I love pizza. I want to marry it, but it would just be to eat her family at the wedding.
Mike Birbiglia
Ultimately, jokes are this really special thing that we can all share. It's exciting to have basically a thousand people in a room together that can laugh at the same time, but I think of it almost as, like, a religious experience.
My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.
The ability to workshop in stand-up comedy is incomparable to any art form, in my opinion.
My first car was, as depicted in 'Sleepwalk with Me,' my mother's '92 Volvo station wagon that had 80,000 miles on it, and I had put 40,000 miles on it, so by the time it retired it had 120,000, and I basically killed it. It served me well, and my mechanic was always very angry with me because I just didn't properly care for it.
Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.
When I was growing up, I didn't know who Jewish people were, what it was to be Jewish.
The way I view comedy clubs is, people are drinking, they're ordering food, they're out for the night, and there's also a person onstage talking. And with the theater, they came to the theater, and they're waiting to hear what you say. So you'd better have something to say.
The thing with film is that it's so wide-reaching compared to comedy. When I release my comedy special, half a million people will see it. If I release a movie, five to ten million people will see it.
I actually wasn't really the class clown growing up. The class clown was always the mean guy who walked up and was like, 'You're fat. You're gay. I'm outta here!' I was always more kind of awkward and introspective.
I love Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel.
I never looked at my parents' marriage or really anyone who had been married more than 30 years and thought, 'I gotta get me some of that!'
I've yet to write a stand-up show that isn't autobiographical.
Someone gave me a piece of advice once, my first manager Lucien Hold. He said, 'If you do stand-up about your own life, no one can steal it.' I always thought that was the best piece of advice.
People are making better and better small budge independent films these days.
The one thing you're most reluctant to tell. That's where the comedy is.
My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
I'm going to end up making twenty films if people let me.
You know the expression, 'You're only as sick as your secrets?' I believe that, and I think I try to have my work live by that to a degree.
I grew up in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and went to college in Washington D.C.
You don't really see sleepwalking in films that often. It's weird; I feel like in popular culture we have the perception of sitcom, arms-in-front-of-your-body sleepwalking, and then maybe Olive Oil and Popeye when she sleepwalks through the construction site. But it's all very cartoonish, in some cases literally.
Making a film is beyond exciting. It's so exciting, it's exhausting.
I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.
Jokes are so personal, and they bring us together in so many ways.
I couldn't recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.
In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.
I end up talking about really mundane things with my fans, and then they're kind of like, 'This is boring. I want to go talk to somebody else.' I think I bore my fans to death by over-talking to them.
When I was in high school I saw Steven Wright, a brilliant one-liner comedian, and I thought: 'That's what I should do; I should write one-liners.' And I did. My first album is mostly one-liners.
I've read that Steven Wright's style was born out of genuine nervousness.
'Terminator 2' is so good. I love it.
You know the quickest way to get comedians to hate you? Do Letterman at age 24.
Comedy unites, it doesn't divide!
The moment I walk into a room, I have kind of like the Terminator's tracking system for where the food is, and I can get there immediately.
I love 'Bullets Over Broadway,' but I'm pretty sure Woody Allen hasn't killed somebody.
I am diagnosed with what's called 'REM behavior disorder.' As far as the disorder goes, there's no cure, but it's going pretty well as far as these things go. I see a sleep doctor, take medication, etc.
My last name has the word 'big' in it. It seems like a logical progression that if you shed away the Bir and the lia, I'll just be Big.
When I go to bed at night, I wear a sleeping bag. And for a long time, I wore mittens so that I couldn't open the sleeping bag.
As a comedian, you want people to like you. That's part of why you're there in the first place: You have this unquenchable need to be liked, and then when you divert from that and take a chance at doing something that has moments of fierce unlikeability, you can hit some real low points.
Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.
I would say that I love pizza so much that sometimes I eat pizza while I'm eating pizza. Like, I'm so content with myself with how it's going that I'm like, 'I should do this more,' not realizing that the mouth is full. I'm just cramming pizza into my mouth.
Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.
Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you don't act out your dreams.
When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.
I think the thing I had to be careful about while writing a book was not to say anything that was revealing about other people that they would be uncomfortable with. I didn't want to make people angry - that's a real risk.
Directing a movie is a little bit like being back in student government and putting on the homecoming dance. You're like, 'You put up the streamers, and you hire the DJ, and you get the punch bowl.' Some people are just like, 'This dance sucks.' And you're like, 'No no, this dance is awesome!' You have to be really positive.
Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing, and it's almost holding you back.
Random people, celebrities of note come to your shows over the years, and I've had some really strange ones. Like the guy from Kiss. Gene Simmons has literally been in the audience at my shows, like, four times. I don't know if he knows me; he's just a big fan of comedy.
I sometimes think of not doing Twitter or Facebook anymore, but that's how people find their favorite bands and comedians.
One of my favourite movies is 'Annie Hall' because it's about the silver lining of the break-up.
