For someone whose affably rumpled appearance suggests Matt Damon waking up from a nap, the comedian Mike Birbiglia is remarkably industrious. He is a film-maker (movies include Don’t Think Twice, a comedy about an improv group starring Keegan-Michael Key) and an actor (The Fault in Our Stars, Orange Is the New Black), and he recently played Taylor Swift’s avaricious son, who discovers at her funeral that he has been left out of her will, in the video for Anti-Hero. He also has a podcast, The Old Ones, in which celebrity guests pick apart his earlier standup routines, and another, Working It Out, in which they help him develop new material. “Like Tom Sawyer getting his friends to paint the fence,” as one guest, Nathan Lane, memorably put it.
Now the 45-year-old is bringing his latest show, The Old Man and the Pool, to the UK after a sell-out Broadway run. If he had his way, he wouldn’t reveal anything about it in advance. “I’d just say, ‘I wrote a show about mortality and I guarantee you’ll laugh for 80 minutes straight and sometimes people also feel emotions from it and – trust me – I think you’ll love it.’” He is speaking to me from his Brooklyn apartment, a large ceiling fan whirring sleepily above him so that it looks like his head has propellers.
