Review: Mike Birbiglia Has a ‘New One.’ It’s Funny Until It Isn’t.

Review: Mike Birbiglia Has a ‘New One.’ It’s Funny Until It Isn’t.

The comedian and storyteller Mike Birbiglia didn’t want to become a father. He had his reasons. Here’s the fifth one: He has a job. A baby, he says, would spit up all over that. “Kids hold us back.”

It’s true. Take “The New One,” Mr. Birbiglia’s autobiographical postpartum solo show at the Cherry Lane Theater is at first excruciatingly funny and then just kind of excruciating. The first hour, about his wife and cat and brother and vascular repair, is gorgeous, just the right amount of wrong. The testicle jokes? They kill. But once Mr. Birbiglia actually has a kid, most of what makes him so immensely appealing — his acuity, his empathy — goes down for a nap.

Mr. Birbiglia is a longtime comedian and more recently an indie film director and star (“Sleepwalk With Me,” “Don’t Think Twice”). He has a teddy-bear physique, a cheerful stage presence and a mumbling, stealth articulate voice — with a tendency to swallow the ends of his sentences like so many frosted snack cakes — that breeds instant intimacy. His genre-straddling shows mostly catalog an array of poor decisions: professional, romantic, somnambulant. His life-threatening sleepwalking disorder is no joke. Except of course it is. Everything feeds a genius blend of confessional and observational comedy. He is, to use a really unforgivable word, relatable.

“The New One” begins on a mostly bare set (the designer, Beowulf Boritt, earns his fee later) with a story about his couch that segues into another story about having breakfast with his older brother Joe as a beloved nephew whacks him in the eye with a foam bat. That’s when Mr. Birbiglia’s wife decides that they should have a baby. “A baby wouldn’t have to change the way we live our lives,” she says. All the parents in the audience laugh uproariously.

Mr. Birbiglia lists, in awesome, horrifying, meticulous detail, every argument against babies in general and his baby in particular. But before you can say blastula, his wife — he begins by calling her Clo, then just goes with her real name, Jen — is crying all the time and sending all-caps texts about pretzels.

Under Seth Barrish’s obliging direction, it’s very funny. The bit about the birthing class — golden. Even the jokes that seem a little harsh, a little canned are softened by Mr. Birbiglia’s amused delivery. “My wife was pregnant for about 75 months,” he says. “And it was a brutal pregnancy. It was hard for her too.”

When the baby arrives, the jokes don’t really stop, but they take a brakes-stripping turn toward self-pity as Mr. Birbiglia becomes “this pudgy milkless vice president of the family.” I was reminded of something the director Judd Apatow said on a recent episode of his podcast, “The Old Ones,” that Mr. Birbiglia was someone who “seems so nice but really isn’t.”

I should probably say here that I know nothing about Mr. Birbiglia or his marriage to Jennifer Hope Stein, who contributed writing to “The New One,” other than what he’s discussed onstage. I am really hoping exaggeration for comedic effect figures big. Because after the birth Mr. Birbiglia seems awful. Which he knows. He describes an unhappy conversation he and his wife have while he’s doing the dishes and later he quotes her saying: “You tell that story about me breast-feeding at the kitchen table. The only part that isn’t true is that you do the dishes.”

After that squabble he retreats to his room and recalls thinking, “I get why dads leave.” That observation was greeted with the whooshing sound of a couple of dozen people sucking air in through their teeth while making a “yeesh” face.

It’s provocative, sure, but is this a terrible, unspeakable truth or is it just Mr. Birbiglia spinning personal inadequacy as universal experience? He blames these odd-man-out feelings on his wife, saying, “she’s in the greatest love affair of her entire life that you’re watching through a window.” If you know Mr. Birbiglia’s comedy, then you know that he’s smashed through windows before. Why not here? Also, who’s the “you”? I have two small children. I am not watching anything except them and a steadily accumulating pile of dishes. I did not relate.

These riffs are built around an old-school, kneejerk, whole-body-jerk assumption that biological mothers are built to nurture and that dads (Mr. Birbiglia doesn’t discuss other family structures) are somehow surplus to requirements. He doesn’t allow that many nonbiological parents feel profound bonds or that if he had put in the hours feeding, rocking, bathing his infant daughter, he might have quickly felt them, too.

At the risk of spoilers, Mr. Birbiglia does eventually do some dishes. His daughter’s laughter extorts his love. A happy ending. For him. I don’t disagree with his read on how children can really scribble all over a life and a marriage. I was totally with him on birthing class. But when he said “I get why dads leave” all I could hear was “I get why moms get divorced.”

The New One
Through Aug. 26 at Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, thenewone.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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