Mike Birbiglia betrayed us.

Mike Birbiglia’s 2013 stand-up special My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend begins with a targeted critique of marriage:

So about five years ago, pretty much everyone who I know started to get married, and that was strange for me because I don’t really believe in the idea of marriage. And that would have been fine, except I have a problem where sometimes when I think that I am right about something, it can be a real source of tension between me and the person I’m arguing with. And the reason it’s a source of tension is that I’m right. And so I remember distinctly talking to my friend Dana, and she goes, “Well, you don’t believe in marriage for you, but, of course, you believe in it for other people.” And I was like, “No, I think it’s insane, you know, for anyone.” And she said, “Why?” And I said, “Well, first of all, it just seems doomed.” You know, 50% of marriages end in divorce. That’s just first marriages, by the way. Second marriages, 60% to 62% end in divorce. Third marriages, 70% to 75% end in divorce. That’s a learning curve.

And he doesn’t stop there. In his comedy special, This American Life and The Moth regular Mike Birbiglia reinforces his anti-marriage worldview with jokes about actively resisting the pending marriages of his friends:

I had one ally in all this, which is my friend Andy, and he’s a comedian as well. Not only did we decide we weren’t gonna get married, we actually tried to stop other people we knew from getting married. Yeah, we were pretty good at it. Like, we stopped or put on hold three or four marriages, you know. We were pretty good. I mean, we weren’t like the best in the world. I’m sure there are better in Europe. But we were solid, you know. Like, so, like, for example, at point my friend Alex was about to get engaged. And so we just took him to dinner. And during dessert, we gave him a long, hard stare. We said, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” And then we went cold to give him the sense of what it would feel like when we weren’t friends anymore.

Throughout his special, Billions and Orange Is the New Black guest star Mike Birbiglia critiques the gaudiness of marriage ceremonies (“I don’t buy into the flamboyant pageantry that goes into celebrating it”), the history of marriage (“marriage is an archaic institution invented in the middle ages based on exchanging property”), the legal mores of marriage (“why does it need to be written into a government contract?”), and marriage’s inherent connections to religion (“I’ve been to more weddings of my friends where the people on the altar don’t believe in the religion of the church they’ve invited us to!”).

Then, Cedar Rapids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015) actor Mike Birbiglia tells a personal story about the comically tragic aftermath of a car accident—a story he has told on This American Life and elsewhere—before transitioning back to his girlfriend Jenny: “The only person who would talk to me at this point was Jenny.”

Famous sleepwalker Mike Birbiglia ends his 2013 special with a heartwarming admission of his own stubbornness and a confession of his marriage to poet Jen “Jenny” Stein:

July 7, 2007, Jenny and I went to city hall and got married. I still didn’t believe in the idea of marriage, and I still don’t. But I believe in her, and I’ve given up on the idea of being right.

It’s sweet.

But I hate it. I hate it because it doesn’t stop there.

At the beginning of his 2019 comedy special The New One, casual Taylor Swift friend Mike Birbiglia acknowledges his dislike of children:

Maybe I have a low tolerance for children. I’ve lost a lot of great friends to kids. Because it really is like a disease in some ways. But it’s worse than a disease because they want you to have it too. [zombie voice] “You should have kids too.” I’m watching you do it, and I’m thinkin’ I’m gonna not do it. They’re like zombies, they’re like [zombie voice] “You should eat brains.” I’m watching you eat brains, and it seems like it ruined your life.

By his own admission, past Late Night with Conan O’Brien intern Mike Birbiglia’s desire for a childless life was unambiguous: “I was very clear when we got married that I never wanted to have a kid. . . . I was clear I would never change.”

And throughout The New One, he offers specific reasons for not wanting kids:

Number one, I’ve never felt like there should be more of me in the world. . . . I had cancer, life-threatening sleeping disorder, Lyme disease, diabetes. I’m not exactly handing off A-plus genes here. Number two. I love my marriage, and I feel…I really do, I feel so lucky to have found my wife. . . . And I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want that to change. I don’t want a third person showing up, like, “What about me?” I’m like, “We don’t even know you!” Number three. I don’t know anything and I’m not ready to teach the children. I mean, I’ve read hundreds of books. I’ve retained very little. . . . Number four, I have a cat. Number five. I have a job. . . . It took me a long time to figure out anything I was good at. I wasn’t good at video games, or archery, or whatever the hell kids do. And then, I figured this out. I don’t want to give that up. My brother’s like, “Mike, you can have a kid and a career.” And I said, “Yeah, Joe, but it’ll be worse.” If we’re being honest with ourselves kids hold us back. . . . Number six. I don’t think there should be children anymore. Nothing drastic. I think the current children can see through their term. I just think maybe we cut it off there, because, look, we were given the earth and we failed. . . . Number seven. People aren’t great. Not just Nazis. I mean, people in general are not great. And look, you guys seem fine. And the conventional wisdom is that people are generally good. But are they?

And Jimmy Kimmel Live fill-in Mike Birbiglia allegedly told his wife all of that: “Why would you want to bring a child into this world with me? I’m a walking pre-existing condition, the earth is sinking into the ocean, we’re about to be living in the movie Waterworld, which did terribly at the box office. People are horrible, and I’m not great.”

His wife allegedly responded, “I know all of that. And I think you’d be a good dad.”

So they had a kid. Not just in the comedy special anecdote. Real-life married father Mike Birbiglia actually has a child now.

Mike Birbiglia betrayed us.

I want to be abundantly clear: The problem is not that Birbiglia is married and has a child. Unlike Birbiglia in his own stand-up special, I do not mind when others get married or have children. The problem is that Birbiglia publicly and enthusiastically advocated for single, childless lifestyles before getting married and having a child—and then uses his past advocacy as fodder for comedy.

Consider the current socio-political landscape as it applies to perceptions of marriage, parenting, and “traditional” families:

• In 2015, Pope Francis said that couples who choose not to have children are “selfish.” Pope Francis reinforced that belief again in 2024, praising cultures with averages of three to five children per household: “Keep going like this. It is an example for all countries.”
• In 2016, Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., explained the inherent psychological biases we have against single individuals: “Nearly every other person describing married people, approximately 49 percent, spontaneously suggested that married people are kind, caring, or giving. Only 2 percent of the participants describing single people came up with those same characteristics. Every third person describing married people, around 32 percent, said that they were loving. No one—not one person—described single people this way. Married people were also more often described as happy, secure, loyal, compromising, and reliable. Single people, though, were more often described as independent.”
• In 2021, JD Vance criticized “childless cat ladies,” which according to to NPR is an insult with a long history designed to paint childless women as either frightening or pitiful. (Vance has since claimed that his comment was meant as a critique of the “anti-family and anti-child” Democratic Party.)
• Also in 2021, JD Vance stated that the idea of childless educators having influence over children “disorients” and “really disturbs” him. (Again, Vance later reframed his comment as a critique of “left-wing indoctrination” in schools.)
• Again in 2021, JD Vance wondered during an interview whether or not childlessness might make people “people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less mentally stable.” The full quote: “There’s just these basic cadences of life I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life, and the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives, you know — I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less mentally stable.”
• In 2022, a survey showed that “52% of 1,000 single UK adults reported experiencing single shaming ‘since the start of the pandemic.'” According to BBC, “researchers asked about the common ‘shaming phrases’ single people have heard from others, and 35% said they were told ‘you’ll find someone soon’. Twenty-nine percent heard ‘you must be so lonely’, while 38% reported general pity over their relationship status.”
• A 2024 study from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, unveiled “four overlapping ‘archetypes’ [perceptions] of single women and men”, including “‘Heartless (‘selfish,’ ‘promiscuous’), and Loner (‘lonely,’ ‘antisocial’).”

So when folks like Mike Birbiglia softly belittle genuine concerns about marriage and procreating, they are perpetuating a longstanding and wholly damaging status quo of pro-marriage, pro-procreating propaganda. In his comedy specials, Birbiglia presents himself as an underdog who reluctantly succumbs to happiness, but he’s really just punching down. He creates a fun, quirky, freethinking single-life caricature of himself only so that he can later use self-deprecation as a means of discounting singleness and/or childlessness.

Mike Birbiglia is not the only one who does this. My least favorite scene in the entire run of Parks and Recreation is this one:

Like Birbiglia, April Ludgate had valid reservations about having a child. But then Andy, Ben, and Leslie effectively bully April into having children. And so she does. (Leslie tells April that she likes her “team” and would love to see more “team members,” whatever that means.)

In the episode, Ben’s assertion that April will inevitably “get there” and change her views about children is particularly heinous.

There are valid reasons to oppose marriage and/or a child-filled lifestyle. According to 2025 numbers from Forbes, 43% of first marriages end in divorce. Yes, that’s lower than the commonly spread divorce statistic of 50%, but a 57% success rate is still hardly worth celebrating. If a restaurant had a 57% satisfaction rate, would you make a reservation? If a university had a 57% job placement rate, would you pay tuition? The average wedding in 2023 cost $30,119, and the cost of raising one child is, on average, $21,681 per year, not including the cost of saving for college. (The cost of raising a child over 18 years is $237,482 “just for the basic necessities”). Plus, the idea of marriage as an act of love is relatively new. Marriage was “rarely a matter of free choice” until the late 20th century. For most of human history, “romantic love was not the primary motive for matrimony.”

Finally, there’s nothing selfless about having children, unless you can somehow guarantee that your kid is going to cure cancer or be the first interstellar pioneer to colonize another solar system. Otherwise, you’re having a kid for you—because you want a child. This is perfectly fine, but let’s be honest about it.

Even if someone does not have “valid” reasons for being hesitant about (or outright opposing) marriage and procreation, you should still respect those views without comment or objection. The validity of the worldview is not the point: the hesitation itself is the point. Many in society—pastors, parents, purveyors of the patriarchy—proselytize endlessly about the importance of the bonds of marriage and the roles of parenthood. So shouldn’t folks think long and hard about whether or not they want to enter into those commitments? Shouldn’t that hesitation be celebrated, not belittled? But, instead, many treat having children like buying lottery tickets: lots of uninformed finger-crossing (with plenty of awkward scratching and dirty fingernails, I assume).

Luckily, there are some positive, confident portrayals of singleness and/or childlessness in films and on television. Mary Albright from 3rd Rock from the Sun. Commander Adama from Battlestar Galactica. Mackenzie McHale from The Newsroom. Poppy Li from Mythic Quest (before the fourth season). Kenneth Parcel from 30 Rock. Elise Atchison, Brenda Cushman, and Annie Paradis from The First Wives Club. And pretty much every single superhero from both Marvel and DC.

But I’ll leave you with one of my favorite portrayals of a confident, single, and childless character—which, incidentally, comes from Parks and Recreation. Not early-seasons April Ludgate or Leslie Knope. I’m talking about Jennifer Barkley.

Yes, I know that the character of Jennifer Barkley reinforces the “heartless” stereotype of the single, childless individual and is a less-than-perfect symbol of my argument. But I can’t resist the comparison: In a world utterly filled with Leslie Knopes and April Ludgates, be bold enough to be a Jennifer Barkley.

---

Ben Boruff is a co-founder of Big B and Mo’ Money. Read more at BenBoruff.com.