By Nick A. Zaino III Globe correspondent,Updated August 5, 2020, 2:30 p.m.
If things had gone as planned, Mike Birbiglia would have been honing new material onstage this spring. He was supposed to play colleges and register students to vote in April, then head out on a 20-city tour, and sprinkle in some appearances to promote his book “The New One,” an adaptation of his one-man off-Broadway show reconfigured as a collaboration with his wife, poet J. Hope Stein.
Instead, Birbiglia and Stein will be making a virtual appearance in conjunction with Harvard Book Store Sunday evening. And instead of stage time, the Massachusetts native has been trading thoughts on new bits with comedian and creator friends on Instagram and, for the past month and a half, on a new podcast called “Working It Out.” Upcoming guests include Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro, Judd Apatow, and former Boston comic Sam Jay, whose debut stand-up special, “3 In the Morning,” hit Netflix this week.
It is counterintuitive for comics to reveal unfinished ideas to the public when their usual instinct is to road test the work in front of audiences. But in the midst of a pandemic when stage time isn’t available, the podcast is a novel solution. “I would never in a million years have considered doing that outside of the circumstances that we find ourselves in right now,” says Birbiglia by phone. “Mitch Hedberg once said to me when I opened for him, ‘Don’t ever show anyone your notebook.’ It’s a funny piece of advice. There’s some truth to it. Which is, you don’t want people to see the magic, what the magic trick is.”
Read the full article here: In his new podcast, Mike Birbiglia and guests are creating comedy in real time