Is Stand-Up Creative Nonfiction?

The craft podcast you need to be listening to.

I am not a great addition to a casual book club. Like many of you, I’m taking it way too seriously. I want to talk form and theory. I’m pulling out the Graywold Press “The Art Of” series. I’m bringing the ear ringing energy of an overzealous undergraduate with something to prove. But, I also don’t want to be surrounded by people like me (how exhausting). I need some levity, I need to find some kind of balance. 

For years, I was on the hunt for an equally entertaining and intellectually stimulating podcast on craft in literature or screenwriting. I kept coming up against the same issue: either the delivery is fun and the content is underwhelming, or the delivery is so mundane I can’t even appreciate the expert commentary. The hunt started when I had to give up on news podcasts and pop culture reviews (they’re alwaaays saying the saaame thing). But then, I turned to comedians.

In his podcast, Working It Out, stand-up and writer Mike Birbiglia sits down with comedians to talk shop. Full hour comedy specials exist on a spectrum of structure, some are separate joke after separate joke, and the most artful weave personal or global tragedy into live storytelling. The guests present their new material, either early jokes or full hour premises, and they workshop it one-on-one. 

Sometimes, they go back and forth over the wording of one singular joke, and other times, they just talk about what the major theme of the next show may be, and Birbiglia pushes the comedians into more personal territory, his main advice almost always being: “The more specific the feeling is, the more people can relate to it.” In comedy, relatability rules.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? I think of Ann Hood’s ever-relevant Tin House talk on how to write a kick ass essay:

“They’re about something small, they’re about something enormous.” 

In one of my favorite episodes, Birbiglia pushes up-and-coming stand-up and former Bravo star Hannah Berner to take her singular jokes to narrative territory, suggesting that she dig into her fraught relationship with her father and the years she spent trying to impress him playing high level tennis (she would’ve gone pro, but she got hit by a car, joined Bravo’s Summer House, got fired, and started Giggly Squad—a millennial podcast powerhouse). Birbiglia and Berner talk family stories, fatherly expectations, and how to structure a narrative set. 

Working It Out is the perfect blend of high and low brow, an accessible craft podcast that will make you laugh and use your brain. All creatives, but especially writers, can learn something from comedy: taking our trials, turning them upside down, and presenting them in a new form.

Bonus recommendations: Check out Jenny Slate’s Stage Fright on Netflix for a braided narrative set (part documentary, part live show), and Hannah Einbeinder’s Everything Must Go on Max for an avant-garde, theatrical set on womanhood and the environment.