Tell it like it is: Comedian Mike Birbiglia's guide to better storytelling

A few years ago, New York stand-up Mike Birbiglia made the transition from telling shorter bits (self-admittedly ripping off Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg) to fuller comic stories, and his career took off. His first purely storytelling effort, 2007's My Secret Public Journal Live, is as honest, hilarious, and memorable as every comedy album should be. He then took a collection of stories about his real-life sleepwalking disorder and honed them for a one-man show called Sleepwalk With Me, which was produced by Nathan Lane and opened in New York to rave reviews. He even got to tell a few sleepwalking stories on This American Life. Now that the show's ended its eight-month run, he's started developing it as a book and a film, and going out with new stories on his I'm In The Future Also tour, stopping at the State Theater Sept. 26. Because the art of storytelling has played such a significant role in Birbiglia's career, The A.V. Club asked him to teach the world how to tell better stories. 

Step 0: Disclaimer

Mike Birbiglia: Whenever you talk about anything technical as a comedian, you always run the risk of people just going, “Well, what does this guy know?” So I want to preface all my comments by saying, “… but I have no idea.” When you’re reading this interview, just write that in parentheses.

The thing that’s most rewarding about telling stories is the payoff is much more palpable. The degree to which [the audience] feels close to the performer is much higher. It’s a hard place to get to because there are a lot of bad storytellers. A bad joke-teller can just abandon ship if a joke doesn’t go well. But as a storyteller, when you’re in the middle of a story, you’re in there.

Step 1: Don't plan anything.

MB: A lot of times the best way to find out what the story is about is to walk onstage without having it completely nailed down. Because it’s in that moment of pressure where, almost, your party instincts kick in. Like where you’re at a party and someone’s like, “Hey Mike, tell that story from college about how you overslept for class and missed the final.” You get onstage and the audience is staring at you. You’re feeling out the crowd, and you’re feeling out what they’re identifying with, and you kind of go to that. That’s like taking the big piece of stone and chipping it into something that might be a bird, or might be a dog of some kind—it’s something, but it’s not a stone anymore.

Step 2: Figure out the starting point.

MB: I find that generally it is trial and error. Sometimes I’ll have a story that doesn’t connect with the audience, but they connect with some minor detail. I had that recently where I was talking about performing in a basketball gymnasium at Middlebury College. I had this throwaway line where I say, "And it was the first time I’d ever gotten applause in a basketball gymnasium," and people laughed at that part of it versus the rest of the story. So I started delving into why that was the case: “As a kid, I actually remember that basketball is the only sport in which I’ve ever cried while playing in a game.” And then I told that story. Another tip, I guess, is openness to where something might go.

Step 3: Script it.

MB: I’ll take recordings of telling it [onstage] four or five times, listen for where the laughs are and what the interesting parts are. Then I’ll try and write a draft of the story. There’s a few people I’m close with who I show stuff to. I'll show it to Ira Glass if I feel like it’s good enough to be considered for This American Life; [Sleepwalk With Me director] Seth Barrish; my brother Joe Birbiglia, who collaborates with me as well. I’ll take their notes. I’ll do a new draft. Then I’ll go out and do the story again with the notes in mind. I always try to tell people who write stories, find people you can collaborate with whose instincts and aesthetic you agree with, and people whose aesthetic you like. And tell them to be really critical. Take in the criticisms. This is the biggest mistake I see in storytellers, comedians, filmmakers who are starting out. They get notes from people and they’re like, “Yeah, fuck that. I know what I’m doing.” And it’s like, “Really? I don’t feel like you do know what you’re doing.”

Step 4: Easy on the creative liberties.

MB: It’s really important that something is true if it is consequential. So in other words, there were points in Sleepwalk With Me where something happened in real life two months later, but for the sake of the story—not overexplaining why something took two months to happen—I would say “two weeks later.” To me, that was inconsequential. But you get into dangerous territory with truth versus fiction if you’re exaggerating something to a point where exaggeration is almost showy. “Yeah, I was driving like 175 miles per hour.” And you’re like, “Really?” Then if you ask the guy later he’s like, “Actually I was going 96.” That’s so much different than 175 miles per hour.

Step 5: Finesse with attention-grabbing asides. (A few from Birbiglia's repertoire: [Following a groan] "I know… I'm in the future also." / "Now, before I tell this part of the story, I want to remind you that you're on my side.")

MB: One of the ways that [latter] mechanism was formed was not out of some skillful writing. It's from the charity golf story where I was performing after an 11-year-old boy who had survived leukemia. I would tell that story without that qualifier, and people would just look at me like, “We hate you.” And saying “I know…” to the audience was another kind of necessity that came out of people gasping. There are certain kinds of things you don’t want to hear, and one of them is, “Uggghhh.” And also an “Ooooh.” That’s not good.

Step 6: Keep it interesting.

MB: What’s neat about those [conversational] mechanisms is that they’re very unique to a live performance. [During Sleepwalk With Me,] I would do the “I know” in different parts of the night because there was always a different thing that people would go “ooooh” about. An older audience gasps more at some of the medical stuff, because they know how consequential some of that is. Saying, “I had a tumor in my bladder,” people who are older go, “Ooooh, my friend’s had that.” The younger audiences, they gasp when you say “I cheated on my ex-girlfriend.” Older audiences kind of go, “Yeah, it’s not life threatening.”