For someone whose affably rumpled appearance suggests Matt Damon waking up from a nap, the comedian Mike Birbiglia is remarkably industrious. He is a film-maker (movies include Don’t Think Twice, a comedy about an improv group starring Keegan-Michael Key) and an actor (The Fault in Our Stars, Orange Is the New Black), and he recently played Taylor Swift’s avaricious son, who discovers at her funeral that he has been left out of her will, in the video for Anti-Hero. He also has a podcast, The Old Ones, in which celebrity guests pick apart his earlier standup routines, and another, Working It Out, in which they help him develop new material. “Like Tom Sawyer getting his friends to paint the fence,” as one guest, Nathan Lane, memorably put it.
Now the 45-year-old is bringing his latest show, The Old Man and the Pool, to the UK after a sell-out Broadway run. If he had his way, he wouldn’t reveal anything about it in advance. “I’d just say, ‘I wrote a show about mortality and I guarantee you’ll laugh for 80 minutes straight and sometimes people also feel emotions from it and – trust me – I think you’ll love it.’” He is speaking to me from his Brooklyn apartment, a large ceiling fan whirring sleepily above him so that it looks like his head has propellers.
Millions trust Birbiglia already. This is his fifth show, with three of the others – My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Thank God for Jokes and The New One – available as Netflix specials. His routines are intimate and convivial, peppered with delicious phrasing and zinging observations. He talks on stage about his wife, the poet J Hope Stein, whose soothing voice has “a thread-count of 600”; he bemoans the arrogance of the bed, the only item of furniture to have an entire room named after it; and he makes good-egg, commonsense arguments, such as his plea against tardiness: “It’s so easy to be on time because all you have to do is be early – and ‘early’ lasts for hours.”
The Old Man and the Pool begins with a catastrophic midlife MOT. Healthcare appointments usually spell trouble for Birbiglia, who had bladder cancer at the age of 20 and still suffers from a severe sleep-walking disorder that requires him to go to bed each night in a sleeping bag while wearing mittens to prevent him from unzipping himself. Prior to his diagnosis, he once jumped through a closed second-storey window of his hotel room while asleep.
This time around, he has pulmonary issues. “The doctor asked me to blow into a tube,” he recalls. “Then he said, ‘If I was going just by this, I’d say you’re having a heart attack right now.’ I did it a second time and he said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you…’” There was reason to worry: his father had his first heart attack in his 50s, while his grandfather suffered a fatal one around the same age. “He worked in a bodega in Brooklyn. One day a regular came in and said, ‘How’s it going, Joe?’ And he keeled over the counter and died. Which is sad but, in a way, also the funniest response you could possibly have. I think of him as the original comedian of the family. That is an extraordinary level of commitment.”
To add to his problems, Birbiglia was also diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Cue a tale of fear, panic and grudging exercise at his local YMCA, which gives the show its Hemingway-riffing title and makes possible the eye-catching set: a tiled tidal wave looming over Birbiglia. (Think of it as the pool of Damocles.) The heavy stuff is leavened by his springy delivery and niceness, though he bristles slightly when I use that word: “I don’t know if the audience needs me to be ‘nice’ so much as ‘human’.”
There are also odes to blissful domesticity: he and Stein have an eight-year-old daughter, Oona, whose birth was the subject of The New One, and whose chit-chat features in the latest show without tipping too far into kids-say-the-funniest-things terrain. Today, he is wearing a bracelet she made for him, its beads spelling out the word “silly”– a daily reminder to salt his talk of death with daftness, and one he has no trouble heeding.
Indeed, audiences will rarely have laughed so much while being invited to contemplate their own extinction. “All my shows,” he says, “are about the value of fearlessness when it comes to being truthful with the people you love, and how that can make us closer to each other. But this show is like the icebreaker of all icebreakers. If you don’t have a deep conversation afterwards with the person you came in with, then you probably never will.”
• The Old Man and the Pool is at Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, until 27 August, and at Wyndham’s theatre, London, from 12 September to 7 October.
