Top 100 Birbiglia Quotes
#1. I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It's like, 'Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?' David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I'm just a nobody. I'm a comedian and a writer.
Mike Birbiglia
#2. If you tried to sell Mike Birbiglia as a concept, no one would buy it.
Mike Birbiglia
#3. I love pizza so much, I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception.
Mike Birbiglia
#5. I feel like everyone wants to make a movie that they feel passionate about watching.
Mike Birbiglia
#6. I was very much a late bloomer. That's not to say that girls didn't express interest in me from time to time, but I just, I did not know how to respond to that.
Mike Birbiglia
#7. I went to the doctor, and they found something in my bladder. And whenever they find something, it's never anything good like, "We found something in your bladder AND IT'S SEASON TICKETS TO THE YANKEES!!"
Mike Birbiglia
#8. My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
Mike Birbiglia
#9. It was a hard name having growing up as a child. Some kids would call me names like "Birbiglebug" and "Birbibliography" and "Faggot". Some were more clever than others.
Mike Birbiglia
#10. I drank the Kool-Aid of being a network star. Once it didn't happen, I realized it wasn't the best version of my comedy.
Mike Birbiglia
#12. Someone stole my wallet last week. The guy called me up and he was mad at me. He was like 'you gotta get your finances together. You got no cash, your credit cards are maxed out. You don't even have minutes on your calling card. I had to use my card to call you.'
Mike Birbiglia
#13. I've found, being in Los Angeles, it's like living in a live-action Planet Hollywood.
Mike Birbiglia
#14. One of my favorite comedies of all time is 'Terms of Endearment;' that's my pace.
Mike Birbiglia
#15. Awkwardness and feeling alienated are always going to be a part of comedy.
Mike Birbiglia
#16. And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.
Mike Birbiglia
#17. The people who are the worst at news, who kind of engage in what I call the World Wrestling of news, have kind of set the bar for where news is.
Mike Birbiglia
#18. When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.
Mike Birbiglia
#19. Sex and pizza, they say, are similar. When it's good, it's good. When it's bad, you get it on your shirt.
Mike Birbiglia
#20. My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Mike Birbiglia
#21. Someone said to me at a party once, 'Oh, yeah, you're a comedian? Then how come you're not funny now?' And I just wanted to say, 'Well, I'm just going to take this conversation we're having and then repeat that to strangers, and then that's the joke. You're the joke later.'
Mike Birbiglia
#22. I just like, when you look at people who have long careers in film, they're able to make films that are far away from themselves, because they're metaphorical. It creates more opportunities, I think.
Mike Birbiglia
#23. How many people do you know who have thrown up on the Scrambler or a carnival ride? A lot of people, is the answer.
Mike Birbiglia
#24. High school is not unlike a Mormon fundamentalist cult where the women are claimed by the older and more powerful.
Mike Birbiglia
#25. It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.
Mike Birbiglia
#26. You know the quickest way to get comedians to hate you? Do Letterman at age 24.
Mike Birbiglia
#27. The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.
Mike Birbiglia
#28. In real life, I first started sleep walking in high school because that was when this concept of getting into college first appeared. I had this moment of, 'Oh! This is going to affect the rest of my life.'
Mike Birbiglia
#29. Over the years, I managed to develop this comedy career, went from opening act to headliner at comedy clubs, to playing concert halls, and had an off-Broadway show with 'Sleepwalk With Me.'
Mike Birbiglia
#30. Louis C.K. directs his show, which is very much like a series of short films.
Mike Birbiglia
#31. This is my situation. I'm the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called 'Aviation Club Soars into Orbit!' and an unhappy bully I've never heard of is sending out envoys.
Mike Birbiglia
#32. What I really need is a woman who loves me for my money but doesn't understand math.
Mike Birbiglia
#33. Fortunately, I don't talk about politics on stage.
Mike Birbiglia
#34. If you're asked something on a movie set and you say 'I don't know,' you lose confidence in every department. What you need to say is 'I'll have that for you in five minutes.'
Mike Birbiglia
#35. It's interesting how sleepwalking in a certain way becomes an accumulation of your outside stimuli that's actually there and what's happening in your brain.
Mike Birbiglia
#36. People getting along doesn't sell very well in the news. I find that to be deeply depressing. I don't even talk about it on stage, because it would take too long to explain.
Mike Birbiglia
#37. Backup dancers are completely respectable. They're the studio musicians of dance.
Mike Birbiglia
#38. I think that my regrets mostly have to do with my relationship with my ex-girlfriend. Every once in a while, you get those flashback memories of conversations you had with your exes, and you just, like, wince when you're walking down the street. Something occurs to you, 'Oh, no, I said that.'
Mike Birbiglia
#39. When I was starting out, I thought I would go into comedy and there would be a mentor, like the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in 'Almost Famous,' in my life, and there just wasn't. It was really frustrating for me because I desired that so much.
Mike Birbiglia
#40. Making a film is beyond exciting. It's so exciting, it's exhausting.
Mike Birbiglia
#41. It used to be that if you got on 'The Tonight Show,' your career was made. Now, if you're on 'The Tonight Show,' maybe 14 more people show up to your gig in Tulsa.
Mike Birbiglia
#42. As artists, we'd all love to not be commercial - to not sell out to the full extent that we are able. But you do what you have to do to pay New York rent and continue to do what you feel strongly about.
Mike Birbiglia
#43. Sometimes I'll go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of groceries as though I knew how to cook, which I don't, and as though I was going to be home for the next six days, which I won't.
Mike Birbiglia
#44. I am diagnosed with what's called 'REM behavior disorder.' As far as the disorder goes, there's no cure, but it's going pretty well as far as these things go. I see a sleep doctor, take medication, etc.
Mike Birbiglia
#45. When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you're an adult and you're a poet, it's all about love and pain, but if you're a kid it's, "Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?"
Mike Birbiglia
#46. I actually wasn't really the class clown growing up. The class clown was always the mean guy who walked up and was like, 'You're fat. You're gay. I'm outta here!' I was always more kind of awkward and introspective.
Mike Birbiglia
#48. I'm a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.
Mike Birbiglia
#49. You can't go to medical school and come out and be like, 'I'm going to be a dog catcher.' That would be so pointless.
Mike Birbiglia
#50. I like films that are so funny, dramatic and lifelike simultaneously, that you are laughing and cringing simultaneously all throughout the film.
Mike Birbiglia
#51. I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.
Mike Birbiglia
#52. When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.
Mike Birbiglia
#53. Sometimes I take this women's exercise class called Core Fusion at a place called Exhale. I shouldn't say it's a women's class. There's maybe two men.
Mike Birbiglia
#54. What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.
Mike Birbiglia
#55. I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn't be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I'm So Drunk.
Mike Birbiglia
#56. I always have the best story at the party. Anyone telling a story at a party is like, 'No, no, you've got to listen to my story!' I'm like, 'Step aside, everybody. I'm going to blow the doors off this place.'
Mike Birbiglia
#57. When I was growing up, I didn't know who Jewish people were, what it was to be Jewish.
Mike Birbiglia
#58. Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.
Mike Birbiglia
#59. Nothing that you want ever is what you think it is.
Mike Birbiglia
#61. Some people come up to me and say "You know, in Italy, it's pronounced Ber-beel-lia" And I say "Well, here in America, you're annoying ... "
Mike Birbiglia
#62. I find my fans are really funny people. Most comedians can't say that about their fans.
Mike Birbiglia
#63. When I moved to New York, I was wide-eyed. I was nice to everyone, which comedians hate.
Mike Birbiglia
#64. I love pizza. I want to marry it, but it would just be to eat her family at the wedding.
Mike Birbiglia
#65. There's something about small venues that's amazing for developing material. It's almost like you can not only hear people's response, but you can understand it. In bigger venues you lose that, but you gain this sense of camaraderie in the audience.
Mike Birbiglia
#66. So I went to a club the other day, which is timely because my self esteem had been hovering right around 'normal' and I had been meaning to knock it down to negative 1000.
Mike Birbiglia
#68. I gravitated toward stand-up because there's no overhead. I mean, literally, there's no overhead: Often, you're outdoors performing in front of groups of people.
Mike Birbiglia
#69. I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.
Mike Birbiglia
#70. I love 'Bullets Over Broadway,' but I'm pretty sure Woody Allen hasn't killed somebody.
Mike Birbiglia
#72. I was an altar boy as a kid. And the answer is no.
Mike Birbiglia
#73. You get to the end of something, you're laughing, you're like, 'That's funny, and that's funny,' and then you get to the end, and the credits come down, and you're like, 'That's it?! That's the whole thing?! You had me here for that?!' I just don't want to do that.
Mike Birbiglia
#74. I think because I've been working in front of audiences for so many years, I'm able to take in the input, good or bad, and just say, 'This is the part I agree with that you're saying, and these are the parts I don't agree with.'
Mike Birbiglia
#75. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.
Mike Birbiglia
#76. I performed for the U.S. troops in Guantanamo Bay. And signed autographs for people who've been gone from America for so long they didn't realize that I'm not famous.
Mike Birbiglia
#77. I think your tendency when you play yourself is to accentuate something about you that you think is the funny thing about you.
Mike Birbiglia
#79. I feel like being a door person was like college in a sense. I could watch comedy on a professional level seven nights a week without paying, and they would pay me a nominal amount of money to be there.
Mike Birbiglia
#80. I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, "Do you guys hate me?"
Mike Birbiglia
#81. Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.
Mike Birbiglia
#82. My writing process is very feedback-based. When I do stand-up, I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting, and then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.
Mike Birbiglia
#83. My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.
Mike Birbiglia
#84. My last name has the word 'big' in it. It seems like a logical progression that if you shed away the Bir and the lia, I'll just be Big.
Mike Birbiglia
#85. The moment I walk into a room, I have kind of like the Terminator's tracking system for where the food is, and I can get there immediately.
Mike Birbiglia
#86. I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But they're also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.
Mike Birbiglia
#87. In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.
Mike Birbiglia
#88. I got an E-Trade account. Turns out I can turn $1,000 into $420 in less than a week. Sure, I had to pay some fees ...
Mike Birbiglia
#89. The key to eating healthy is not eating any food that has a TV commercial.
Mike Birbiglia
#90. I feel like people have more in common than the news reports. People getting along doesn't sell very well in the news. I find that to be deeply depressing.
Mike Birbiglia
#91. Falling in love is a completely transcendent experience. It's like eating pizza-flavored ice cream
Mike Birbiglia
#92. I'm generally so disoriented during the week about what I'm doing and where I am - I travel a lot - that when I'm home on a Sunday, I typically try to sleep in as much as I can.
Mike Birbiglia
#93. I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show.
Mike Birbiglia
#94. When I was in college, I wanted to write for 'Late Night With Conan O'Brien,' and I was an intern there.
Mike Birbiglia
#95. I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.
Mike Birbiglia
#96. I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.
Mike Birbiglia
#97. I think the thing I had to be careful about while writing a book was not to say anything that was revealing about other people that they would be uncomfortable with. I didn't want to make people angry - that's a real risk.
Mike Birbiglia
#98. I'm a comedian, and the other comedians are played by comedians, the same way that in 'Once' there are the musicians that hang out together.
Mike Birbiglia
#99. Sometimes, occasionally, people will make out in the audience, completely not aware that there's a human being onstage just yards away from them, who can see them. Sometimes people think that you're on television while you're onstage, so you're not even a person.
Mike Birbiglia
#100. You need to know what doesn't work to know what works. It's especially true in improv and stand-up.
Mike Birbiglia
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