How Mike Birbiglia Got Sneaky-Famous

Early next year, on January 24, the comedian Mike Birbiglia will perform in Walla Walla, Washington, for the first time since the night in 2005 when he nearly died after sleepwalking—sleep-running—through the second-story window of his hotel room at a La Quinta Inn. He’d been having issues with sleepwalking for years, and on this night, he was dreaming that a missile had been fired on his infantry platoon, so he took drastic evasive measures. He crash-landed on the grass and started running, until he realized he was awake, and in his underwear, and covered in blood and shards of glass, one of which was embedded in his thigh, a centimeter from his femoral artery.

“I know,” he says whenever he recounts this moment onstage, responding to the gasps from the audience. “I’m in the future too.”

Birbiglia first told this story at the climax of his 2008 breakthrough off-Broadway solo show, . He’s made five Netflix specials, and with each one, the rooms get bigger, the runs get longer, and the storytelling grows more ambitious. , which premiered on Netflix in 2019, about his uneasy embrace of fatherhood, ran at the James Earl Jones Theatre, on Broadway, for two months. His latest, , his midlife-crisis comedy, sold out an extended run at Lincoln Center, then moved to London’s West End for another month. The show at Wyndham’s Theatre prior to his was , directed by Kenneth Branagh, and the show following his was , so if you’re keeping track, that’s Shakespeare, then Mike