Screening and In Person Conversation with Hasan Minhaj
Mike Birbiglia is an actor, director, filmmaker and here, monologist, not a stand-up comedian. The artist includes what his profession calls “jokes,” but they’re so intricately woven through personal, humanistic stories, we don’t recognize them as such. He later explains coupling truth and the ridiculous. Birbiglia is irrepressibly droll but also sensitive, moving and provocative. Spalding Gray comes to mind, though he had little of Birbiglia’s innate sweetness. Alex Edelman is an up and comer.
Walking his nine year-old daughter Oona home from school, Birbiglia passed a number of smoke shops with cutesy names like Blazy Susan and Yes We Cannabis. Oona looked up at the name of one of these shops and asked, “Dad, what’s The Good Life? …I thought it was a good opportunity to explain the fake happy of drugs…mom and I use them sometimes… not when we were your age…”
In fact, despite working in nightclubs, Birbiglia has never even seen cocaine. The performer theorizes it’s because he looks so straight he’s been taken for an undercover narc (narcotics policeman). We segue to his sleepwalking, a medical condition about which he’s spoken so often over the years, the disorder now carries his name in med schools. “My dad wanted me to go to med school…well, now I’m in there and I basically teach.”
Birbiglia was prescribed Klonopin. A new GP is astonished because of the drug’s many side effects. “I thought that was just my personality – (beat) my personality is side effects.” Awkwardly cutting a pill which was inadvertently exposed to water created “sherbet” which he snorted from a table top. “How do I explain that to Oona?”
We hear about his withholding father. “…a doctor who in his free time got a law degree. He didn’t want to be a dad. We really wanted a dad and he wanted a secondary degree. Our needs were not aligned.” A stroke took Birbiglia senior down. Interaction was frustrating, tender and at last kind of resolved. There are moments the whole theater is hushed. A master at following a heart stopping observation with comic relief, the artist diminishes neither.
Rapport is reflected upon with wildly diverse examples, Birbiglia’s nine year-old and his elderly dad. Oona’s friends and their parents, a birthday party “factory” at which she’s injured on a trampoline, driving from the venue Urban Air to Urgent Care “there might just as well be a shuttle bus” and describing what an x-ray is to Oona are all sources of exasperation and fallibility.
A priceless story about being concerned with his “hard nipples” at 12 and childhood injury give us a glimpse of his dad. Mom, with whom he’s close, is religious. “I was religious when I was young cause kids love magic…it’s baked into my childhood.” That he was included in an invitation to top comedians for an audience with the Pope is also fodder. Birbiglia is successively querulous, self-effacing, caring and wry. What, he asks, has historical Rome to do with Christ but marketing? “It’s like the Wilkes Booth family sold Lincoln Logs.”
There are many things he can’t explain to his daughter. “Who is Jesus?” Oona asked. “He lead a well- intentioned cult…” Birbiglia began. What about sex or worse, porn? “I know nothing about the genres… like homemade porn – when I finish sex, all I can think is, ‘thank God, no one saw that!” One subject leads fluently to the next.
In the end, he comes up with a very good answer to “What’s the good life?” Birbiglia is wonderful. Watch the show on Netflix where past presentations are also harbored.
Actor/comedian Hasan Minhaj then splits audience question file cards with his apparent friend. Few are actually read as Minhaj takes up time competing for laughs, promoting himself, and praising Birbiglia. A lost opportunity.
Event Photo by Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography.
Netflix Photo Courtesy of 92Y
Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life
The Good Life: Screening and Mike Birbiglia in Conversation with Hasan Minhaj
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