Review: 'Good One: A Show About Jokes'

Every stand-up comedian writes and arranges their acts somewhat uniquely. I spent my 20s doing stand-up and my approach was to not write anything down. Instead, I'd have a consistent opening and closing set of jokes. And everything else in the middle was just randomly assembled on the fly, out of an ever-changing collection of maybe 2-3 hours of jokes that were in various levels of completeness.

This was not an optimal approach. Once I started to headline, fellow comics loved to watch me because when my approach worked (say 80% of the time), it almost felt like jazz. The problem for me was that maybe 10-15% of the time it didn't work and my act blew up onstage like I was some kind of comedy club suicide bomber.

Comedians who are successful long term have a much more thoughtful approach to the joke-writing process, and an example of that is featured in the new Peacock documentary Good One: A Show About Jokes, which premiered today on Peacock. The special follows Mike Birbiglia around as he begins work on what he hopes will eventually become his next one-man show.

As it turns out, Birbiglia's chosen method of crafting together an act involves writing journals and stacks of multi-colored index cards, which works very well on television. But he's also very open to sharing his process on camera, which in one case involves following a small story from the moment he mentions it to another comic to the various approaches he takes on stage trying to determine if it's going to work as an actual routine.

There are also the expected interviews with fellow comics, including longtime friend and supporter Seth Meyers, as well as younger comics Birbiglia has mentored, such as Atsuko Okatsuka and Hasan Minhaj. 

But Good One is primarily about Birbiglia's writing process and how he see the world. Some early shows take place in his hometown of Providence, R.I. and that provides the opportunity to hear from his family, including a brother who everyone seemed to think would have been the comedian of the family. 

It's difficult to do a TV special showing the process of stand-up comedy, but Good One does a nice job of providing a glimpse into the process that takes some random stories into a carefully crafted one-man show.

Good One: A Show About Jokes premieres Tuesday, March 26th, 2024 on Peacock.