Mike Birbiglia
Not just for laughsSleepwalk is not just very, very funny it is also scary and profoundly moving.
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois
I like Mike Birbiglia. (See my review of his last presentation in Montreal.)
Birbiglia, simply, looks and talks like a human. In this way he is like three other of favourite comics: Patton Oswalt, Eddie Izzard and Louis CK. What makes him different from Oswalt and CK is the lack of rage and from Izzard is the lack of surrealism. But Izzard understands and likes Birbiglia (as he said in his iTunes session, Live From London) and I think it's because the two men share a comic trait: the tangent. Both start by telling a story (Izzard, say, about the Last Supper and Birbiglia, say, about his girlfriend seeing another man) and before they get to the end of the tale, they have veered all over the place. They're not the only two comics who use the tangent as an integral part of their work (Dane Cook has tried it - as he has tried everything - and still isn't funny) but they are both unerringly hilarious when they do.
