Bostonist Interview: Comedian Mike Birbiglia - Appearing @ The Wilbur on Saturday - Bostonist: Boston News, Food, Arts & Events

Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk With Me Mike Birbiglia, the comedian whose hometown is Shrewsbury, MA, brings a traveling version of his off-broadway show, "Sleepwalk With Me", to the Wilbur Theater on Saturday. Bostonist reviewed Birbiglia's excellent DVD, "What I Should Have Said Was Nothing", earlier this year and have been eager for a Boston appearance.

"Sleepwalk With Me" is something more than a stand-up act but maybe not quite a play according to Birbiglia. We had a chance to talk to talk to Birbiglia as he walked the streets of New York earlier this week:

Listen to entire interview here:

Bostonist: Tell us about your off-broadway show["Sleepwalk With Me"], how is it going, what's it about?

Mike Birbiglia: I'm concluding a 20 city tour this weekend. The Boston one is cool because it's at the Wilbur Theater, and it's my hometown sort of, I'm from Shrewsbury. I was a dramatic writing major in college, and my hope in becoming a comedian, that I could eventually write plays and screenplays for myself. About four years ago I started writing this play called "Sleepwalk With Me", and it was originally a play with a couple actors, but the more I wrote it I started to think about it as a one-man show. In 2006 the "Two Drink Mike" CD came out which is on Comedy Central Records, and when I was on tour promoting that, the audiences started to know the material because they had bought the CD and when I'd start to say the joke the response from the audience was that [they were familiar with the material]. And I just didn't realize that this is what would happen if I started to release CDs.

So I started to experiment on the tour by telling stories from the "Sleepwalk With Me Play" and I was getting a better response from that than the original joke material. I started working with a theater director who helped me refine it and shape it to have the maximum impact for theater and this is how it came about.

[interview continues after the jump]

Mike Birbiglia: Earlier this spring I co-wrote a pilot for CBS this spring which didn't get picked up but I thought I would take what I learned from Hollywood, which is great at producing and putting a glossy finish on things, and apply that to this project. It was around that time that Nathan Lane came to one of my shows at Caroline's and I found out that he had my CDs and I proposed the idea that he present the show which he was totally game for which I was shocked and thrilled about. So now we have this full on production now! It's the first time in my career that I have felt like I'm doing exactly what I should be doing.

Bostonist: You're culminating a 20-city tour, how has the response been to this presentation and format?

Mike Birbiglia: It's been really great. I do the 90-minute one-man show and then I'll encore with songs and jokes from my CDs and other show. So if people really didn't go for the show they will get the more familiar material. People will come up to me afterwards and say "that was a play" and then others will come up and say "that's not a play, but it's very funny". I don't really care what people call it but I do care that they enjoy it and think it's funny and if they take away more than that it's phenomenal.

Bostonist: Not that there aren't other comedians who have blogs, but by embracing the blogoshpere has been very successful for you, did you do it because you felt that you needed to write or was there some other reason? Did you have a real strategy there or was it something more spontaneous?

Mike Birbiglia: What I had was a list of emails of people who wanted to know about my show dates and how it started was that I would send out an email saying that I was coming to town and that last week I was in Portland, Maine, or Boston, and here's what I saw or did there, and those entries got longer and longer. So I thought my don't I at least spell-check this and put it into some kind of format. What would a good name be? So I thought that blogs are kind of like a secret public journal so why don't I call it that? What's funny is that now I'll see a lot of blogs and I'll see them named by people as their "secret public journal" which is really funny.

I never intended for it to be this, but it became this excellent writing deadline that forced me to write, and because it forced me to write I became more prolific and had a lot more material. I ended up reading these on radio shows like Bob & Tom's and recently I had an entry picked up by "This American Life" and I'm working on another piece for them. The blog is something I spend a lot of time on, I've been approached by some publishers and while I want to write a book I want to make sure that it's not just a compilation of blog posts.
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Birbiglia performs "Sleewalk With Me" at the Wilbur Theater on Saturday, October 11th.

You can listen to Birbiglia's "This American Life" piece, "Fear of Sleep" on this podcast.

Birbiglia's website where you can read his blog, "My Secret Public Journal" and sign up for tour and other info.