Begin with your ending – and other great storytelling advice from Mike Birbiglia
How to find stories for the stage – and why ending them properly is key.
Master storyteller Mike Birbiglia’s pet peeve with how normal people tell stories:
Sometimes what people think is a story isn’t a story. My dad will call me and be like: “Oh, I’ve got to tell you this great story. Jim over at the post office has heard of you.” And that’s the end of the story. That’s not a story! People always say you’ve got to have a beginning, middle and end, but [expletive] the middle. If you have a beginning of story and an end of story, everyone is satisfied. At any party, if you’ve got a beginning and an end, people go: “Got it. That’s a story. I can get on board with that.” If you have a middle, you’re basically a genius.
What’s the story you should tell onstage? Birbigs on that:
“I always ask people, ‘What’s the story you don’t want to tell anyone?’ And, weirdly, that is the story you want to tell on stage,” Birbiglia says during a recent phone chat with Fast Company. “It’s the story that you’re so reluctant to tell that the audience can feel it in the room. They know, because they have stories they don’t want to tell. I think that when someone does that right, there’s an immediate empathy and the audience is more willing to go to different places, because it’s uncomfortable. I like to think of great storytelling as you’re telling secrets to the audience, because everyone loves secrets.”
The movie is about “the concept you can talk about these things your ashamed of, and more often than not, you find a deeper connection with people,” Birbiglia tells EW. “The one thing you’re most reluctant to tell, that’s where the comedy is.”
Related: The thing you least want to talk about is the thing they most want to hear.
He also advises to start with your ending and build backwards from there:
“People always say with stories: There needs to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. I disagree slightly. I feel like there just has to be an end. There doesn’t even have to be a beginning, really. You just have to have an end, and it has to be definitive, and you need to indicate to the audience that eventually you’ll get there. Because if it doesn’t end, people will be furious. They want to go home, they have plans, they have parking arrangements. They just want some ballpark indicator of how long this is going to be. The key thing is starting with your ending and then building it backwards from there.”
He also explains the importance of getting over your “stage persona” and figuring out how to truly be yourself:
People would be like, ‘You should do that on stage.’ And I swear to god, I would say, like, ‘No, no, no. My stage persona would never do that.’ That’s a huge mistake…In comedy or storytelling, it’s amazing when you figure out how to be yourself. It’s so hard to do, and it takes years and years. I still struggle with it. To this day, I’m always trying to be more myself.”
Don’t worry about having your story completely nailed down. Keeping it loose will let your “party instincts” kick in.
A lot of times the best way to find out what the story is about is to walk onstage without having it completely nailed down. Because it’s in that moment of pressure where, almost, your party instincts kick in. Like where you’re at a party and someone’s like, “Hey Mike, tell that story from college about how you overslept for class and missed the final.” You get onstage and the audience is staring at you. You’re feeling out the crowd, and you’re feeling out what they’re identifying with, and you kind of go to that...I’ll take recordings of telling it [onstage] four or five times, listen for where the laughs are and what the interesting parts are. Then I’ll try and write a draft of the story.
Birbigs also talks about how to take something personal and make it relatable via an analogy.
When you’re writing something, no matter how specific and personal it is to you, you need the audience to feel it’s about them. That is the balancing act of writing something personal, is that you need to get really specific with yourself and somehow make that feel really specific to the audience. I’ll give you an example of that. I’m trying to come up with an analogy right now for the stage. Last night I performed at Union Hall, and I’m doing so many talk shows and personal appearances that I want to be able to say things in a comedic way about making the film that people will understand, that’s relatable. But making a film is actually entirely unrelatable. There’s nothing relatable about it, it’s nothing like anything anyone has ever done, except like, 100 people in the world…
So I came up with an analogy this week that I think is going to work, and it worked last night onstage. Directing your first film is like showing up to the field trip in seventh grade, getting on the bus, and making an announcement, “So today I’m driving the bus.” And everybody’s like, “What?” And you’re like, “I’m gonna drive the bus.” And they’re like, “But you don’t know how to drive the bus.” And you’re like, “Well, I’ve been watching the bus driver, and I’ve been playing close attention. I’ve been watching other people’s bus rides. I know what I like, I know when I think a bus ride is good, and I have a notebook of things that I’ve written down that I’ve observed about other bus rides.” Sometimes you drive the bus to the location, sometimes you drive off a cliff. That can happen. So it feels very risky, but then if you get to your destination, it feels like it pays off in such a big way.
All of Birbigs’ shows are great, but Thank God For Jokes might be the most essential for aspiring comedians since it really gets at the heart of comedy and why we tell jokes.