Mike Birbiglia's Netflix comedy special The New One is moving, honest, surprising, tender and wildly funny

Vulture

"The New One is a gorgeous longform piece of storytelling that unspools slowly, looping back on itself to secure its thematic anchors more and more tightly as it goes," says Kathryn VanArendonk of his Netflix special that was a Broadway show. "It’s a story about Birbiglia’s concern about having children, and throughout the hour-plus performance, he builds and returns to many of the same images, each time layering them with new angles for humor and pathos." She adds: "The New One is a 'comedy special,' for sure. It’s hilarious! It’s a long performance of a painstakingly constructed one-person comedy show that’s been honed and perfected until it’s tight as a drum. It’s a stand-alone hour, not meant to tell a continuing story beyond this one performance. It also fulfills many of the contemporary stand-up tropes that tend to appear again and again — it’s a man talking about his marriage and the mundane annoyances of his life. Birbiglia is the exterior narrator of his own life story, stepping into and out of events as he’s retelling them to point out their absurdities."

ALSO:

• Mike Birbiglia says "I don't care" if you don't think he's a real standup comedian: "I didn’t have concerns about it because things weren’t going well enough for me to have concerns," he tells The Last Laugh podcast. "That was a big thing with Hannah Gadsby’s special (Nanette) where people were like, ‘It’s not stand-up! It’s a one-person show!’ It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter what you call anything. It just matters ultimately what the experience is for the audience member."
• Birbiglia likes comedy shows that are "willing to be dark and to be funny and to be sad and to be joyous... all of the emotions wrapped up into one"
• The artistic expression Birbiglia unveils over the course of an hour and 25 minutes is leaps and bounds beyond everything he has brought to the table thus far