Top 80 Mike Birbiglia Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Falling in love is a completely transcendent experience. It’s like eating pizza-flavored ice cream.”

— Mike Birbiglia

2. “I used to think I was a little unstable, and then I met every girl I’ve ever dated.”

— Mike Birbiglia

3. “The one thing you’re most reluctant to tell. That’s where the comedy is.”

— Mike Birbiglia

4. “What I really need is a woman who loves me for my money but doesn’t understand math.”

— Mike Birbiglia

5. “Dopamine is a chemical released in your brain and your body when you sleep that paralyzes your body so you don’t act out your dreams.”

— Mike Birbiglia

6. “My writing process is very feedback-based. When I do stand-up, I listen to the audience. I try to understand what’s connecting, what’s not connecting, and then rewrite, rewrite and rewrite.”

— Mike Birbiglia

7. “Comedy is tragedy plus time, but the time is different for everybody.”

— Mike Birbiglia

8. “My family isn’t really Italian. We’re more like Olive Garden Italian.”

— Mike Birbiglia

9. “Everyone tries to get you to dance at clubs. They come up to you and say “You gotta dance! you gotta dance!” And then I dance, and they’re like, “Not like that!””

— Mike Birbiglia

10. “You can always tell who went to catholic school, because they’re atheists.”

— Mike Birbiglia

11. “The key to eating healthy is not eating any food that has a TV commercial.”

— Mike Birbiglia

12. “So I went to a club the other day, which is timely because my self esteem had been hovering right around ‘normal’ and I had been meaning to knock it down to negative 1000.”

— Mike Birbiglia

13. “Awkwardness and feeling alienated are always going to be a part of comedy.”

— Mike Birbiglia

14. “I don’t go to church, but I regularly attend the Museum of Natural History.”

— Mike Birbiglia

15. “I check my phone messages and email about forty-five times a day. I don’t even know what I’m expecting to get in these messages. Maybe Visa will call and say, “We just realized that we owe you money!” or I’ll get an email from a high school classmate that says, “We’ve reconsidered and we’ve decided you were cool after all.” Whatever.”

— Mike Birbiglia

16. “I just don’t give off a great first impression.”

— Mike Birbiglia

17. “I don’t smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, “Do you guys hate me?””

— Mike Birbiglia

18. “I love pizza so much, I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception.”

— Mike Birbiglia

19. “When you’re in a relationship with someone who’s selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it’s this souped-up shine. And you feel like you’re in the club. And you don’t even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”

— Mike Birbiglia

20. “Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase “Don’t tell anyone.” But not about creepy things. I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like I wouldn’t make the soccer team and my father would say, “Don’t tell anyone.” And I would say, “They’re gonna know when they show up to the games and I’m not on the team and I’m crying.”

— Mike Birbiglia

21. “I was an altar boy as a kid. And the answer is no.”

— Mike Birbiglia

22. “I feel that marriage can lead to the ultimate rejection and failure and divorce and things we all fear.”

— Mike Birbiglia

23. “I went to a funeral recently, and they handed out Kleenex before the funeral. Which I thought was cocky.”

— Mike Birbiglia

24. “Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?”

— Mike Birbiglia

25. “Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with ‘I’m joking.”

— Mike Birbiglia

26. “I almost can’t even put to words how happy I am that I got married.”

— Mike Birbiglia

27. “I like ‘Donnie Darko;’ it’s a cool take on dreams and sleep.”

— Mike Birbiglia

28. “Someone stole my wallet last week. The guy called me up and he was mad at me. He was like ‘you gotta get your finances together. You got no cash, your credit cards are maxed out. You don’t even have minutes on your calling card. I had to use my card to call you.’”

— Mike Birbiglia

29. “A girl offered me E at the club. ‘Have you ever done E?’ ‘I watch E.’”

— Mike Birbiglia

30. “I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn’t. I’m still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister’s frequent flier miles just six days before.”

— Mike Birbiglia

31. “It had that kind of open-ended fear to it – like that feeling you get when you’re driving and you see a cop. And you’re not speeding. You don’t have drugs. But you’re just thinking, I hope he doesn’t notice I’m driving.”

— Mike Birbiglia

32. “Every comedian comes to a fork in the road where they have to decide if they’re going to make jokes about other people or make jokes about themselves. I chose myself.”

— Mike Birbiglia

33. “I read recently that women still make 30% less than men in the workplace. Which I think is fine, cause if we didn’t make 30% more, you guys would marry each other.”

— Mike Birbiglia

34. “I think spending a lot of time with my mom, who’s a talker and a storyteller, and my dad, who has kind of a soft-spoken, understated sense of humor, I think that’s how I became what I am, which is sort of an understated storyteller.”

— Mike Birbiglia

35. “I think serious situations actually make for the best kind of belly laughs. But theyre also the hardest to convert into comedy at the outset.”

— Mike Birbiglia

36. “They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.”

— Mike Birbiglia

37. “I got an E-Trade account. Turns out I can turn $1,000 into $420 in less than a week. Sure, I had to pay some fees...”

— Mike Birbiglia

38. “How many people do you know who have thrown up on the Scrambler or a carnival ride? A lot of people, is the answer.”

— Mike Birbiglia

39. “When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you’re an adult and you’re a poet, it’s all about love and pain, but if you’re a kid it’s, “Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?””

— Mike Birbiglia

40. “Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.”

— Mike Birbiglia

41. “I didn’t realize how good I was with computers until I met my parents.”

— Mike Birbiglia

42. “I find my fans are really funny people. Most comedians can’t say that about their fans.”

— Mike Birbiglia

43. “Alienation, I suppose, can’t be hackneyed because it will always exist.”

— Mike Birbiglia

44. “I feel like people have more in common than the news reports.”

— Mike Birbiglia

45. “The people who are the worst at news, who kind of engage in what I call the World Wrestling of news, have kind of set the bar for where news is.”

— Mike Birbiglia

46. “I drank the Kool-Aid of being a network star. Once it didn’t happen, I realized it wasn’t the best version of my comedy.”

— Mike Birbiglia

47. “I always try to attack the most honest issues I can in my comedy.”

— Mike Birbiglia

48. “I couldn’t recommend more that people put themselves in a situation where they can see a lot of work that they admire, and for free.”

— Mike Birbiglia

49. “Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do, but have decided are not a great idea.”

— Mike Birbiglia

50. “Backup dancers are completely respectable. They’re the studio musicians of dance.”

— Mike Birbiglia