Mike Birbiglia and Conan O'Brien Compare Catholic Fathers, Pope Shoes, and What Kids Actually Think of Their Famous Parents

The bit that opens this episode, Conan feigning outrage at a producer for watching Barcelona versus Inter Milan during a recording session, eventually collapsing into a Goodfellas riff and then a full-throated defense of the very man he was just berating, is a perfect seven-minute illustration of why this podcast works. Nobody hosts quite like a guy who will chase a bit past all reasonable stopping points and then declare himself the hero of it. By the time Mike Birbiglia actually walks in, you’re already a little giddy.

Birbiglia is the ideal guest for Conan because he refuses to be a guest. He showed up with a stack of notes, which Conan clocked immediately, and the two of them spent the better part of an hour not interviewing each other so much as comparing notes on being the same person. Both from Worcester, Massachusetts. Both with physician fathers who were allergic to emotional display. Both the kind of parents now who say ‘I love you’ so many times per conversation it borders on a medical condition. Conan put it plainly: their generation swung so hard away from their parents’ emotional stoicism that they’ve overcorrected into something almost comically demonstrative.

every conversation with my kids starts with I love you and them saying I love you and ends with I love you and them saying I love you sometimes in the middle of the conversation

Two Worcester Boys Walk Into the Vatican

The strangest true story in the episode, and there is real competition for that title, is that both men were among a group of international comedians invited to meet Pope Francis. Chris Rock was there. Steven Colbert. David Sedaris. Jim Gaffigan, who Birbiglia notes in his special actually opened for the Pope at a stadium event in Pennsylvania years prior, apparently serves as the Vatican’s comedy liaison. Conan’s reaction to learning the Pope’s remarks were delivered in Italian is to observe that it sounded like ‘a waiter was telling us our options.’ He then does an accent. Birbiglia, whose own special includes a joke about the Pope saying ‘I’mma make a pizza on the Eucharist,’ is in no position to complain.

He spoke to us in Italian. So it just sounded like a waiter was telling us our options.

Pope Francis died during the period between taping and release, which gives this whole stretch a strange texture. Birbiglia had written the Pope into his special before that happened. Conan notes the timing, pivots back to the bad accent anyway, and then tacks on a disclaimer at the end of the episode, in character as the Pope, condemning him from heaven. It’s disrespectful in the precise way two Catholic-raised comedians from New England are allowed to be disrespectful, which is to say they clearly loved the man and this is how they process it.

Doctors Who Don’t Want to Be Dads, and the Sons Who Became Comics Instead

The emotional engine of The Good Life is Birbiglia trying to reckon with his father’s stroke while simultaneously asking what he wants to teach his own daughter. Conan, whose parents both died within three days of each other the same year, responds not with condolences but with a story about his father, who had a major abdominal surgery, ripped out his own pain management IV, and was standing at the front door of the family house the next morning when Conan arrived. The man had just had a section of his intestine removed. ‘He was like, it is good to see you, son,’ Conan says. ‘I can tell he’s basically been gutted like a fish.’

The reason these stories land is that neither man is performing grief or performing resilience. They’re just two people who grew up around doctors who treated their own bodies like inconvenient paperwork, and they turned that into material, and they’re trying very hard not to turn their kids into people who will do the same thing to them someday. Birbiglia’s daughter, who is ten, has already diagnosed his situation accurately.

I walked a few blocks. I go, ‘What do you think when people say stuff like that?’ And she goes, ‘It’s a waste of my time.’

Birbiglia’s pitch at the end, that when Conan eventually dies he would be honored to host Mike Birbiglia Needs a Friend with Sona and Matt, is both a joke and a sincere friendship flex. He already visited the Vatican with them. He’s already had coffee in Brooklyn. He’s lobbying for quarterly meetings. The man is genuinely pursuing this friendship, which, given that the whole premise of the podcast is that Conan can’t make friends, might be the funniest joke in the episode and nobody calls it out.