I think your tendency when you play yourself is to accentuate something about you that you think is the funny thing about you.
Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.
One of my favourite movies is 'Annie Hall' because it's about the silver lining of the break-up.
Directing your first film is like showing up to the field trip in seventh grade, getting on the bus, and making an announcement, 'So today I'm driving the bus.' And everybody's like, 'What?' And you're like, 'I'm gonna drive the bus.' And they're like, 'But you don't know how to drive the bus.'
Backup dancers are completely respectable. They're the studio musicians of dance.
I was very much a late bloomer. That's not to say that girls didn't express interest in me from time to time, but I just, I did not know how to respond to that.
If I dream that I'm directing, it's not a film, it's like a commercial for cotton candy, and I've got four feet of cotton candy all around me that I've got to break through, like a brick wall or a fortress.
I love Broadway shows.
How many people do you know who have thrown up on the Scrambler or a carnival ride? A lot of people, is the answer.
You don't really see sleepwalking in films that often. It's weird; I feel like in popular culture we have the perception of sitcom, arms-in-front-of-your-body sleepwalking, and then maybe Olive Oil and Popeye when she sleepwalks through the construction site. But it's all very cartoonish, in some cases literally.
You can't go to medical school and come out and be like, 'I'm going to be a dog catcher.' That would be so pointless.
The Comedy Central CDs combined with the TV specials are what led to my stuff being traded and passed around, and a lot more people knowing my jokes than I thought.
In some sense, Comedy Central has made their audience into comedy connoisseurs.
When I was in college, I wanted to write for 'Late Night With Conan O'Brien,' and I was an intern there.
Every sleep doctor I've talked to said it was an urban legend that you shouldn't wake up a sleepwalker. All that will happen is that you will get condescended to.
My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It's like, 'Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?' David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I'm just a nobody. I'm a comedian and a writer.
Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.
I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college.
You have to be delusional to be a comedian.
