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May 14, 2012 12:09 PM

Mike Birbiglia's Fresh Air interview gets awkward. From last week's This American Life live episode.
posted by roll truck roll (31 comments total)

Am I a total spoiler if I say that this is partly a promo for Sleepwalk With Me, Birbiglia's feature film? Also, here's full audio and a partial transcript from his Fresh Air interview.
posted by knile at 12:21 PM on May 14, 2012

Am I a total spoiler if I say that this is partly a promo

What? Are you saying that wasn't a documentary? I thought NPR and TAL only did works of jornalistic non-fiction?!?
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:35 PM on May 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Both times I read the phrase above as "partly a porno"... which made me think I'd missed something when I'd heard this elsewhere. Here's hoping nobody else makes that mistake, especially if it got their hopes up.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:43 PM on May 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

It's a great piece but he's riding this horse until it drops dead out from under him, apparently.
posted by Danf at 12:43 PM on May 14, 2012 [6 favorites]

Both times I read the phrase above as "partly a porno"...

That would have made a lot more sense if their "private" plans had be strikingly different.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 12:45 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

100% guarantee Birbigs stories are all real though, there's no way anyone would fabricate so many unimportant details about every part of every tale.

(not that they aren't still usually hilarious, cuz they are)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:47 PM on May 14, 2012

Both times I read the phrase above as "partly a porno"...

Well, Terry Gross was in the Ira Glass Sex Tape, too. The confusion is understandable.
posted by maudlin at 12:47 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Just in case there's any confusion: the linked video is not the same thing as Birbiglia's actual Fresh Air interview.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:50 PM on May 14, 2012

This just kept getting better and better. Gotta love Birbiglia.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 12:53 PM on May 14, 2012

It's a great piece but he's riding this horse until it drops dead out from under him, apparently.

"This horse" being the sleeping disorder? Or his storytelling style? I think the latter has quite a bit of life still in it.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:53 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

ROFL, Pizza Until You Fall Asleep.

This reminds me of a time, long ago, when a household of us filthy young slobs, after a day and night of partying, phoned for pizza and promptly all fell asleep in sleeping bags on the balcony (it was crazy hot that summer). We woke up in the morning to find two pizza's, still in boxes, sitting beside us on the balcony, my wallet, which had been in the kitchen, was missing cash in the amount of the pizza plus $2.
posted by Cosine at 12:58 PM on May 14, 2012 [29 favorites]

"This horse" being the sleeping disorder?

I think "this horse" might be the story performance about the sleeping disorder, and the book of the story performance about the sleeping disorder, and the movie of the story performance about the sleeping disorder, and the story performance about making the movie of the story performance about the sleeping disorder. There's a lot of recursion here.

I liked the book.
posted by Sidhedevil at 1:06 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

This is all very interesting because I also haZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
posted by hal9k at 1:11 PM on May 14, 2012

I'd always imagined something like that as being how Terry Gross spent her evenings. That, or being a dominatrix.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:40 PM on May 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

Mike is a jerk IRL.
posted by weinbot at 1:40 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Mike is a jerk IRL.

Yeah, you can't just say that and not follow up with more details. Stories, please.
posted by infinitywaltz at 1:51 PM on May 14, 2012 [10 favorites]

"In real life, Terry Gross has never robbed a bank."


The more you know....
posted by wittgenstein at 1:53 PM on May 14, 2012

OHMYGOD THAT'S WHAT TERRY GROSS LOOKS LIKE!
posted by zardoz at 2:22 PM on May 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

When did Terry Gross first appear on camera? Seems like for most of my life, she was an interviewer with an amazing voice who looked like whatever I imagined her to look like. Suddenly, I'm actually seeing her in a lot of things. It's slightly weird.
posted by jiawen at 4:03 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

jiawen, I was recently thinking about that too. Not just with her, but all the big public radio personalities. For most of my life, I had no idea what any of them look like. Now, I see them all over the place.

But then I got to thinking that that has something to do with how I consume "public radio." Nowadays, I'm more likely to read an NPR news story on Facebook than hear it on the radio. Like it or not, NPR and PRI are full-fledged media companies now.

Remember when Ira Glass's "official" headshot had most of his face obscured by a microphone? Now everyone knows what Glass looks like and I can't even find that photo online, which says something about the sea change around public radio celebrities.
posted by roll truck roll at 4:39 PM on May 14, 2012

Something similar happened with the voice actors for The Simpsons. At the very outset of the series, whenever the voice actors were photographed they were supposed to pose behind paper masks of the characters they played. There's a passing reference to this on the DVD commentary track for one of the episodes. The idea was that the producers wanted the viewers to conceptualize the characters on screen, not the actors who played them. It was a very short-lived thing, though. I remember seeing a photo of the voice cast all hidden behind masks of Homer, Bart, Marge, and Lisa. That was way, way back in fourth grade, and I saw it in an issue of Weekly Reader, but like the old Ira Glass photo I can't find it online.
posted by compartment at 5:18 PM on May 14, 2012

Hadn't Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer already done things as actors before? And maybe Yardley Smith, but I'm not sure. Certainly Julie Kavner had... I never thought it was a secret what the voice actors from The Simpsons looked like, but perhaps I was just more aware of that group of people before the series started than most.
posted by hippybear at 5:41 PM on May 14, 2012

Terry Gross could have a great career in comedy. She did a radio bit where Alec Baldwin...oh wait! I found it. Click on the third one down "Alec re-assigns Terry Gross".
posted by Xoebe at 6:00 PM on May 14, 2012

I've met Terry Gross. She's teensy-tiny. Like, shockingly short. It suits her, but it isn't at all what one would expect from hearing her on the radio.
posted by hippybear at 6:07 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hippybear, I'm sure you're right. The whole exercise seems rather pointless, and the commentary track made it seem like a short-lived experiment. I would have been about nine or ten years old when I saw that photo, and I had no idea who the voice actors were, let alone their prior work. It wasn't until after college when I saw Hank Azaria in a movie that knew what any of them looked like.

The idea seems pretty ill-conceived in retrospect, not least because it denies the voice actors recognition for their work.
posted by compartment at 6:15 PM on May 14, 2012

The whole exercise seems rather pointless, and the commentary track made it seem like a short-lived experiment.

Granted I'm a bit of a cynic, but it would seem to me like the kind of thing that's done to try to make the voice actors more easily replaceable.
posted by inigo2 at 7:20 PM on May 14, 2012

I saw that at the live show and it was fun good times. Terry Gross is indeed tiny and birdlike...and a total bank robber. Awesome.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:11 PM on May 14, 2012

The implication that Mike was going to join them in the bedroom really freaked me out.
posted by angrycat at 4:16 AM on May 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've met Terry Gross. She's teensy-tiny. Like, shockingly short.

So is Glenn Close. She looks like she could be snapped like a twig, which made me view Fatal Attraction in a different light.
posted by desjardins at 6:31 AM on May 15, 2012

(She's very nice, though.)
posted by desjardins at 6:32 AM on May 15, 2012

I love Mike Birbiglia; he's like 'Nice Guy' Rich from Community's socially-awkward younger brother. (Maybe Rich is really Joey Bag of Donuts?)

(I too would be interested in hearing how he's a jerk IRL, disappointing as it may be)
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 11:46 AM on May 15, 2012