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Awkwardness and feeling alienated are always going to be a part of comedy.

Mike Birbiglia

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Mike Birbiglia
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: June 20
Actor
Comedian
Executive Producer
Film Director
Screenwriter
Stand-Up Comedian
Part
Going
Always
Awkwardness
Alienated
Comedy
Feeling
Feelings

More quotes by Mike Birbiglia

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I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, Do you guys hate me?
Mike Birbiglia
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I think our culture views success as visibility, being seen as being successful. Whereas I've learned that success is rooted in helping and connecting to other people, and knowing where you can contribute. I've kind of spent my thirties doing that, because in my twenties I was seeking any kind of success.
Mike Birbiglia
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You can express love by calling out the truth out of the situation as opposed to dancing around it.
Mike Birbiglia
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I have this habit of asking 'why do you want to do it?' and then interrupting them to say, 'here's why you want to do it.' Because it's in the 'yes...and' spirit [rule of improvisation].
Mike Birbiglia
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I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.
Mike Birbiglia
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Backup dancers are completely respectable. They're the studio musicians of dance.
Mike Birbiglia
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I'm a whitebread cracker. That's my favorite white person slur: whitebread. The other day, someone came up to me and said, What's up, whitebread? And I was like, That's not even an insult. That's just my race plus a food. I can do that, too, black bean soup! Stay out of this, Asian chicken platter!
Mike Birbiglia
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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!!
Mike Birbiglia
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The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.
Mike Birbiglia
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I used to think I was a little unstable, and then I met every girl I've ever dated.
Mike Birbiglia
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Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.
Mike Birbiglia
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The people who are the worst at news, who kind of engage in what I call the World Wrestling of news, have kind of set the bar for where news is.
Mike Birbiglia
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I read recently that women still make 30% less than men in the workplace. Which I think is fine, cause if we didn't make 30% more, you guys would marry each other.
Mike Birbiglia
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What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.
Mike Birbiglia
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My writing process is very feedback-based. When I do stand-up, I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting, and then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.
Mike Birbiglia
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Eugene Mirman is the Andy Warhol of comedy. People look to him for what's next in comedy, and he emails these people back promptly. The Will to Whatevs put me in a great mood because I was laughing out loud. Alone. That's hard to do.
Mike Birbiglia
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I feel like people have more in common than the news reports.
Mike Birbiglia
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I figured out in my thirties it was about 'what can I contribute'? And what I figured out about that is creating something from scratch, and connecting it to people.
Mike Birbiglia
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I just don't give off a great first impression.
Mike Birbiglia
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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 kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.
Mike Birbiglia