How To Make A Joke

Whether he intended to or not, Jesse David Fox has taken the mantle from Marc Maron as the comedy chronicler of our time. Maron’s podcast WTF, in its early days, interviewed comedians to see what makes them tick. WTF eventually broadened to include musicians, actors, even U.S. presidents, while Fox’s show Good One focuses on a more granular level: each episode examines an individual joke that a comedian picked to discuss.

The new special of the same name, Good One: A Show About Jokes, arrives on Peacock as a kind of proof of concept for how a TV series version of the podcast would work. And it’s got a ringer of a first subject: monologuing superstar Mike Birbiglia, who transcended the world of stand-up comedy to create beloved one-man shows including Sleepwalk With Me as well as The Old Man and the Pool and The New One on Broadway.

Good One, the podcast, concerns itself with the origin and influences of a single joke or routine (it’s a loose rule, sometimes it’s about a whole show), which makes the special a good fit with Birbiglia: as we learn over about 45 minutes, the autobiographical comic is a process guy. He has note cards. He meticulously refines material with dozens of performances before he even can say what thematic obsession his next show will be focused on. (Past ones: parenting. Sleep disorders and stagnation. Aging and death.) He has a sibling in his employment as well as a personal assistant to bounce ideas and revisions with in between performances where he tells patient audiences, “In case anyone is wondering, there will be no arc. If you notice an arc, feel free to shout it out.”

Birbiglia proves the perfect subject for a show like this because he is more than willing to not only reveal how he works offstage, to broadcast still-in-progress material from a rough-cut version called “Working It Out,” and to pontificate, in a way that some stand-up comics won’t, on why this painstaking labor yields results… eventually.

As it’s presented, however, Good One the TV show sometimes overcompensates in its effort to separate itself from the podcast. While we’re ostensibly focusing on the material that will one day become the next Birbiglia show, the special meanders to include clips of the comic returning to his childhood home and his school, tropes you’d see in a typical documentary about any comedian’s life. There’s the usual talking-head interviews with family members as well as celebrities such as Seth Meyers (a producer of Good One) and Hassan Minhaj to overexplain what Birbiglia does in ways we are already seeing in the show.

Only the interview with up-and-coming comedian Atsuko Okatsuka, who has a unique comedic voice worthy of its own Good One episode, gives us insights into Birbiglia that shed new light about his role as a mentor that fans of his work wouldn’t already be privy to.

More egregious are the chapter names such as “WORKSHOPPING,” “GETTING PERSONAL, “FINDING YOUR VOICE” that make Good One feel more like a home-renovation show on HGTV, and the tacky “LAB: Comedy D.N.A. Testing,” an animated sequence that suggests Birbiglia’s mix of personal stories and one-liners makes his comedy D.N.A. is 43 percent Mitch Hedberg, 30 percent Richard Pryor and 27 percent Steven Wright.

Those hacky bits aside, Good One as an ongoing series could be catnip for comedy nerds, depending on who it chooses as future subjects and whether it can cut unnecessary material as ruthlessly as Birbiglia does for his shows. The pilot works best when it’s focusing on the stage work and the behind-the-scenes craft that goes into it rather than trying to capture a comedian’s whole life.