Mike Birbiglia has mined his medical, emotional and existential crises for long-form comedic storytelling for the better part of two decades. This time, however, the stakes feel somehow more vital as the comedian confronts his father’s mortality, his own inadequacies as a father, and a chance meeting with the Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church. Good thing comedy comes in threes, right?
The Gist: Birbiglia’s fourth Netflix special arrives just one year after his Emmy-nominated The Old Man & The Pool.
In this new hour, he’s grappling with answering life’s questions, big and small, to his daughter, while simultaneously re-evaluating his relationship with his own father in the wake of his father’s stroke. What sets this special apart from past ones is its recency bias. You can tell he’s processing it all right now not only because of the dates he’s dropping, but also the name drops; biggest of all, his invitation alongside fellow comedians to visit Pope Francis last summer in the Vatican.
As Birbiglia himself said of this special: “Over the years I’ve done a lot of personal shows but somehow this one is the most personal because it’s not in my past. It’s my life right now. So there’s really no filter. At certain points during the tour I literally thought on stage: ‘Whoa. Am I really gonna tell this story?’ But that’s sort of the idea behind these shows. I try to probe into what’s most painful in order to figure out what’s most funny.”
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Although Birbiglia somewhat occupies his own lane, you’ve seen his touch as a producer on his fellow Emmy nominees (and winner) Alex Edelman and Jacqueline Novak. And this special might get you thinking about Sarah Silverman’s new hour Postmortem (sharing stories about their dads), Jim Gaffigan (because he talks specifically about Gaffigan), and even some early Louis CK (in struggling to answer his daughter’s questions).
Memorable Jokes: An opening gambit reminiscing about the D.A.R.E. program may feel a bit by-the-book until Birbiglia reveals that’s his medical condition actually is in a textbook, which is a fun callback for his fans and helps serve as a quick introduction into him for anyone just tuning into his comedy now.
What it also does is tie him to his father, a doctor who had hoped Mike would go to medical school. Instead, he’s a comedian, and his wife is a poet, which means they don’t always have the most accurate answers for their inquisitive daughter. That provides a running place to check-in for jokes throughout the hour.
But the meat of the hour comes from Birbiglia learning his father had suffered a devastating stroke, and how he looked at everything his father had done for him and others in a new light. Particularly because while the community respected and needed Mike’s dad, his own memories reflected a different relationship. “Because I just didn’t see a lot of that.”
Although he does take this opportunity to access moments from his childhood that may have been foggy or long forgotten, such as the time he got kicked in the head as a kid while playing goalie on his soccer team. Or when his father showed up at his school’s science lab to explain his career to his classmates. Or the time when Mike was 5 and wound up in the hospital where his father worked, demanding immediate treatment for him.
As a father himself, Birbiglia has more fun delighting in his scorn of his daughter’s peer group, calling the other Brooklyn kids “an insufferable bunch” and the other dads losers. And in his relationship with his wife, he alternately takes pride and mocks himself for keeping score as a love language. The ultimate determination of whether he’s correct or not comes after some deft crowd work seeking answers from the more established married couples in his audience.
The dad stuff may hit home for many viewers. But what’ll definitely stand out to comedy fans is Birbiglia’s description of his invitation to join Jim Gaffigan, Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien and other comedians on a trip to the Vatican last summer to meet Pope Francis. There’s fun to be had just in learning more about this. But the comedian also takes this moment to hammer home how his views of the church differed from those of his parents, and how he’ll still zing the Catholics for their multi-generation molestation scandal. Will he ever go easy on this topic? “I will when they do!”
Our Take: Birbiglia pauses to note that his subject matter this time around isn’t for everyone.
“Most of the jokes are for you but a few of them are for me,” as he’s still a bit raw in coming to terms with the changing nature of his relationship with his father. “It would be weird if it was your dad” he were making these jokes about, he concedes. Then again, as Birbiglia also reveals, his father hasn’t seemed to enjoy a lot of his material over the past two decades.
What’s always been a hallmark of Birbiglia’s humor is how he finds ways to recycle lines or threads from previous specials when they serve the new story he’s telling. Here that comes early when he brings up his sleepwalking disorder (where he pointedly says “I’ve talked about it so much in my comedy specials”) or later when discussing his Catholic youth as an altar boy and how he avoided becoming a victim (“I think it’s because they knew I was a talker”). Of course, now he turns some of these jokes and ideas on their head. What it it turns out his medical condition wasn’t what he thought? What if he’s been talking to everyone but the one person he needed to sit down with the most?
Birbiglia says he’s winging it at fatherhood because he feels like his parents never sat him down to show him the way through life as a child. But sitting with his father this past year, Birbiglia also realizes that there’s a lot he didn’t know because he never asked.
Stepping out of and then back into a framed painting of a river with grass and trees and the sunrise behind it all, you might think the good life were a Bob Ross painting. But it’s actually simpler than that. It’s about going toward the light, the happy, kind light.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Birbiglia’s new hour comes not only at a time when we’re re-evaluating our perspective of the Catholic Church thanks to the elevation of the first American pope, but also, in that window between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, gives us each a chance to reconfirm our relationships with our parents, no matter how they have been in the past. Because being open and loving is the path to the good life.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.