One of the most creative and useful things to come out of the fact that comedians, like the rest of us, are stuck at home these days is Mike Birbiglia’s Instagram Live series Tip Your Waitstaff. Co-created with Roy Wood Jr., the series features Birbiglia alongside another comedian as they workshop some of their new jokes together — a process audiences usually don’t get to see — and raise funds for comedy-club staffs around the country in the process. Wood has taken the spirit of that project over to a new web series for Comedy Central called Stand-Up Playback With Roy Wood Jr., only instead of workshopping new jokes with fellow comics, he has them revisit some vintage clips of them performing material to see if their old jokes still hold up.
Today’s episode features Wood and Birbiglia together, and it’s a fun way to kill almost 20 minutes. You’ll learn plenty of interesting things during this episode, including (1) Wood, who dressed “like an 80-year-old,” used to not know that wearing his lanyard gave away his amateur stand-up status; (2) realizing his guitar skill had reached its limit, Birbiglia walked away from a potential future as an Adam Sandler-esque musical comedian; and (3) Birbiglia has John Mulaney to thank for one old but great song lyric about [whispers] space crystalsssss. Spoiler alert: The jokes hold up, but the fashion? Not so much.
