Comedian Mike Birbiglia on His New Book, 'Sleepwalk With Me,' and One-Man Show, ‘My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’ -- New York Magazine

Stand-up as storytelling as art:

Birbiglia road-tests his material with a trio of trusted advisers: older brother Joe, who serves as his manager and co-writer; Seth Barrish, director of Sleepwalk With Me; and Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.” “If a minute goes by without laughs, Mike’s learning to quiet the part of him that says, ‘This is sucking’—those minutes in a story that are there just for the feeling you’re not going to get a laugh,” says Glass, who discovered Birbiglia through the “Moth” storytelling series. The two are working on a film adaptation of Sleepwalk With Me. “He’s learning the more specific and personal a story is, the more universal it is,” adds Barrish, who speaks to Birbiglia several times a day, “so he can say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking.’ Mike thinks and dreams big, but not in a way that’s remotely obnoxious.”

In 2008, Birbiglia wrote a script for a CBS sitcom loosely based on his blog, Mike Birbiglia’s Secret Public Journal. It had a Seinfeld conceit, only this time the comedian lived in Brooklyn with his girlfriend. It got as far as the pilot stage. “I can’t even begin to describe the degree to which I had no control; it’s the reason I haven’t attempted to do a TV show since,” he says. “They didn’t want all of me, they wanted this part they perceived to be likable, which ended up being wrong. I tested unlikable. Can you imagine a worse scenario? I tested poorly in something that few people on Earth can quantify, yet was quantified for me, and I failed.

“In a way,” he adds, “my whole career is an accident. I tried to sell out, then when they didn’t buy it, I decided to be artistic.” Birbiglia credits failure with the comedy renaissance going on now. “Few people are above selling out, but the difference between the highest and lowest bidders isn’t much anymore. People are like, ‘Fuck it, if I’m not going to make a lot of money, I might as well do something I’m proud of.’ ”

Go Into The Story: David Milch: "The Writer's Voice" (Part 2)

GITS is doing Milch, this time on the psychology of the artist:

A psychiatrist will tell you—well, a psychiatrist won’t tell you shit. But in psychiatric terms, the psyche is differentiated into the ego sense of self, the id—which is everything that gets us jammed up—and the super ego, which is the idea of form, or structure, or the accommodation in the world for our behavior. And the super ego is the internalization of the parental voice. Now, it’s obviously an oversimplification. But in particular, a writer—for reasons we will get to in another part of this discussion—stands in a particular kind of doubleness, typically, in his or her emotional makeup, toward experience. Stands both within it comfortably, and, for whatever combination of reasons, stands outside it. That’s the cards you’re dealt. That’s what predisposes you to be a writer as well as predisposes you to be a few other things.

Often, that doubleness is caused by a traumatic association with the idea of form. Here’s a for-instance. The Irish are regarded as a great storytelling people and also as a country full of drunks. There’s a reason for both reputations. It’s a tough country—weather’s tough, they had a lot of problems. One way you learn the doubleness that is typical of the writer is that you are both within the [tavern] and you’re standing outside wondering where the next punch is coming from.

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The second maxim that I can give you, the thing that I always try to communicate to an aspiring writer, is that no one can teach you anything that you don’t already know, and each of you has, in your heart, the capacity, when encouraged by a benign organizing presence, to identify the deepest truths of the human story.