Mike Birbiglia Quotes

In sketch comedy, wear your character like a hat, not a suit of armor.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

I think my goal was just to do comedy, honestly. It still is. Whatever form that took or takes, it doesn't matter.

With comedy, if you write something for me, I'm better at it. I'm not sure I'm so good at improvisational stuff.

I wrote comedy sketches in college.

I've always wanted to do a segment on a talk show. Jay Leno has been such a good friend, and if he would allow me, I'd have to get it all together, but I'd like to go on 'The Tonight Show' and do a set with no props. Or come out with a trunk and never touch it. Or come out with a clear trunk with nothing in it.

There's [John Mulaney Show] jokes that I have in stand up that I wouldn't try to put in, I would try to have someone just speak extemporaneously in the middle of a scene about an episode of "Law and Order" or something.

I found doing that kind of comedy without an audience is just... for me, it's almost impossible. You need the audience to do their half of the work.

I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.

I just like to build. Don't get me wrong: I think stand-up is great, and when someone like Richard Pryor or Steve Martin does stand-up, there's nothing better in the world. But I don't want to watch a lot of stand-ups for two hours. So I can do 45 minutes of stand-up and then say, 'Can we do something else now?'

My background is in comedy.

In terms of comedy, I never did five-minute sets or clubs or anything. I just started doing shows. Coming from that theater background, it never crossed my mind that I should start doing five-minute sets.

I'm a huge sketch comedy fan, and I think my love of sketch is reflected in my stand-up in that I do a lot of vignettes and voices and characters.

I did a lot of standup from ages 19 to 24 but then stopped to focus on sketch with Broken Lizard.

When you see the American chat shows, they've got so many ideas about what they could with the guests. I did stand-up on 'Jimmy Fallon' and they had loads of sketches and ideas, we don't tend to do that here.

My jokes have definitely changed. 'SNL' has helped with that, because when you're on 'SNL,' you have to kind of pay attention to the news. I feel like my material has gotten smarter now.

Our new programmes have always just been different vehicles for the same sort of comedy.

I was a funny kid growing up, and I did improv in college and went to Pratt Institute, but I did it very informally. It was just me and some of my friends goofing around on campus.

When comics are in the room, people have a tendency to try to make them laugh. That doesn't really make you funnier. It makes you a comic's comic, but you aren't going to get a fan base doing that.

You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.

For me, I wanted to write a book about getting into comedy. That's what I wanted to write.

I've been doing comedy for 20 years now. I started when I was 13 and I think for the first 10 years I was impersonating other people.

Second City Las Vegas is very different from Second City in Chicago on the main stage, where they do improv sets. That's how they kind of hone material, kind of work up to new material.

Doing a format parody is one of my favorite things to do in comedy.

Acting is more creative and liberating than production.