Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
Read Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy Online
Authors: Judd Apatow
The interviews in
Sick in the Head
have been condensed and edited for readability.
Copyright © 2015 by Judd Apatow
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Photographs not otherwise credited are used courtesy of the author.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint the material specified below:
C
ONDÉ
N
AST
: Transcript from interview with David Denby, Judd Apatow, and Seth Rogan at The New Yorker Festival in 2009, © 2009 The New Yorker/Condé Nast; Albert Brooks interview by Jim Windolf,
Vanity Fair
, January 2013, © 2013 Condé Nast;
Freaks and Geeks
Oral History by Robert Lloyd,
Vanity Fair
, January 2013, © 2013 Condé Nast. Reprinted by permission.
E
MPIRE
M
AGAZINE
: “Mann and Husband” by Olly Richards, from the March 2013 issue of
Empire
Magazine. Reprinted by permission.
E
SQUIRE
M
AGAZINE
: “Apatow and Shandling” by Mike Sager, from the October 2014 issue of
Esquire
Magazine. Reprinted by permission.
H
UCK
M
AGAZINE
: “Judd Apatow vs. Miranda July,” from the May 2013 issue of
Huck
Magazine. Reprinted by permission.
WTF
WITH
M
ARC
M
ARON
:
Judd Apatow on
WTF with Marc Maron
podcast. Reprinted by permission.
M
EADOWLANE
E
NTERPRISES
: Judd Apatow interview with Steve Allen. Used by permission of Meadowlane Enterprises, Inc.
S
ONY
P
ICTURES
H
OME
E
NTERTAINMENT
: Transcript of
The Cable Guy
Blu-ray commentary with Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Apatow, Judd.
Sick in the head: conversations about life and comedy / Judd Apatow.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9757-6
ebook ISBN 978-0-8129-9758-3
1. Comedians—United States—Interviews. 2. Stand-up comedy—United States. 3. Television actors and actresses—United States—Interviews.
4. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Interviews. I. Title.
PN1969.C65A63 2015
792.7′60922—dc23 2015008155
ebook ISBN 9780812997583
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno
Cover design and illustration: Rodrigo Corral and Zak Tebbal
v4.1
a
The Beginning: Jerry Seinfeld, 1983
Freaks and Geeks
Oral History, 2013
Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller, 2010
How did I start interviewing comedians? That’s a good question. I was always a fan of comedy and…okay, I have been
completely obsessed
with comedy for about as long as I can remember. I blame my dad. My dad was not a comedian, but he may have secretly longed to be one. When I was a kid, he would play us Bill Cosby records and even took me to see him perform at Hofstra University for my birthday when I was in fifth grade. (Note: In this introduction, I was going to talk at length about Bill Cosby, but I can’t, in good conscience, because he has more sexual accusers than I have had partners.) From there I discovered Dickie Goodman, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce, and then, when Steve Martin hit, I completely lost my mind. I bought every album he put out—and couldn’t stop doing an impression of him for the next five years. The biggest fight I ever got into with my parents was when we were at an Italian restaurant for dinner and I was trying to rush them out so we could get home in time to see Steve Martin on
The Carol Burnett Show.
They refused to hurry through their chicken parmesan and, as a result, I never got to see it. I remain furious.
The mid- to late seventies was a golden age in comedy. You had Richard Pryor,
Saturday Night Live
, Monty Python,
SCTV
—all in their prime. The club scene was beginning to explode, too. In my room at night, I would circle the names of all the comedians in the
TV Guide
who were going to perform on talk shows that week so I wouldn’t miss any. When I was in fifth grade, I produced a thirty-page report on the life and career of the Marx Brothers and paid my friend Brande Eigen thirty dollars to write it out for me, longhand, because he had better handwriting than I did. This, by the way, was not for school. I wrote it for my own personal use.
A comedy freak was born.
I’m not sure why I was so drawn to comedy. Part of it, I think, was frustration. Looking back, I was an angry kid who didn’t feel like the world made sense. My parents were not particularly spiritual people in those days, so they couldn’t help much in the existential angst department. The closest they came to religion was saying over and over again throughout my childhood, “Nobody said life was fair.” It was the opposite of
The Secret.
It was
The Anti-Secret.
This left a bit of a void in my life, and I looked to comedy—and the insights of comedians—to fill it.
Plus, I was the youngest boy in my grade, so I was small. This size deficit led to me always being picked last in gym class—every day for thirteen years. When you’re always picked last, you always get the worst position, like right field in baseball. Then, since you are always in the worst position, the ball never comes your way, so you never get a chance to show anyone that you are, in fact, good at this sport. But the truth is, you are
not
good at this sport because you are never involved in a play, because you are always in the worst position. When it is time to step up to bat, you feel so much pressure to do something incredible, like hit a home run, that you usually whiff. If you somehow manage to get a hit, your accomplishment is ignored by your peers, who chalk it up to luck. (No child in history has ever gone from last one picked to first one picked. That is a universal law that will never be broken.) Then the kid who is picked last never gets a girl to like him, because he has been labeled a loser.
Therefore, what else is there to do except decide that everyone else is the loser and you are the cool one?
That is how the cocky nerd comes to be.
So I had a lot of time to sit there, in right field, thinking about other things, like how unfair this whole setup was. If I wasn’t handsome, how would I ever find a girl who would love me? Could someone who sucked at sports be popular? Was there a reason why nobody else was interested in the things I found interesting? Why did all the teachers think I was a pain in the ass and not someone special?
At that age, the comedians I liked most were the ones who called out the bullshit and gave voice to my anger—the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Jay Leno. I loved anyone who stood up onstage and said that the people in power were idiots, and not to be trusted. I was also drawn to people who deconstructed the smaller aspects of this bizarre and ridiculous life. I idolized the new generation of observational comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, and Robert Klein. I related to them and imitated them, and even began to write really bad jokes of my own in a notebook I hid in a small metal locker in my room. “On
Gilligan’s Island
they went on a three-hour cruise,” I wrote, “so why did they bring so much luggage?”
During junior high, my parents got divorced and things got a little messy. It was the early eighties, and after my dad read the self-help book
Your Erroneous Zones
, by Wayne Dyer, I think he suddenly realized how unhappy he was—and that was that. He and my mom never figured out how to make it work. They were both warm, caring people, but neither handled the divorce well. For reasons I never quite understood, they fought in and out of court for years—until everyone was broke. I was lost and scared. At one point, I started shoplifting with the secret hope I would get caught so that I could finally have an excuse to yell at them: “This would never have happened if it wasn’t for this divorce!” (Sadly, I only got caught once, and when Macy’s couldn’t reach my parents by phone, the store let me go.) It’s hard to be a teenager witnessing your parents at their worst. This was way before the days of “conscious uncoupling.” This was war. I remember thinking to myself at one point,
Well, I guess my parents’ advice can’t be any good—just look at how they are handling this situation. I need to figure out how to support myself financially and emotionally.
Oddly, that pain and fear became the fuel in my tank. It inspired me to work hard and has led to every success and good thing in my life. It worked so well that today, a parent now myself, I am trying to figure out how to fuck up my daughters
just
enough that they, too, develop outsize dreams and the desire to get the hell out of the house.
When I was a kid, my parents owned a restaurant called Raisins. After the divorce, my mom, Tami Shad, moved out and got a job. A former bartender named Rick Messina (who went on to manage Tim Allen and many others) hired her as a hostess at a comedy club he ran in Southampton, New York, the East End Comedy Club. I was fourteen years old at the time and this was one of the great summers of my life. I was finally able to see comedians in person. My mom would get me a seat in the back of the house and I watched every comedian—people like J. J. Wall, Paul Provenza, Charles Fleischer, and Jay Leno.
My next move was to accept a job as a dishwasher at the East Side Comedy Club, located in Huntington, New York, near my hometown of Syosset. East Side was one of the first comedy clubs that existed outside New York City and Los Angeles, and I remember the day it opened. One day there was an old fish restaurant in the middle of a large parking lot, and the next day there was this place that had nothing but comedy, and lines out the door. Long Island legends like Bob Nelson, Rob Bartlett, Jim Myers, and Jackie Martling were regulars. I remember watching a young Rosie O’Donnell do her first weekend spot at the club, and how excited everyone was for her. Occasionally a twenty-one-year-old named Eddie Murphy would come in and work on new material. When he did, the staff would start a pool and take bets on how long his set would go; they were annoyed at—and probably a little jealous of—his marathon sets, which would bump all of the other comics for the night. Watching him one night, I remember some guy in the crowd started heckling him. “I don’t care what you say,” Eddie responded, “because I’m twenty-one, I’m black, and I have a bigger dick than you.” In retrospect, it was not that great a line, but back then I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I didn’t have a big dick (more medium-sized), but now I definitely wanted to be up there yelling at people and being funny.
By my fifteenth birthday, my obsession was full-blown. I needed to become one of them. The question was, how to do that? And the answer seemed clear:
Meet them. Talk to them. Get to know them. Learn their secrets.
But who was going to sit down with some junior high school kid and talk about comedy?
In the tenth grade, I started to work at my high school’s radio station, WKWZ 88.5 FM, in Syosset! Headquarters was a nerd’s paradise located in the basement of our high school. The station was supervised by Syosset High’s film teacher, Jack DeMasi, a fiery, hilarious Italian guy who went to film school with Martin Scorsese. We all loved him because he talked to us and treated us, a sea of weirdos, like we were adults.
At WKWZ, the sports geeks produced sports shows, the news geeks produced news shows, and there was even room for jazz and classical. My friend Josh Rosenthal was a DJ at the station, and he loved music as much as I loved comedy. Occasionally he would take the train to the city and interview new bands like R.E.M. and Siouxsie and the Banshees. This blew my mind. Wait, so we could actually interview people we admired? They would talk to you if you asked nicely? It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I could do this with comedians. I asked Jack if I could start a show of my own, and he said yes.
In your life you come across people who encourage your voice and originality. For me, that person is Jack DeMasi. In fact, in an episode of
Freaks and Geeks
Paul Feig wrote many years later, there is a cool teacher who runs the AV squad, played by Steve Higgins (the announcer on
The Tonight Show
and the producer of
SNL
), who gives an inspiring speech about why the jocks won’t get anywhere in life. “They are peaking now,” he said, “but the geeks will rule the future.” In my mind that was Jack, and this moment changed my life.
How did I get people to talk to me? Well, I would call their agents or PR people and say I was Judd Apatow from WKWZ radio on Long Island and I was interested in interviewing their client. I would neglect to mention that I was fifteen years old. Since most of those representatives were based in Los Angeles, they didn’t realize that the signal to our station barely made it out of the parking lot. Then I would show up for the interview and they would realize they had been had. But they never turned me away, and every single one was gracious and generous with their time. (Except for one, who asked to see my dick. I won’t mention his name but I said no. I didn’t even realize this was probably just stage one of his plan. He told me he’d made “a bet with another comic” that he could get me to show it to him. I now realize the bet was probably a
little
more complicated than that.)
Over the next two years, I interviewed more than forty of my comedic heroes—club comics, TV stars, writers, directors, and a few movie stars. It was a magical time. I remember walking into Jerry Seinfeld’s unfurnished apartment in West Hollywood, in 1983, and asking him directly, “How do you write a joke?” And meeting with Paul Reiser at the Improv and asking him what it was like shooting
Diner.
I took a three-hour train ride to Poughkeepsie, New York, to meet Weird Al Yankovic, and hung out with John Candy on the set of
The New Show
, Lorne Michaels’s short-lived follow-up to
SNL.
Harold Ramis met me in his office as he prepared to shoot
National Lampoon’s Vacation
, and I sat down with Jay Leno in the tiny office in the back of Rascals Comedy Club in West Orange, New Jersey. By the end of those two years I had interviewed Henny Youngman, Howard Stern, Steve Allen, Michael O’Donoghue, Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello), Harry Anderson, Willie Tyler (not Lester), Al Franken, Sandra Bernhard, the Unknown Comic (Murray Langston), and so many others. Some went above and beyond the call of duty. The legendary comedy writer Alan Zweibel took out his phone book and hooked me up with a bunch of his famous friends. “Hey, here’s Rodney Dangerfield’s number. You should call him! Tell him I sent you!”
This was my college education. I grilled these people until they kicked me and my enormous green AV squad tape recorder out of their homes. I asked them how to get stage time, how long it takes to find yourself as an artist, and what childhood trauma led them to want to be in comedy. I asked them about their dreams for the future and made them my dreams, too. Did I mention I never even aired most of the interviews? I put a few out there, but even then I knew this information was mainly for me—and that the broadcast part was a bit of a ruse.
One thing I took from these interviews was that these people were part of a tribe—the tribe of comedians. My whole life I’d wanted friends who had similar interests and a similar worldview, people I could talk with about Monty Python and
SCTV.
People who could recite every line on the
Let’s Get Small
album and who knew who George Carlin’s original comedy team partner was (Jack Burns). It was lonely having this interest that no one shared. Even my best friends thought I was a little weird. In fact, just last year, my high school friend Ron Garner said to me, “I finally get what you were doing in your room watching TV all those years.”
These interviews would inform the rest of my life. They contained the advice that would help me attain my dreams. Jerry Seinfeld talked about treating comedy like a job and writing every day. (I have never done that, but I certainly have written more than I would have since speaking to him.) More than one told me that it takes seven years to find yourself and become a great comedian. (Mystical-sounding, but kind of true.) From that piece of advice I learned patience. In my mind I thought,
If I start working hard now, in seven years I will be Eddie Murphy.
Well, that hasn’t happened—yet. Harold Ramis talked about how when he started, he wrote jokes for comics like Rodney Dangerfield to pay his rent, so when I was green and behind on my rent, I wrote jokes for people like Tom Arnold, Roseanne, Garry Shandling, and Jim Carrey, and when they got TV specials or movies sometimes they would ask me to help. Harold’s advice set me on the path.