Mike Birbiglia’s Dad Gave Him World’s Briefest Sex Talk
Much of Mike Birbiglia’s new Netflix special, The Good Life, wrestles with the comic’s distant relationship with his aging father. When Mike was growing up, Dr. Vince Birbiglia was a practicing physician who got a law degree in his spare time so he wouldn’t have to while away his off-hours parenting.
That meant Mike and his dad didn’t share many of the rite-of-passage moments that others might, including a fatherly explanation of the birds and the bees. That left the young comedian confused as he entered his teenage years. For example, Birbiglia explains that when he was 12, he had hard nipples. Later in life, he learned that it was a physical condition that sometimes occurs during puberty. Birbiglia emphasized the “sometimes,” because he found out that hard nipples aren’t universal when he mustered the courage to share that information with his college roommate.
“He laughed for five minutes straight,” Birbiglia confessed. “At the end of the laughter, he said to me, and I quote, he goes, ‘I think that’s just a you thing.’”
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Maybe the roommate wouldn’t have laughed so hard if he’d known that Birbiglia was a lifelong hypochondriac. To him, hard nipples didn’t mean puberty — they had to signal cancer. “And if you know a hypochondriac, you know I’m not exaggerating,” he explained. “I didn’t think maybe it was cancer. I thought I had cancer. What are the next steps?”
Unfortunately, Birbiglia didn’t know any doctors — unless you counted his dad. With an expert in the house, the 12-year-old knew what he had to do. One night, he confronted his father in the living room while the old man was reading a war novel.
“Hey Dad, I think I might have cancer.”
“Why do you think that?”
Birbiglia took a long beat. “I have hard nipples.”
“That’s not a symptom.”
The teen whipped off his shirt in response. “See for yourself.”
Realizing his son wasn’t going to take “That’s not a symptom” for an answer, Mike’s dad got up, walked over to him, “and he felt my hard, hard nipples, which was nice.”
Don’t get the wrong idea, said Birbiglia. His family was never physically affectionate, so he didn’t grow up with many hugs or verbal affirmations of love. “So when my dad caressed my hard, hard nipples, I distinctly remember thinking, ‘It’s not I love you, but I’ll take it.’”
After the examination, Dr. Birbiglia gave Mike “the briefest medical diagnosis I have received to this very day: ‘Nope.’”
That was it. End of conversation. And “it was the closest to a sex talk I would receive for the rest of my life.”
