The New One

by Mike Birbiglia

  I’d think, That seems terrible. Then I’d sign the form. Do your best… Mike Birbiglia.

  “We may accidentally replace your balls with those Chinese yin and yang balls.”

  Namaste… Mike Birbiglia.

  The night before the scheduled procedure, I make the mistake of going on a surgery message board. A gentleman who had this exact procedure wrote in all caps:

  “DO NOT HAVE THIS SURGERY. YOUR PENIS WILL NEVER WORK AGAIN.”

  So I call Dr. Kaplan in the middle of the night and say, “I was doing some research and this one guy was screaming about how his penis never worked again. Is that one possible outcome?”

  Dr. Kaplan says, “Mike, a lot of these people are gettin’ this stuff done by amateurs.” Which I picture immediately. Some rogue sportsman geared up with outdoor equipment and rubber gloves, shouting, “I like huntin’, I like fishin’, I do varicocele repairs out in the garage!”

  But what Dr. Kaplan doesn’t say is that the scenario of the penis never working again isn’t a possible outcome—so maybe it is. Sometimes doctors speak in fine print. So I’m worried.

  At this point Jen doesn’t think this surgery is a good idea. I don’t think it’s a good idea.

  I’m sitting on my couch in the middle of the night, thinking, Jen would be a great mother and I don’t want to get in the way of that, so I’ll let ’em tinker with my balls for a few hours.

  Well, tinker, they do. The next morning I limp out of outpatient surgery after several hours and for eight days I walk around New York City like a cowboy in snow.

  People say, “What happened?”

  I say, “Unnecessary ball surgery.”

  As if that isn’t bad enough, I’m booked at Loyola University in Chicago two days later. I would have canceled, but I was booked with Ke$ha and then she canceled. And when this massively popular pop star canceled I didn’t realize that I would be post-surgery on the day of the show so I had confidently tweeted: “Ke$ha cancels her Loyola-Chicago performance, but Mike B$rb$gl$a will be there with even more dollar signs in his name.”

  When I wrote this tweet, I didn’t know that I would be icing my testicles before the performance. So I fly to Chicago and, moments before I walk onstage, Joe calls me and says, “Mike, I forgot to tell you that this show has a decency standard. It says that everything you say must be in keeping with the Catholic values of Loyola University and cannot contain anything obscene, indecent, or profane.”

  And I think, This is gonna be tricky because what they have just done to my testicles is obscene, indecent, and profane. So I hang up the phone. I pause for a moment. I want to be decent but I also want to be honest about my physical situation. I’m exhausted. I’m in pain. I don’t want to be there. So I hobble onstage and I say, “Hey, everybody, I’m limping because I just had unnecessary ball surgery. But I’m here tonight because I am not Ke$ha!”

  The show was decent, though perhaps not up to code. But here’s the upshot: The varicocele surgery worked.

  Now I’m shootin’ firebombs. Slingin’ rockets in every direction. Laser accuracy. Everyone I’m even shaking hands with is walking away pregnant.

  I’m about to find out that one of those people is my wife.

  WE GOT A WIN!

  It’s a humid summer day when I return from Appleton, Wisconsin, and collapse on our beloved green/gray couch.

  Jen says, “I’m pregnant.”

  I jump up and shout, “Yes!” because I have forgotten that I didn’t want to have a kid.

  That is how dumb my brain is. Even though I didn’t want to have a kid, when Jen says she is pregnant, I think, We got a win! Now what?!

  In that moment I am more excited than Jen. She says, “I’m not gonna be able to celebrate until the baby is born.”

  I say, “That might take the fun out of it because I’ve heard that pregnancy can be very long.”

  Jen is pregnant for about seventy-five months. I’m not sure of the exact amount of time, but it’s a long duration. And the pregnancy is brutal.

  It’s hard for her too.

  It’s terrifying because it doesn’t feel like we have a baby. It feels like we have a gift card for a baby. We have a pile of gift cards in our drawer from Circuit City and Coconuts Records and Tapes, so we aren’t optimistic.

  The first remarkable fact we learn is that in a woman’s first trimester, her hormones double—

  Every three days.

  That is so much.

  It’s like my wife is having her period times infinity. To be clear, I’m a big fan of my wife’s period. I’m even more sexually attracted to her during her period in a way that she finds hilarious and almost unbelievable. I’m attuned to her period the way she’s attuned to my sleepwalking. Jen knows when I might sleepwalk before it even happens. The way older folks feel aches in their bones before a storm, Jen can predict my sleepwalking and I can predict her period.

  That said, this is like a period the scope of which I have never witnessed.

  You know how on a clear night you can look at the sky and see hundreds of stars and behind those stars hints of other stars and you can imagine an infinite universe of stars and planets and moons? That’s how many periods it is.

  The first hint of this is when we interview this OB-GYN, which, if you’re not familiar, stands for “Open Broken Gooey Yabaganadanayana.” She seems thoughtful and knowledgeable and we walk out and Jen says, “She’s a fucking monster.”

  I say, “I totally agree. She’s not good at being a doctor.”

  But that’s not enough. She says, “No, she’s a fucking monster!”

  I shout, “Yeah, she’s a fucking monster!!!”

  Now I’m screaming at the top of my lungs in broad daylight on the corner of Twenty-Ninth Street and First Avenue about a doctor who I think is pretty good.

  Around the time of these doctor visits, Jen writes a series of poems whose main character is a fish:

  Fish Doctor Play

  “FISH tell me your symptoms.”

  FISH closes her eyes, leans on DOC’s hairy chest: “I’m sensitive to light… sound… odor… when I enter a room, I can smell everything that ever took place. As a consequence, I experience nausea 70–90% of the time and although I try, when my body convulses, nothing comes out…

  My skin breaks out into sand-dial-shaped hives but when I try to show anyone the marks on my body vanish and no one believes me…

  And then there’s this hook here in my eye.

  But DOC the worst symptom of all… is when I wake in the morning and the symptoms are gone. The pain is the worst when the symptoms are gone.”

  When we get home from the doctor, Jen says, “Will you go to the grocery store and get me some pretzels?”

  I say, “Yeah, I’ll head over there in a few minutes.”

  And then what happens… is that Jen starts crying the most I’ve ever seen her cry in the twelve years we’ve known each other.

  I say, “Clo, what’s wrong?”

  She says, “I need the pretzels now.”

  So I jog to the store like a snack food superhero and take photos of three types of pretzels, and I text them to her and she writes back, “ALL OF THEM.”

  I write back, “I saved your best friend’s life.”

  My neighbor spots me photographing the pretzels.

  He says, “Mike, what are you doing?”

  It’s early in the pregnancy so we aren’t telling anyone. I say, “This is something I’m into. I have a lot of secrets, Tony.”

  He says, “When my wife was pregnant she craved pretzels.”

  I say, “That’s irrelevant.”

  All Jen can eat for a while is pretzels because she has awful morning sickness. But the morning sickness continues into the second trimester, which is more rare. So we’re googling “What happens when the morning sickness doesn’t stop?”

  And the internet basically says, “That isn’t a thing.”

  And we’re thinking, But it’s happening.

&
nbsp; The internet is really not the best doctor. It’s like if you had a doctor who was on amphetamines. He’s like, I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s cancer! Maybe it’s blood clots! I’m not responsible for this! I’m just data, man! Yo, you ever think about Viagra? Sorry, I was peekin’ at your history!

  One night we’re sitting on the couch and Jen says, “I found this one site that says ‘blow jobs can cure morning sickness’”—which isn’t on WebMD, it’s just in the comments section.

  Heroes aren’t always the people you expect. They’re not always the first responders or the paramedics.

  Sometimes it’s a guy with a laptop and a convincing username.

  BOMB JOKES

  When Jen tells me she’s pregnant I’m in the middle of a 112-city tour.

  That month I’m in Pittsburgh—then Cleveland—then Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Champaign, Indianapolis, Chicago, and then back to New York City for a corporate event honoring the Association of Urologists, a gig I performed while I was awake.

  As I stuff five pairs of underwear into a backpack I say to Jen, who sits on our green/gray couch: “I have this new joke: My wife is pregnant, which is exciting because I’ve been meaning to grow into my look.”

  Jen says, “It would make me uncomfortable if you talked about the pregnancy onstage.”

  I say, “Got it.”

  Jen’s intense need for privacy is not a put-on. This is real. And I’m torn. Because part of me is literally part of her and she doesn’t want me to talk about it. I don’t love this because it’s, well… breaking one of our vows—that I could always talk about us onstage.

  That’s okay, I wishfully think. This will be our onetime exception.

  That said, it’s challenging. A solid chunk of my life is spent living and another hearty slice is spent onstage telling jokes about living. For the first time since Jen and I met I am forbidden from talking about our life together. It’s off-limits.

  I pass through security at LaGuardia Airport. There’s a sign that instructs us not to tell “bomb jokes,” which is a phrase that never ceases to make me smile because I know that my childhood self would be furious. No bomb jokes? Why not? Those are the best jokes! To clarify, when I say “bomb jokes” I don’t mean “jokes that bomb,” which I’m acquainted with as well, but rather “jokes about bombs.” When I would occasionally fly as a kid my brother, Joe, and I would exclusively tell bomb jokes. Bomb jokes are the funniest jokes one can tell when one is nearby a location that might contain bombs. Therein lies the risk and reward of jokes. We joke about things we are most anxious about to defuse the anxiety of the actual threat. We’re defusing bombs with jokes about bombs. Or maybe we’re just being idiots.

  Jen is pregnant, which is its own type of bomb. Something will probably explode, and, if we’re lucky, no one will get hurt. The more I think about it, the more I want to tell jokes about it.

  I’m sitting on my flight from New York City to Pittsburgh and I pick up the complimentary USA Today, everyone’s favorite coloring book that sometimes contains words. I’m reading about a man on a flight from Philadelphia to the Dominican Republic who sneezed and then shouted, “I have Ebola.”

  To clarify—he didn’t have Ebola. The outburst was, according to him, “a joke.”

  All jokes are subjective, but I feel pretty comfortable judging this joke as not a good joke. I’m not even really sure which was the joke part. I suppose the setup was the sneeze and then the punch line was “I have Ebola.” After he said, “I have Ebola,” he actually also said, “You’re all screwed.”

  Maybe that was the punch line?

  Well, regardless of this aspiring comedian’s experimental joke structure, the pilot of his aircraft landed immediately and the plane was met with crews of workers in hazmat suits. So it wasn’t an ideal comedic debut for “Ebola Man.”

  What jumped out at me in this story was that Ebola Man’s defense was that he was “joking”—which seems to be the modern catchall defense for any outburst of random, despicable behavior. So many of these stories about workplace sexual harassment seem to have some scummy guy saying things like, “Nice tits, Betsy!” and then, when people call out the creep he’ll say, “I’m joking!” Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with “I’m joking.”

  I’m sitting on this flight to Pittsburgh jotting down thoughts about the sensitivity of jokes. What occurs to me is that people have the right to offend others with jokes and, equally, people have the right to be offended by them.

  I flash back to a time when I was on a flight eating a chicken salad sandwich. To give context, I fancy myself a professional traveler. I’m always two hours early. I wear laceless moccasins. And I board flights with enough food to last me six weeks in the event of a crisis. This particular chicken salad sandwich I was eating was on walnut raisin bread. The flight attendant came over and said, “Excuse me, are there nuts in your sandwich?”

  Generally, when I eat, I am consumed by the food as I am consuming the food, so I had to take a moment to disconnect from my sandwich and say, “Um, I think so?”

  The flight attendant said, “Actually you can’t eat that on the plane because the woman seated over there by the window has a nut allergy.”

  And I said, “Um… I won’t feed them to her.”

  He said, “Actually she’ll have a reaction even if there are nuts in the air.”

  I said, “Nuts in the air?”

  I tried to be respectful as crumbs of nut bread spilled out of my mouth. I looked at the woman with the allergy and I said to her, “Are you serious? You’ll have a reaction if there are nuts in the air?”

  And she said, “Yes, I’ll have a reaction if there are nuts in the air.”

  I thought, You shouldn’t leave the house. There are nuts everywhere.

  I asked the flight attendant, “Is there anywhere I can finish the sandwich?”

  And he said, “You can eat it in the bathroom.”

  So I walked back to JetBlue’s coffin-sized bathroom and cracked into my chicken salad sandwich, experiencing the airplane bathroom’s symphony of smells: urine and antiseptic and mayonnaise. Then I’m gagging. Then I’m eating more of the sandwich. Then I’m gagging. Then I’m eating more of the sandwich. And I realized at that moment that I have what is called a “fecal airspace allergy.” And it isn’t just if I eat feces, it is if the feces are in the air.

  After the nut allergy flight I told that story onstage in San Francisco and it definitely got laughs. But I felt conflicted about it because I thought, Maybe I shouldn’t tell jokes about a life-threatening allergy, but then I also thought, Jokes have to be about something. After that show I was signing posters for audience members and this kid came up to me who was about fifteen years old. He asked me if I would sign his EpiPen. He has a nut allergy so he brings the EpiPen with him wherever he goes because if he has an allergic reaction his mom has to spike him in the leg so he doesn’t die. So I signed it. And we shared this laugh together, me and this kid who confronts this terrifying reality every day of his life. I was really moved by this experience because I feel like the jokes that touch on the most painful topics can often bring the deepest laughs and the most healing. That’s why I try to talk onstage about my greatest sources of pain. I talk about how I jumped out a second-story window in my sleep and how I was nearly killed by a drunk driver and how I had a malignant tumor when I was nineteen. And those are my best jokes.

  I’m thinking about all of this on my flight to Pittsburgh and jotting down ideas on my JetBlue napkin, and it occurs to me that this will be the topic of my new show. If I’m not allowed to talk about me and Jen, I will talk about the nature of jokes themselves. I call it Thank God for Jokes. It’s about how jokes have the potential to alienate us from other people but also the possibility to make us closer. I believe that a shared joke, whether with friends or your husband or an audience, is one of the single most uniting experiences one can have. That night I’m talking about thi
s onstage and it occurs to me that sharing a private joke with an audience is so intimate that, in a way, it’s like marrying the audience. I improvise to that night’s crowd: “In a way, it’s like we’re married.” Then I take a long pause and say, “I do.”

  In the process of my writing and performing Thank God for Jokes, the world witnessed a tragic incident involving jokes.

  Twelve people were killed in France over an offensive cartoon of Mohammed. The satire was not my personal taste, but what struck me was that these were comedy writers who were murdered for their jokes.

  One of my friends said, “Can’t these people just write jokes that aren’t offensive?”

  And I said, “I’m not sure that’s possible… because all jokes are offensive… to someone.”

  I start talking about all of this onstage. It leads to this thesis about humor that the world is shrinking and that, despite people’s differing jokes and opinions, civility matters. And it’s becoming increasingly important to acknowledge this new reality because we can transmit images and essays and jokes thousands of miles across the earth in seconds. So Russia is our neighbor. China is our neighbor. Texas is our neighbor.

  But it begs the question: What does it mean to be a decent neighbor?

  I think part of it is just listening to people in the context in which they intend their words.

  By the time I end the tour I’ve included elements of the tragedy in France along with the idea that we are all neighbors and that the act of marrying one another with jokes is perhaps healing.

  I perform this show in over a hundred cities and marry over 100,000 people. But there’s something I miss: my actual wife. Jenny. Clo. J. Hope Stein.

  Jen has always worked with me on my shows and my movies. It’s something we’ve always shared. We are each other’s first readers. But now she isn’t in that headspace. She is neck-deep in becoming a mom. It’s the first time since we got married that there is a hint of distance. We aren’t spending enough time together on the couch.