videotape themselves, which I never understood. After I have sex all I think is, at least no one saw it."
Critiquing hotels: ''You can always tell by how much they combine toiletries. They'll have shampoo slash conditioner slash toothpaste. And you actually have to call the desk and say, 'Can I get some more 'sham-paste?' "
Death: ''I went to a funeral the other day . . . they passed out tissues before the funeral started; I thought that was a little cocky. It's like, 'This funeral is going to be so sad . . . you're gonna cry and cry."
Marketing illegal drugs: ''I'll be walking out in the morning to get a Snapple and this guy will say, 'You want weed? You want smoke?' I think he should also sell Snapple -- that way he hooks you in. 'You know what would go great with that Snapple? Crack.' . . . It would be like Amazon.com . . . 'If you like Snapple, you might also enjoy balloons of heroin.' " 