-Mike Birbiglia, I am so happy that you are here.
Thank you so much for coming back to
"The Tonight Show: At Home Edition."
-Here we are. Yeah, this is it.
-This is it.
I mean, Mike, we were -- How was the Father's Day, by the way?
Did you have a good one? -It was good.
My Father's Day and my birthday melded together.
My birthday was Saturday. Father's Day is Sunday.
-Happy belated, buddy.
-A lot of pizza, a lot of cake.
My whole new show is about aging and middle age,
and so it was momentous.
I'm 42, which is exactly halfway through your life.
Not technically.
Not everyone dies at 84, but no one is ever like,
"80 through 100 -- those are the years.
They're like, "I was 83.
I reached for a grape and I never walked again."
You hear that sometimes.
-Oh, my God.
-But, you know, it's -- How old are you now?
-45. -45.
So we're like -- "Over the hill" is the term.
And I never understood that term until I got on the hill.
And then I'm looking around and I'm like,
"Oh, there's natural causes.
They're not close, but they're coming."
-Hand me those binoculars.
Oh, no.
There's so many things on this side of the hill I don't like.
Can we go back down the hill? Oh, gosh!
-The other side of the hill, by the way, not as fun.
-No. Not at all.
You think --
-That front part is fun. You're climbing.
You're learning how to climb.
-Sledding, skiing, those -- That's fun.
Anything like that.
Walking down the hill for your life is not --
-It's like -- Well, it's like Trump coming off the plane.
It's like...
That's the hill. That's coming down the hill.
-Hey, can I see the cover of the book?
I want to see -- -Oh, yeah!
It came out this week. -Dude!
-"The New One." -Look at this.
Wait. Can I see the artwork?
-So, the artwork is -- Wendy MacNaughton painted it,
co-designed by Crystal Sacca.
It's an Earth of toys.
-Ah, that is so -- -Isn't that beautiful?
-Yeah, it's fantastic. -So, it's co-written by my wife.
It's by J. Hope Stein, my wife, Jen.
And I will say this, 'cause it's sort of a he-said, she-said
about us having a child together, and --
Or it's a -- But she writes poems,
so it's a he-said, she-poems.
He-said, she-poetry.
-Oh, my gosh. Was it fun working with her?
-It was awesome.
I mean, I have to say, like, Jen is so talented,
and it's like, it -- I'd have --
In my Word document, when I was writing, like,
I'd have these beautiful poems, like, at the end of a chapter
or beginning of a chapter, and I would be like,
"I have to make it as good as that."
You know, and it sort of, like, forced me to, like,
raise my game.
-Oh, really? That's fun. -You know what I mean?
Like, I felt like you probably had it over the years
at "SNL" when you're playing with different actors
in the cast and you're like, "Oh, I got to bring
my game for this person 'cause they're so good."
I bet people felt that way about you, too.
-But I know what you're saying, though.
But, I mean, I had a great cast when I first walked in.
It was, you know, Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon
and Ana Gasteyer and Cheri Oteri.
-And Parnell. -Chris Kattan. Parnell.
-Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
-Dude, everybody was good,
and I was just like -- I was out of my league.
-But, yeah, that's how it felt.
Jen was my Will Ferrell is what I'm getting at.
I feel like we could be brothers.
Like, I'm looking at you next to me
and I'm like, "Brothers in a movie."
"Taxi 2," baby.
-Oh, dude! Let's do this right now.
I wish had a pen. Come on! We could do this.
We could play brothers. I could see us.
-I think so.
-You have "The New One." -Yes.
-I talked to you on our show when it was a Broadway show.
-That's right. That's right.
-So, then it became a Netflix special.
-Yes.
-And now it's going to be -- knock on wood --
a best-selling book.
-It's going to be -- And it's going to be
a breakfast cereal and it's going to be the home game.
-It should be a home game.
You know what it should be, really, though?
You should make an app. I would make an app.
-Well, we're going to do the app.
The... [ Laughs ]
I was going to read you something from the book,
because I thought it was relevant to the two of us.
I think we have been married the same amount of time.
I'm 13 years in July.
-Yeah, I'm 12 years. Yeah, I'm going to be 13, yeah.
-This is from -- This is my piece of advice
for married couples or newly married couples.
This is the only piece of advice I have,
which is, I think that there's a --
In all marriages, no matter how perfect
you think your marriage is, I think there is an undercurrent
of tension at all times because you have two people
experiencing often the same events at the same time
and then have two completely different memories
of the same event.
So, my best example of this is --
a few years ago, we were in Chicago, where we love to be.
We love to visit.
And we were staying at this hotel.
And we're coming down the elevator.
And we'd stayed there before. We love this hotel.
And I said -- I go, "Oh, I just remembered
there's this café in the hotel that you loved
the last time we were here."
And Jen said, "Who did?"
And I thought, "Oh, no,"
because the subtext of "Who did?" was,
"A," that wasn't me,
"B," that must have been another woman you were dating,
"C," I'm not happy about this.
And we get to the lobby, the doors open, and she goes,
"Oh, my God!
I love this café!"
And I go, "I almost died in the elevator from a heart attack,
and you just casually remembered that I'm right?"
And so now whenever we have a shared memory
that departs from one another, one of us says --
And this is advice for everybody.
You can always use this. One of us says, "Who did?"
And it's our way of saying,
"We're both probably wrong."
-Oh, "Who did?" is good then. I like "Who did?"
-Who did?!