Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Good One: A Show About Jokes’ On Peacock, Charting Mike Birbiglia’s Course As He Writes A New Comedy Show

Good One is a podcast about jokes hosted by Vulture editor Jesse David Fox, but its adaptation into a documentary isn’t so much a visual representation of his podacst so much as it is an extension of comedian Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, Working It Out. Fox is an executive producer on this doc, which followed Birbiglia as he began crafting new jokes last year following The Old Man & The Pool, which enjoyed a Broadway run from October 2022 to January 2023 and aired on Netflix last November.

GOOD ONE: A SHOW ABOUT JOKES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A quote from the late great George Carlin appears onscreen, reading: “The creation of material is the ultimate freedom because that’s creating the world I want.”

The Gist: We’re at the Columbus Theatre in Providence, R.I., where Mike Birbiglia takes us up from the green room to the balcony, where he explains this is where he’ll start the arduous process of writing a new one-man comedy show, as a montage reminds us of The Old Man & The Pool (complete with footage of Birbiglia on Late Night with Seth Meyers, because also, Meyers is an EP and talking head in this). “Super exciting. And then it ends, and it’s like, ‘Well, I can’t tour that anymore.’ And so then it’s like, well now what do I do?”

Every hour of stand-up comedy has to start with that first new bit, in that first new show, even if Birbiglia isn’t yet sure where he wants to wind up in the end, which he says might take 500 shows or more to figure out before it’s ready for Broadway. “What’s the next show about? It’s like, I don’t know until I figure out what I’m obsessed with.” So he starts (or at least, we start out) with a bit reflecting upon his recent stay with his wife in a Rhode Island AirBnB.

We cut to a Providence pizzeria, where we meet two of Birbiglia’s older siblings, brother Joe and sister Gina. Joe has worked for Mike for years now, but why didn’t he become a comic, the actual comic wonders. Mike also reveals that their father, a doctor, had discouraged his funny son from saying anything too personal onstage, but Mike realized doing so unlocked the key to his success because “the connection can be so deep” if you reveal yourself to an audience, he says. “It’s almost like the great metaphor for being a comedian is like, it’s the person who trips a lot and then figures out how to write about it in a funny way.” In The New One, Birbiglia worried about becoming a father. In Old Man, he worried about dying. But where does he go from there? “What’s more high-stakes than death?”

Journaling provides him with both a release valve on a daily basis (“you don’t have to be polite to a journal”) as well as a possible source for material months or even years later, as he can flip back through the pages to see what was driving his emotions and whether any of it might be mined for laughs. We also get outside perspective from Ira Glass (the radio host who helped produce Birbiglia’s earliest one-man shows) as well as stand-up Hasan Minhaj, who says he admires Birbiglia’s work ethic and particularly his method of laying out shows via index cards, and we see Birbiglia sit down with his brother, a producer, and an assistant in an office he keeps in Providence to run potential jokes and stories by them all.

Later we follow Birbiglia north to his hometown of Shrewsbury, Mass., where he walks us through his childhood home (occupied now by friendly strangers who welcome the camera crew) as well as his Catholic school, where he roams the halls with two childhood friends who remind him and us that Birbiglia wasn’t thought of as funny before college. So we cut to Washington, D.C., where Birbiglia won the funniest student on campus at Georgetown (in a contest where he met fellow undergrad Nick Kroll), which allowed him to open for Dave Chappelle at the DC Improv and get a job at the club as a doorman. That job, he says, allowed him to watch and study visiting headliners, and also gave him hope and inspiration.

We then see how Birbiglia passes that inspiration on to other comedians, having his assistant Gary Simons open for him at the DC Improv, or bringing Atsuko Okatsuka with him on tour. It turns out Birbiglia’s inquisitive nature prompted Okatsuka’s show to eventually become The Intruder and debut on HBO at the end of 2022.

None of this has really answered Birbiglia’s initial challenge to himself to find out what his new show will actually be about, though. And he’s OK with that for now, knowing that something major will happen either to himself or his family in the next year, and that’ll wind up giving him the through line or theme for his next special. “Being an autobiographical comedian is not…it’s not advisable,” he jokes. “But also, it’s my favorite type of comedy.”

What Documentaries Will It Remind You Of: When Jerry Seinfeld stopped telling many of his greatest joke hits at the end of the 1990s and the end of his sitcom, we got to see him start from scratch in Comedian. This is kind of like that, but without a comic foil, and much more interested in the process of writing jokes and putting them together.

Our Take: Birbiglia says his two biggest comedy influences were Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg, which might sound odd to his current fans who likely don’t think of him as a surreal joke-teller. But he also cites Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip as the key inspiration for his pivot to storytelling in Sleepwalk With Me, and it’s a nice bonus to see clips of all three of those stand-up legends.

It’s also wild to find out that while Birbiglia keeps his home in New York City, he keeps his business in Providence. He might crack a joke in that first show about it: “I think Providence is a first draft town…that’s why my family lives here.” But it’s probably also great to get out of the city to clear the comedy brain, reconnect with family, and have a safe space to test out brand new material.

Meyers tells us he admires Birbiglia’s work ethic, as Meyers himself only has one Netflix special to his own credit. To be so vulnerable onstage, but also so polished, but also make it feel like he’s not just delivering a monologue. That is what makes a comedian great. Or as Meyers put it: “A comedian only makes it work onstage if it looks like it’s the first time they’re saying it. If it doesn’t seem natural, the audience feels ripped off. You weirdly have to put all this time into it to make it look like you’re coming up with it off the top of your head.”

Minhaj, for his part, recites a Hindi phrase demonstrating why parents and family members might not feel comfortable when their funny relative dishes onstage. Birbiglia’s wife tells us she wasn’t sure how to feel when he joked about them becoming parents. And yet Birbiglia tells a workshop of college students that he probably has written all of these personal shows just to please his wife.

Given the Good One tie-in, I’m surprised we only hear Fox’s voice cut through once about 28 minutes in, suggesting to Birbiglia in a sit-down interview that his bullying story fits in with some of his other material. If you were a podcast fan, you might wonder about the hands-off approach, but so be it.

That it ends without an ending is probably more beneficial than problematic, though, because it means that whenever Birbiglia does bring his next show to Netflix or Broadway, it’ll include lots more than what we see in this 46-minute doc.

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Parting Shot: After a montage of outtakes, Okatsuka gets the last word on camera: “Yeah, good job everyone.”

Sleeper Star: Birbiglia’s big brother, Joe, receives lots of props as the funniest Birbiglia, but in the end, this doc serves as an even more effective promotional vehicle for Okatsuka, as her dance moves and descriptions of The Intruder will likely lead plenty of viewers to check out her special on Max.

Our Call: STREAM IT. This is a fascinating look at the process of developing not just a bunch of jokes, but figuring out how they all come together to create a cohesive whole, a narrative arc, a theme, or maybe they don’t…

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.