Listening to a Mike Birbiglia stand-up routine is painful.

Not in a 'This is so terrible I want to gouge my eyes out," Carrot Top or Larry the Cable Guy-type way. Rather, you can't believe that one man has the capacity to say the wrong thing at the wrong time as often as Birbiglia.

Plus, your stomach totally kills from laughing so hard.

Take, for instance, the time Birbiglia, 30, moved his bed into a new apartment complex. A woman held the door, remarking that she wasn't worried to let him in because a rapist wouldn't have a bed like his.

'What I should have said was nothing," he said. 'But what I did say was 'You'd be surprised.'"

Rather than winging one-liners at audiences, Birbiglia has enjoyed enormous success sharing excruciatingly true stories about his life, whether they're written as entries in his famed 'Secret Public Journal" blog, or performed on his three Comedy Central specials and two live albums.

Previews of his new one-man show, 'Sleepwalk with Me," which opens off-Broadway in October, have received unfathomably stellar reviews from fans and critics. A large portion of the show draws from Birbiglia's difficulties with sleepwalking, which came to a head during a not-so-funny incident that nearly killed him.

But like Richard Pryor in 'Live on the Sunset Strip," Birbiglia has inexplicably found a way to make weighty material uproarious.

On Thursday, Sept. 18, Birbiglia will make at least one audience member at the Victoria Theater in Dayton come dangerously close to peeing their pants. He's been here before-his sister, 11 years his senior, actually went to school at UD.

'I used to come there when I was a kid," he said. 'It's a beautiful campus. I distinctly remember that socializing was a huge part of life."

Flyer News got the chance to speak with Birbiglia about stand-up, Catholic schools and Ms. Pac Man.



*My family isn't really Italian. We're more like Olive Garden Italian.*



I was going to see you on my birthday in Columbus this past June, but someone gave me Chris Rock tickets instead...

(Laughs) If you have to lose a competition, that's one I that don't mind losing. Chris is one of my favorites. I was actually just rewatching 'Bring the Pain" the other day. That's one of my favorite stand-up sets of all time.



Are you pumped to start your show off-Broadway?

I find that high school and college kids all know who I am, but then I talk to middle-aged people and they have no idea who I am. People in the Broadway world don't know me at all. I might as well be a homeless person [when I go up to these people] and be like, 'Hey I want to have a show, you guys!" It's a complete and total experiment, like really no way of knowing how it'll go. The show itself, I'm really proud of. People who have seen it really like it and I feel like my fans like it more than any of my other past shows, which is great. I'm just hoping that the theater audience takes to it.



What's the difference between your usual stand-up set and a one-man show?

It has more of an arc to it. When I do 'What I Should Have Said Was Nothing," it's like a series of stories. What it is with 'Sleepwalk with Me" is we basically made it one story. It's a series of stories that comprise ultimately one big story, and that's a tricky thing to accomplish, kind of drawing on the expertise of my director and different people I know who are playwrights. Some people come up to me and are like, 'Oh this is a play?" Some people come up to me and are like, 'No, it's not a play. But it's really good. It's stand-up." And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what people call it, but if people have been receiving it really well, we were like, well you know, let's really present it as best we can in a really nice theater. We're at the Bleeker Street Theater, which is a beautiful theater in New York where Sarah Silverman did her show 'Jesus is Magic." And we're just thrilled. We're just kind of doing this 'Sleeping While Standing" tour to get ready for the opening in October.



*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 kind of cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks. Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.*



What's your developmental process for writing a routine?

It's almost as though you have to be delusional to be a comedian, because early on it's really not going well, but with the audience you have to tell yourself that it's going great. You'll walk off after dying on stage and be like, 'You know, that was pretty good," looking for the redeeming moments. I use the one moment liberally, because at times there aren't even that. It's kind of like, 'Well, there was that one guy who smiled." So you have to magnify that in your head, because otherwise you'll never get on stage the next night, because you'll be like, 'Well, I guess human beings don't like me."



Did you have any influences in the stand-up world as a kid?

No not really, because I always secretly thought I was funny, but no one else really thought I was funny. And then I started seeing guys like Bill Cosby, Steven Wright and Steve Martin, and later on Mitch Hedberg and Richard Pryor, and I started to go, 'Oh, I guess that's the kind of stuff that I think is funny and that I think about." And it's if you can build up the courage to say that stuff to people, then maybe they would think it was funny. It was a lot of trial and error, but eventually if you work hard enough you can put together something that people aren't angry about after they just saw it when they walk out.



When was the first time you attempted stand-up?

Since I was 16 I wanted to try stand-up, but I never saw a forum for it. When I was a sophomore [at Georgetown University] there was a funniest person on campus contest, and I entered it. I spent a lot of time on it, and I won. One of the chances it got me was to open for Dave Chappelle at the D.C. Improv. This was years before his show on Comedy Central, and stuff like that, but I was still a huge fan of his at the time. That led to more opening gigs for people. Working at the D.C. Improv, I was kind of educated just by watching people like Kathleen Madigan, Mitch Hedberg, Dave Attell and Brian Regan, and eventually I kind of figured some of it out.



*They wouldn't sell condoms on campus. Which was to teach us a lesson: To save up for the abortion, because that can be a pricey fix. It seems like a crazy rule. You put a bunch of 19-year-olds in a dorm together, they're not going to be like, "I guess since we don't have condoms, we'll just play Pictionary!"*



You went to Catholic grade school and college. What is it about Catholic school that inspires so many comedians?

You're really encouraged not to speak up about stuff in Catholic school. I don't know if it's like that across the board, but I know that I was always in trouble for talking too much, saying the wrong thing and all that kind of stuff. I think that kind of suppression built up over the years, and then actually when you were allowed to talk, you were like, 'I've got a few things to say."



Was it tough for you to turn such personal, serious stuff about yourself into comedy?

It's definitely sticky, the subject, sometimes, because it bleeds into my life a little bit. Sleepwalking is still something I wrestle with. It usually takes about a year or so to figure out whether or not something will make a good story. You need the perspective of time, and it's been about four years since that incident happened. But the more distance I get from it, the more I'm able to make comedy from it. The laughter helps. If there were no laughter, it would be much more painful, I think.



All the comedy bits that I've had that are followed [like the sleepwalking bit] started out actually not going as well. My 'Cracka Please," 'Wiffleball Tony" and 'What I Should Have Said Was Nothing" bits, and the sleepwalking story, are all things that the first 10, 12 or 15 times I put them on stage really didn't work. Eventually you kind of nuance them. Those seem to be the jokes and stories that end up being the best, or the ones that you really have to ride the line on.



When you're telling a story, whether you're on stage or in your 'Journal," how much do you embellish the truth?

All those stories are true. It's actually kind of easier in a way to have your stories be true, because life is very funny in a lot of ways. Just kind of examining your reality of what's happening from different angles, you can actually find better treated stories than if you were to make up a story from scratch. So I actually find it, in an odd way, kind of an aid to developing material.



But then you get these surreal, creative ideas like 'Sleepy Karl"...

What's funny about 'Sleepy Karl" is that he's my way of describing the experience I have of waking up in the morning. I really do have a hard time getting out of bed. It's actually as though there's a voice in my head that's like, 'Why would you get up when you can make out with Ms. Pac Man?" In a strange way, that's a real part of my life.



*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!"*



Did you actually start writing in your 'Secret Public Journal" because of a recommendation from your therapist?

It was partly that. There were a lot of different reasons for writing in my journal. Part of it was that I was seeing a therapist, part of it was that I was sending e-mails out to my mailing list and I would write these short little things like, 'Hey, last week I was in Cincinnati, and I did this, this and this." Eventually I was like, 'Well, why don't I make the pieces longer?" Then I was like, 'Why don't I try to open up more in them?" And so that's sort of how it came to be.



Is there a time of the day you tend to come up with more ideas?

You know that phase between falling asleep and being asleep? A lot of people say they get ideas from that and I definitely end up with a lot of ideas from that. Mitch Hedberg has a joke that I'm going to completely butcher, but the gist of it is that he had this thing when he came up with an idea when you're trying to figure out how funny the idea is compared to how much you want to be in bed. It's almost like there's this makeshift equation in your head: "Is this funny enough for me to get out of bed?" And I definitely have that. I think of a lot of stuff before bed and in the shower...well, in a lot of places that are vicarious.



Is there a moment in your career you're most proud of?

I've always tried to surprise myself in some ways, like putting myself in situations where I'm like, "I can't even believe that I ended up here." [Doing] the Letterman show was like that for me, because when I was in my formative years of wanting to be a comedian, I was watching Letterman every night. And that I was on his show and he actually thought I was funny gave me this kind of unjustified confidence that I could do anything.



Doing this show off-Broadway and then the tour that's accompanying it is a huge achievement for me as well. It's the sum total of like four years of writing, and it it's different from the other things I've done, and I kind of put myself out there.



Is the idea of fame something that excites you, or are you kind of wary of it?

More people know who I am these days and that kind of thing, but what's fortunate is that if people come up to me in the street, it's people who I tend to like. I think it's because my comedy is true to myself. So yeah, I think it's fine. Maybe it would get worse if I got a network show or in movies or something like that where it would be unbearable. But right now, it's good to be noticed a couple times a week. It's pleasant, but I'll keep you posted.





Who: Mike Birbiglia: "Sleep While Standing Tour"

When: Thursday, Sept. 18

8:00 p.m.

Where: Victoria Theater

138 North Main Street

Dayton, OH 45402

Cost: $34

More info: www.birbigs.com