I found an apartment in New York with dirt-cheap rent and at night I would go to comedy clubs and try to just “be around.” That was advice I was given. Just “be around.” I was around at the Comic Strip one night when Lucien said to me, “Mike, I’m not passing you at the club but I was asked to put some young comics on a showcase for Adam Sandler’s production company. Maybe you could do some of your Teletubbies material.” That Saturday night I killed in front of a hot 8:00 p.m. crowd. I had to. It was my only chance. Lucien said, “Audiences seem to like you. Why don’t you call the club with your availability?”
Then he looked over at his assistant Maria and said, “Will you write down the phone number for Mike?” That meant I could do one spot a week at the club and that if I hung out for the whole night on standby I might perform on “late night,” which meant that if there was even one last pathetic audience member left after a four-hour show who was still willing to order a drink, I would go on. I was there every night. Maria wrote the number down on a Comic Strip business card and I still remember it. 212-496-1424. It was one of the only numbers I called for the next six months.
I was getting one spot a week at the Comic Strip, which paid ten dollars, so I needed another $460 a month to pay my rent. I needed a plan.
I asked my struggling actor friends if they had any tips for making cash, and my friend Chris said, “Call this number and ask for Diane. Tell her that I sent you.” So I called the number and a cheery voice answered: “This is the Laurie Group!” It was the kind of voice that you imagine stewardesses in the seventies had and I thought, How come no one pretends to be that happy anymore?
I asked for Diane and she said, “Absolutely!” This was going to be much easier than I thought. Maybe she’ll bring me a soft drink and a warm towel. I spoke to Diane and she couldn’t have been more thrilled to get my call. She loved Chris, which was strong language, because I wasn’t even sure I loved Chris. I mean I loved Chris like Jesus loves all, but I didn’t love him more than others. I told her that I had recently graduated from college and was looking for a job.
She said, “Fantastic!” It was the best news she had heard all day: I had graduated from college!
Diane invited me to come in for an interview the next day. In the waiting room, I read the Laurie Group literature and discovered that the Laurie Group had originally been an all-women’s temp agency. They called their temps “Laurie Girls.” Just recently they had started using some guys. So they were “Laurie Girls and some guys.” Diane called me in for the interview and it went as well as the phone conversation. Before I left, they asked me to take a typing test. Now, typing is certainly not my forte. Over the years I had flirted with Mavis Beacon but we’d never gone all the way. When I only scored about forty-two words per minute, they weren’t thrilled with my score, but it was enough. They said they had an assignment for me the next day. It only paid eleven dollars an hour but it would get my foot in the door. I felt like Tom Hanks’s character in Big.
“Eleven dollars an hour?”
I had gotten my first real-world job. I was a Laurie Girl (and some guys.)
I showed up to an advertising firm the next day. The offices were in a forty-five-story building and I was given a desk in the basement.
How about floor two? Or three? Anything near the commissary?
No.
Basement. No windows. Not many people, really. But I had an overseer who showed me how to do data entry. Data entry is a fascinating job where you . . . type . . . in . . . data . . . that’s been . . . written on something else. You can press tab and jump from field to field, and you need to remember to capitalize proper nouns like people’s names and their streets. The first ten minutes of data entry fly by, because you’re really getting the hang of it. The remaining seven hours and fifty minutes go a lot more slowly, because you glance at the clock after you finish every entry.
Data entry is the white-collar equivalent of potato peeling. “Oh, you finished peeling all those potatoes? Well super, because we have a couple hundred more sacks of potatoes!”
I fell asleep with such regularity at this job that I developed a strategy for falling asleep while sitting up in the typing position. It was the closest my life had come to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and it worked. No one ever caught me sleeping. But one day I had been sleeping for a whole hour. I had slept so long that when I woke up I needed to surf the web as a stimulant to get riled up for some more hard-core data entry action. And as I was surfing the web, my overseer sneaked up behind me, looked at my screen, and said, “I caught ya! You’re checking your email.” I thought, You should have been here five minutes ago when I was unconscious. That would have been far more exciting.
I thought that would be the end of my Laurie Girl days, but it wasn’t. They called me the next week with a new job. A better job. An administrative assistant at a women’s magazine that paid fifteen dollars an hour. It was a three-day stint with potential for more if I did well. I went in and did my first two days, and I rarely saw my boss but I answered her phone and did anything else anybody asked me to.
The night before my third day, I had been up doing the late night show at the Comic Strip, which started around 1:00 a.m. and went until about 2:00 or 2:30. After that, I did some more shows at other smaller venues. Starting out as a comic in New York City, it’s not unusual to get a five-minute slot at three in the morning performing in front of three other people, who themselves are waiting to do their own five-minute slot. These aren’t at comedy clubs; they’re in hotel lobbies or in dark, strange apartments that have been filled with long wooden benches and converted to performance spaces. It was kind of like I was living the life of a superhero: by day I was an administrative assistant, and by night I was an insomniac with five minutes of comedy.
So after these shows I got back to my apartment in Astoria, Queens, around 3:30 a.m. and don’t recall anything else until looking at my clock at 11:15 a.m. And I was three hours late for my job at the women’s magazine. I scrambled to the R line on the subway and by the time I got to the office it was almost noon. Maybe no one had noticed?
There was a woman working at the desk next to me, and she solemnly said, “Hey Mike, you’re supposed to call your temp agency.”
I said, “Okay,” and picked up the phone and called Diane.
“Hey Mike! They’re not going to need you today, so just fill out a timecard for your travel time to and from your apartment and we’ll get you paid for that.”
I felt a little bad. I looked over at my boss’s closed door and then I whispered to the woman who sat next to me, “Should I pop in her office and apologize?”
She looked at me like I had just asked her, “Is a fork the thing with the four sharp pointy things, or is that the spoon?”
She said, “Mike, I don’t think you want to go in there.”
I said, “Is it because I was so late?”
She said, “She didn’t like you before you were late. There was a whole list of things you didn’t do.”
As it turns out, there was an actual list. Because this woman who sat next to me pulled it out and started reading it. Things like opening and sorting the boss’s mail, getting her lunch, and a bunch of other very specific tasks. I was so much worse an employee than I ever could have imagined and on top of that, I didn’t even show up. On my way out, my cubicle neighbor said, “You know, Mike, we do like you. It would be great if you were here but you’re not.” She was right.
My agent Marcy called and said in her unusually high-pitched voice, “You need to fly to Hollywood immediately! Immediately!!”
I had just returned from the Montreal Comedy Festival where I had performed in the “New Faces of Comedy” category.
“I’ve set up some meetings for you.”
“Uh . . . okay.” I said. “What are these meetings about?”
“We gotta get you a deal!”
“What kind of deal?”
“A sitcom deal!”
Marcy told me s
tories about Ray Romano and then a bunch of people I had never heard of who got deals after this festival for ridiculous sums of money. This was a perfect situation. Someone was going to give me a lot of money and I needed a lot of money. At this point, my bank balance was in parentheses, which means, ”Let’s say you had money, it might be this much money, but since you don’t, you owe us this much money.” If I could get a deal, I could stop temping.
I said, “Count me in, Marcy! Let’s go get a deal!”
I didn’t even like sitcoms. I didn’t want to be on a sitcom. What I wanted to be was a traveling comedian. But I thought, This will be the thing that will get my parents off my back!
My parents had been urging me to get out of comedy and make a real living ever since I announced my chosen “profession.” The first time I told my father I was performing at comedy clubs he said, “Comedy clubs? What do they do? Strip? You can’t make a living doing that! You need some goddamn reality testing!!”
He had a point. Not about the stripping, but about the career choice. The overwhelming majority of comics lose money each time they perform. By the time you include your many expenses (gas, tolls, rental cars, Funyuns), the seventy-five-dollar gig fee disappears fast.
It’s 11:30 p.m. and I get off the phone with Marcy and I book the first flight I can to Los Angeles. For the next few days, I do what everyone in Hollywood does instead of their job: I take meetings.
I’m taking meetings with people who are theoretically going to give me a deal. I have no idea what I am doing. I later found out that neither did Marcy. She would call these production companies or networks I was meeting with and say, “Mike needs a deal!” Which, I think, is the opposite of how you get a deal. You have to pretend you have all kinds of deals about to happen. Like you’re gonna pass out if you get handed one more deal. You can’t tell them you need a deal. I thought Marcy and I had a kind of secret code language. Nope, that was our strategy: Mike needs a deal.
For six days I stayed on my friend Adam’s couch and he chauffeured me around town. I couldn’t get a rental car because they don’t accept parentheses. He would drive me from meeting to meeting. Adam is gay, in the stereotypical way where he criticizes the way I dress and look and act. He’s like Perez Hilton except he’s willing to rip apart your appearance even if you’re not famous. I would go to these meetings, and it would go okay. Then I’d come out to the car and Adam would say, “You look fat in that shirt.”
I’d be like, “Well, thank you. I was feeling pretty good a second ago, but I had been meaning to have my self-esteem knocked down to negative a thousand.”
Executives call these “general meetings” though they really ought to call them “meaningless events that make it seem like I shouldn’t lose my job, which I should.” These are meetings with networks and companies who have quirky names like Pinball Machine Productions or serious names like Serious Productions. You know—those companies that have their names on the end of TV shows but you don’t know what the hell they do. Well, I’ll tell you what they do. They have “general meetings.” These meetings are about thirty to sixty minutes long and they’re kind of like a speed date.
“What do you do? How’d you get started?”
The way to look cool in these meetings is to act like you have no idea why you’re there or why you’d ever want to talk about show business. You say stuff like, “Isn’t it crazy that polar bears can hear their prey from thirty miles away?”
And they say, “Mike Birbiglia is so interesting. He doesn’t care about show business at all!”
And then immediately after the meeting my agent Marcy would call and say, “Mike needs a deal!”
I would go into these meetings and the people in the meetings would insist that I was going to get a deal. They’d say things like, “You’re definitely going to get a deal.” And, “You don’t have a deal? You will.” Then they’d wink like they knew something I didn’t. After a few days of this, I started to believe it. I was calling everyone I knew. I was like, “I’m about to get a sitcom deal.” I think “about to” are two of the most dangerous words in the English language. Never trust people who say things like “I’m about to” or “Because I’m high.”
At this point, I’m calling my parents, my brother Joe, my friends from college. “You were wrong about me! I’m gonna get a deal! I’m gonna have my own sitcom! I’m about to date Heather Locklear!”
Even my dad, always skeptical, took note: “How much do they give you for these deals?”
I said, “I think like a hundred thousand dollars.”
My dad said, “Well, I guess I’m in the wrong profession.”
I said, “Yeah, I know.” And I thought, Who needs some reality testing now?
A few days later I fly home, and as I’m sitting on the plane it’s occurring to me that I don’t have a deal. I think, What about my deal? That lady from Siamese Twins Entertainment told me that I was going to get a deal! The guy from Choco-Taco Productions told me I was a genius, and should maybe co-host some kind of polar bear animated feature thing!
I land in New York and check my messages.
No messages.
I call Marcy.
“Hey . . . what’s up with the deal?”
Marcy says, “It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. No one’s getting deals this year.”
I found out later that this is what they tell people who don’t get deals, that no one got a deal. But they did. Some people did. Just not me.
I get back to my tiny apartment and I look at my parentheses balance and I feel so tricked. I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn’t. I’m still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister’s frequent flier miles just six days before. It was my first brush with a business full of fast talkers. They convinced me that my life was going to be changed, and it wasn’t. I think this is the reality my dad had warned me about.
I CAN’T STOP!
I was the youngest of four kids, so really anytime anyone was willing to talk to me or spend any time with me at all, I would gladly accept. My brother took advantage of this, and so when I was three, I became Joe’s personal soccer goalie.
I got to be pretty good. I was never a natural athlete, but I developed an uncanny ability to dive headfirst at soccer balls. “You gotta throw your body at the ball,” Joe would say. And I would. I thought, All you got to do to win is throw your body at the ball.
A few years later my diving-headfirst-at-balls technique paid off when I was selected as the starting goalie for Shrewsbury’s prestigious traveling soccer team.
During the game, in Oxford, Massachusetts, I went head-to-head with an Oxford forward in what’s called a 50–50 ball, meaning we each had a 50–50 chance of getting to it. I dove headfirst and got to the ball.
That was the good part.
The bad part was that when the other team’s player arrived at my head, he decided, since there was no longer a ball available, to kick my head with the same velocity that he would have used to kick the ball.
Let me rephrase that: an eleven-year-old kid kicked my head as though it were a soccer ball that needed kicking as hard as humanly possible. I don’t remember anything after that, but here’s what I’m told happened next:
1. The referee blew the whistle and a bunch of players and coaches ran over to me, shouting, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I jumped right up and said, “I’m great! I’m fine!” They said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah! I’m good!”
2. The game continued.
3. About five minutes later, I started walking aimlessly off the field, oblivious to the game in which I was participating. I recognized one person: Tom Bachmann, my defenseman and the coach’s son. “Tom . . . ” Tom looked over at me. I was no longer on the field. I was somewhere between the field and a concession stand nearby. Tom said, “Mike, what’s going on?” I said, “Tom, what are we doing?” Tom said, “Mike, we’re playing a soccer game.” I said, “Tom . . . I think I n
eed to talk to my dad.”
The coaches ran over, as did my dad. They pulled me out of the game and put in another goalie named Jim, who was immediately scored on four or five times. Apparently he did not have the proper throw-your-body-at-the-ball mentality that the position required. We lost pretty badly. I drove home with my dad, disoriented. They were careful to make sure I didn’t go to sleep because of that whole thing with concussions and sleeping and dying. And I never played goalie again. But I used that aggression elsewhere.
• • •
When you’re self-employed, you’re your own boss. You’re also your own employee. You’re also your own tech support. And your own finance department. All those jobs can make one person a little crazy.
I was living in Astoria, Queens, temping during the day and performing in New York City or driving to nearby cities at night. I was always on, and when I was off, I was still on, because the on/off switch wasn’t working too well. It’s actually never worked too well. I’ve always envied those people who have this very nuanced control over their own energy. People who can work in low gear for a few hours, take the night off and relax, and put it in high gear in the morning, only to put it into low gear for the afternoon again. I don’t have that. I’m a manic worker and manic sleeper. I’ve always crashed into sleep versus slowly easing into it. I’m a compulsive everything.
I didn’t go into show business with the intention of performing in hundreds of cafeterias, auditoriums, and multipurpose centers at colleges across the country. But in 2002, about a year into my move to New York, I was introduced to Jill McGee, who books college gigs exclusively and submits comedians to the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA) conferences. These are held seven times a year in hotel conference centers across America and they consist of live shows and then conference room “marketplaces” filled with booths where live comedy is just one of the offerings. At a regional NACA in Reno, I walked around to see some of the other booths. There was Karges the Mentalist, who bends not only spoons but also forks. There was Sailesh, the “World’s Best Uncensored Hypnotist.” There were lecture events like Gail Hand’s lecture “The Power of Laughter.” Gail and I could be a duo, I thought. I could make the audiences laugh and then she could explain why they were laughing. Perhaps my favorite booth was “The Mystical Arts of Tibet,” where students are encouraged to participate in some kind of eastern philosophy equivalent of Lite-Brite. All the booths tended to have some kind of gimmick. They hook you with something like free cookies—which worked on me. Another popular gimmick was the use of an air-filled fat suit and huge boxing gloves. One booth just had a gigantic chair, which students would sit on and have their photos taken, in an effort to appear tiny. I asked them what they sold and they said, “This is what we sell.”
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