Death is no laughing matter. At least, most of the time it isn’t.
A comedian as gifted as Mike Birbiglia, however, can spin a 78-minute yarn about confronting his own mortality into something as hysterically funny as any pure standup special.
The Old Man and the Pool, which is streaming on Netflix starting November 21, finds Birbiglia struggling to come to terms with the heart disease that runs in his family, and examining what that will mean for his relationship with his daughter. In other words, not exactly typical fodder for a comedy show. But Birbiglia’s command of his craft is such that it feels like perfectly natural material for a one-man Broadway show-turned-Netflix special. By the time it’s over, viewers might start to wonder why comedians don’t perform shows musing on their own eventual death all the time.
Although he started his career with more traditional, scattershot standup sets, Birbiglia has long since evolved into a comedic storyteller in a class all his own. This latest special marks the fifth time he has constructed an hour-long performance around a single narrative, following The New One most recently, from 2019. Now that the novelty of his ambitious transformation has worn off, all that’s left is just to marvel at how he somehow keeps getting better at this.
Anyone hoping to tell a long story as well as Birbiglia someday is probably in for a rude awakening if they’re not willing to put in the requisite 10,000 hours first. Each of his specials, though, are master classes in storytelling, packed with actionable nuggets of lived-in wisdom.
Here are five tips gleaned from The Old Man and the Pool that might help spice up your next all-hands meeting, coffee hang, or 10,000-hours-later Broadway show.
Nothing could be less surprising than the fact that Mike Birbiglia keeps a journal.
“I like to write in my journal every few nights, because if you write down what you’re saddest about or angriest about, you can start to see your own life as a story,” he says during the special, which uses journal-writing as a motif. “And when you see your own life as a story, sometimes you can zoom out and make better decisions.”
Birbiglia has the self-knowledge and eye for detail of an inveterate journaler, which comes across most in how personal his shows tend to be. Getting personal doesn’t mean oversharing necessarily—although Birbiglia is no stranger to oversharing; it just means providing the little details that are quintessentially you. In this case, those details range from a physical demonstration of how terrible a high-school wrestler he was, to the hesitation he felt in passing a second plate of chicken parmigiana to a father with a heart condition.
If there is ever a point in telling a story where an important conversation takes place, one option is to simply sum it up with the most relevant takeaways. Another option, though, and the one Birbiglia is most fond of, is to portray both sides of the key portion in a dialogue, as he does several times during The Old Man and the Pool. Reenacting conversations is a chance to shake up the rhythms of your story and convey information in a fun way—especially if the conversation is an argument, which introduces conflict into the mix, or has some repetition to it, as when Birbiglia and his cardiologist keep going back and forth about whether anyone “does cardio five days a week.”
Speaking of shaking up the rhythms of your story, a comedy show about death would not be possible if it was either all hilarity or all doom-and-gloom. Instead, Birbiglia cycles through different modes to take his audience on a full excursion and keep them engaged. About 20 minutes into the joke-packed Old Man and the Pool, for instance, the comic gets serious when describing how he never told his father “I love you” when the elder Birbiglia was recovering from a heart attack. Later on, he shifts tones again, this time with a poetic interlude about how time seems to disappear underwater, in the deep end of a pool. Just as important as shifting into one of these softer modes, though, is shifting back out of it. Each time he does so, Birbiglia is sure to do a silly voice or hit a big joke, to let the audience know it’s okay to laugh again.
At any given moment in one of his stories, Birbiglia seems to know exactly what his audience needs, whether it’s a hearty laugh or something meatier to contemplate. He also seems to know exactly how the audience is going to react to what he’s serving them and beat them to the punch. When he returns to an earlier topic after going on a digression so lengthy the audience might have forgotten what preceded it, he does so abruptly but casually—which both moves the story forward and rewards audience awareness of the length of the detour. He uses the casual rejoinder, “So I explained all this to my cardiologist,” to come back from a long side-tangent, twice, and it gets a big laugh both times.
Throughout the Old Man and the Pool, Birbiglia expertly establishes different elements so he can bring them back later. Sometimes it’s painting a visual image with such graphic language—the titular old man at the pool, for instance—that the audience will be primed for its return. Other times, it’s establishing a theme—such as the difficulty the comic’s family has in expressing their love for each other—and calling it back enough times that the audience can understand a nonverbal reference to it. Establishing different threads throughout a long story, though, makes it feel like a magic trick when you weave them all together in the end.
5 storytelling tips from Mike Birbiglia’s new Netflix special ‘The Old Man and the Pool’
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21.11.2023
Death is no laughing matter. At least, most of the time it isn’t.
A comedian as gifted as Mike Birbiglia, however, can spin a 78-minute yarn about confronting his own mortality into something as hysterically funny as any pure standup special.
The Old Man and the Pool, which is streaming on Netflix starting November 21, finds Birbiglia struggling to come to terms with the heart disease that runs in his family, and examining what that will mean for his relationship with his daughter. In other words, not exactly typical fodder for a comedy show. But Birbiglia’s command of his craft is such that it feels like perfectly natural material for a one-man Broadway show-turned-Netflix special. By the time it’s over, viewers might start to wonder why comedians don’t perform shows musing on their own eventual death all the time.
Although he started his career with more traditional, scattershot standup sets, Birbiglia has long since evolved into a comedic storyteller in a class all his own. This latest special marks the fifth time he has constructed an hour-long performance around a single narrative, following The New One most recently, from 2019. Now that the novelty of his ambitious transformation has worn off, all that’s left is just to marvel at how he somehow keeps getting better at this.
Anyone hoping to tell a long story as well as........
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