How Mike Birbiglia goes from jokes to stories to one-man show
The path of turning jokes into a narrative.
Mike Birbiglia – to Neal Brennan on Neal’s Blocks podcast – on writing a one-man show that’s funny:
You start off and you write 100 jokes that work. Well, you start off with 500 jokes that don’t work and there’s 100 that work. And then you go, “How can the 100 [jokes] be 10 stories? Or 10 chunks. And then you’re like, “Can the 10 chunks be a single narrative?”
More from Birbigs on his process:
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...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.
And here are some other Funny How posts about Birbigs:
![If I want to be a comedian [or actor/writer/improviser/director], how do I get started?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1300,h_650,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5105bbc6-c7b7-4901-978f-a2ec0df3e4aa_600x840.jpeg)
