There’s no shortage of standup on the depredations of middle age. Transferring from Broadway, Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man and the Pool is a thing apart, and not only because it barely classifies as standup. Birbiglia is a “comic storyteller” by trade, his shows precision-engineered, driven by narrative, and uninterested in the pretence of spontaneity. And, without stinting on the jokes, his sensibility is as poetic as it is comic. Where other midlife male standups splash in the shallows of domesticity, dinner parties and feeling tired, Birbiglia – on a cool blue set tiled to resemble his local swimming pool – plunges into the deep end of mortality, families and the meaning of life.
He does so with a featherlight touch, in a show that begins with the Massachusetts man taking a pulmonary test six years ago. “If I was going just by this,” says his doctor, “I’d say you’re having a heart attack right now.” This is not good news for rumpled, fortysomething Mike, whose dad and grandad both had heart attacks aged 56. And so begins his journey – physical and philosophical – into preserving and extending his own life. Encouraged to swim daily, he recalls unlovely childhood memories of trips to the YMCA pool, all 80 gallons of urine and “a jungle of penises” in the changing room. With his wife, he writes a will. With his daughter, he reads bedtime stories. With his parents, he starts treating goodbyes as if they might be his last.
The show spans several years of Birbiglia’s life, as he returns for further tests, and adds type 2 diabetes to his swelling roster of afflictions. It’s never self-pitying: Birbiglia is the hapless everyman butt of his most of his own jokes, like the one about liking pizza so much, “I get excited when I see the word ‘plaza’.” He does not finally mine the autobiographical material for especially profound conclusions. But The Old Man and the Pool is a lovely restatement of savour-the-moment principles, and you never feel less than carefully held by Birbiglia, whose meticulous, unflustered, wryly self-amused comedy is – well, not to die for, but to live for.
