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Using a videotaped welcome from Jimmy Kimmel that’s more than four years old might seem odd, or this week even more amusing and coincidental if not planned, considering Kimmel just hosted the Oscars.
But Kimmel’s intro for Mike Birbiglia’s Thank God for Jokes on Netflix serves a higher purpose – a place setting for Birbiglia to come back to his hosting gig at the 2012 Gotham Independent Film Awards as one in a series of bad or awkward gigs that allow the comedian and storyteller to reflect on the importance of, and his love for, jokes.
If you, too, love the art of joking and comedy, then you’re probably familiar with Birbiglia’s work as the writer/director/co-star of last year’s cinematic love letter to improv, Don’t Think Twice. Many of you still aren’t, though. Birbiglia knows that.
“I’m a niche. I understand that,” he jokes at the top of his 70-minute performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After taking Thank God for Jokes on a nationwide tour and an off-Broadway run, he filmed this, his third one-man show (following Sleepwalk with Me and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend), on the weekend before the presidential election – though only one of his jokes even indirectly references it. Even after all of his years in comedy and onscreen (recurring on Orange is the New Black, and supporting in Trainwreck), Birbiglia’s aware that he’s not a household name still in 2017. So back in 2012, hosting the Gotham Awards, he knew he was in trouble, telling his wife: “You should never tell jokes to the people who the jokes are about.”
Truth is, joking is never as easy as it looks or sounds.
Sure, you may not anger religious extremists to the point of assassination, as what befell the French satirists of Charlie Hebdo, but you’re much more likely to talk yourself into a visit with Human Resources at work or get kicked off an airplane with one wrong turn of phrase. “You can’t tell jokes in life almost ever,” Birbiglia says, although noting without naming the one now leader of the free world who somehow pulled it off. “Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with ‘I’m joking.’ Or ‘Git-R-Done.’”
By recounting the low moments in his own career, from a police encounter in New Jersey to a Christian college that wondered why he’d joke about Jesus (although if they could hear his Woody Allen as Jesus turned Bernie Sanders, they’d certainly absolve him of any past sins!), to an ill-timed profanity onstage with the Muppets, it all shows how far Birbiglia had come from working the coat check at the Gotham Awards to hosting it 13 years later. Each story further serves as evidence to the case Birbiglia makes that “jokes have to be about something.”
So when he returns to the scene of that 2012 awards ceremony, and the joke he cooked up for lifetime achievement award winner David O. Russell, you’re sympathetic both for Russell and the plight Birbiglia put himself in for telling the joke.
“All jokes are offensive – to someone,” Birbiglia observes.
Everyone has their side to every story, and the same holds true for the teller and the target of a joke. Birbiglia masterfully concludes by reviewing the hour-plus he just performed from the point of view of an offended audience member. That’s not likely to be you, though. For he’s such an endearing storyteller that he has invited you into his world, and these have all become inside jokes we can laugh at and enjoy. Even the punny ones.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
