Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (25 page)

Judd:
He had questionable years of sobriety.

Jim:
I don’t know
what
he was doing, but he had energy to burn. It was crazy. Between commercials he’d just be looking at you out of the corner of his eye and drumming with the pencils or something and going (
giggles manically, sniffs
). Just, like, going like the hounds of hell. He was like a child. A man-child.

Judd:
I remember Ben and I being somewhat shocked at your energy level, too. Take after take after take—it literally threw me as a person that it was possible.

Jim:
I’m a desperate human being.

Judd:
Do you feel like you’re needier now or then?

Jim:
I’m definitely in more pain now than I was.

Ben:
Me too! I’ll join you there.

Judd:
Does success bring about peace and calm, or more pain?

Jim:
When you start to realize that peace and calm are not actually gonna help you in the business—that they’ll actually be bad for you—that’s
when the real divide happens. When you go,
Oh, I could work towards peace, I could find bliss, but I won’t have a career.
It’s all about abandonment, it’s all about need, it’s all about worthlessness. If I remain worthless in my own mind, I will be the king of show business.

Ben:
The building blocks of success.

Judd:
I remember John Cleese—he
knows
he’s not as funny anymore, but he says he doesn’t care because he’s happier now. But I have to say, he seems pretty pissed lately and he’s been pretty funny. He got divorced recently.

Jim:
Oh yeah, there you go.

Ben:
Pain and humor go together.

Ben:
There’s David Cross! Left side of the frame.

Jim:
David Cross! We love David Cross. How many people were in this movie? We started the industry!

Judd:
Sometimes when I watch this movie—I always thought it was going to be some kind of wild roller-coaster ride that’d also be, like, super-fun and delightful. But then, it has true madness in it.

Ben:
I think it was a roller-coaster ride, it’s just that it was going
down
the whole time. The big drop.

Jim:
I disagree. I think it’s sublime.

Ben:
No, but it’s a fun drop.

Judd:
I remember when Jim said at the end of the movie, “I have to die. I need to jump off the tower and die.”

Jim:
Yeah.

Ben:
Well, you should have died, that’s the thing.

Jim:
I really should have. When you go halfway, it never works.

Ben:
That’s my fault. I take responsibility.

Judd:
They weren’t going to let us kill you.

Jim:
People don’t understand, truly, how warped you are, Ben. They haven’t even scratched the surface. Your iceberg is large under sea level there.

Judd:
Ben, this was the second movie you directed, after
Reality Bites
, but did you feel like,
Oh, I’m not getting as much acting work at this time, so that’s why I’m gonna direct?
Or—how do you decide how much acting to do? It takes so long to direct.

Ben:
Well, this was a weird period in time. I sort of had a career as an actor but not really—

Jim:
(
Pretends to wake up from snoring
) Sorry, guys!

Ben:
Let’s go back to the beginning—when I was about fifteen I played with the idea of becoming an actor.

Jim:
You didn’t direct for quite some time after
Cable Guy
, did you?

Ben:
Well, nobody was banging down the door. Let’s call it—basically I got a new agent. And he said, “Okay, you can’t do anything for about six months.”

Jim:
Hide under the porch.

Ben:
And then we’ll see where we’re at. It’s so obvious in show business. When a movie doesn’t make a lot of money, people don’t call.

Judd:
But then you did
Zero Effect
, and then right into
Something About Mary
?

Ben:
I did—after this, I did
Zero Effect, Something About Mary, Permanent Midnight
, and
Friends and Neighbors.
I could keep going, Jim—

Jim:
No, I’m loving it.

Judd:
But I remember when you got
Something About Mary
, that was big, because your star had not risen—

Ben:
It was a break. Huge. The Farrelly Brothers gave me a chance because they liked
Flirting with Disaster
.

Jim:
Which is one of the classic comedies of all time, by the way. That was a genius movie.

Ben:
But it was a weird time, where I didn’t know what I was going to—

Jim:
When you kiss Téa [Leoni] in that movie, did you
really
kiss her?

Judd:
Versus how
you
kissed her, in
Fun with Dick and Jane
?

Jim:
It was crazy! It was crazy what was happening outside the frame.

Judd:
I just remember once, we were at a restaurant after
Something About Mary
, and you were saying, “It’s really weird, because people keep walking up to me with their hair gelled up, like with semen,” and I was like, “Really? Nooooo.” And then a girl walked up to our table and said, “Can you come say hello to my friends?” And you walked over and came back and said, “One of the girls had her hair gelled up, like the—”

Jim:
It’s a nice thing! That’s nice.

Judd:
It’s nice having catchphrases, visuals, that people yell at you.

Ben:
But this was your reality, Jim, when you were making this movie. It had already been like that for a few years. What was it like?

Jim:
It was odd.

Judd:
I remember being in the mall with you, Jim. We were in a bookstore and suddenly people started walking up to you, and then more people, and more people, and then we realized every single person in the mall is headed to you, and then it got sort of dangerous for us to get out and became a
Hard Day’s Night
moment.

Jim:
No, exactly. And that’s why I’m a martial artist. That’s why I’m a weapons expert.

Judd:
How emotional do you get now when a movie does well, or badly? Like after having made a lot of movies, how emotionally connected are you?

Jim:
My entire self-worth is wrapped up in it.

Ben:
I find it hard to totally disconnect from that stuff.

Jim:
I want to go to a place where they hate me personally, and I have to win them back. It’s odd, because some of them—when a movie doesn’t
work, you know, it’s because it had something of gravity in it, and actually there was something that was not going to appeal to everybody, and it spirited people away in the other direction.

Ben:
It’s a complicated thing. Because how do you disconnect from that, but not make it about yourself, too?

Jim:
Whenever you try to do something serious, you’re gonna lose people. Certain people. Because they want you to be a certain thing and—

Ben:
There is that thing with comedy. People can take it very personally if you’re not there to be
funny.

Jim:
On Twitter, man, every once in a while, every fiftieth person is like, “Who do you think you are? You better not be dramatic anymore. Don’t you be dramatic!”

Ben:
I’ll tweet something about Haiti and there’ll be someone who’ll tweet back, “Be funny! Who cares about Haiti!”

Jim:
“Who cares about Haiti? Put your penis in your zipper and shut up.”

Ben:
“I’m unfollowing you, you’re not funny. You just care about Haiti.”

Judd:
I get that for retweeting your Haiti things! “Stop retweeting Ben’s Haiti things!”

Jim:
“Who do you think you are, funnyman?”

Ben:
Judd, how do you feel when your movies come out?

Judd:
I have those moments where—

Ben:
I’m looking for some insight here.

Judd:
Where I’m so proud…and it doesn’t do well. Like this movie. This blew my mind—I didn’t recover like you guys. This one threw me for years because I loved it
so deeply.
Like, how come—I loved this work so much, what Jim’s doing, what Ben’s doing, and how come it didn’t do well? It threw me because I thought I was in tune with what the audience liked.

Ben:
See, I’ve never felt like I had any idea about what the audience liked. It’s always like a crapshoot, really. (
To Jim
) We were talking about it—you only do what feels good to you, right?

Jim:
Yeah. Only what feels good.

Ben:
Yeah. How can you figure out what twenty million people will like?

Jim:
Well, it’s the Emerson thing: What’s true for one man isn’t true for all, and—

Judd:
I went back to TV after this. I retreated.

Ben:
I didn’t direct again for four years after this.

Judd:
It’s true.

Jim:
I still marvel at where everybody went. It just blows me away. It’s hard for me to even be in the room with you guys.

Ben:
(
Laughs
) Honestly, though, Jim, just to put it in context, when we did this movie, you were giving us a shot—right? I mean, wasn’t Jim giving us a shot?

Judd:
We were all giving each other a shot, but in weirdly interwoven ways.

Jim:
Judd was like pumping me back when I was in the clubs and stuff, and no one was watching me.

Ben:
I remember going to your young comedian special, in Phoenix, with David Spade.

Jim:
Judd actually opened for me.

Judd:
And I thought,
I gotta quit. Because I can’t do that.

Ben:
So what did you think, Jim, when you said to everybody, “I want Judd to produce it,” and then Judd said, “I want Ben to direct it”?

Jim:
You know, this is the thing—

Ben:
You had the power to do that.

Jim:
No one really knows anything about comedy. We know a little bit about what we’re doing, but as far as the industry—the exec branch—they don’t know how it happens. It never comes to you prepared and ready to go, you always have to work it to death till the last second, in the moment and whatever. And I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to say right now.

Ben:
I think you’re saying that they don’t know, so they let you go with your instinct.

Jim:
Exactly.

Ben:
If you’re the guy in the power position, they’ll listen to you.

Jim:
A lot of the comedies, you find yourself having to take shots with people, because they have that kind of—not a lot of experience, but they have that kernel of brilliance, that you go, like, “A good brain’s a good brain, man. Let’s go.”

Judd:
And they don’t know to be scared. I mean, we weren’t scared when we did this and in a lot of ways that’s what makes it pure. Really, it’s like a pure comedic thought.

Jim:
There’s not somebody trying to fit it into a shape or a form that’s
known
to be successful.

Ben:
And I don’t think we knew enough about the context of the “business” to know whether or not it could hurt us.

Jim:
It’s too bad that my money got in the way of all the fun. But you know, I’m just not going to look back with regrets. I’m just not. It was fun. Such a fun movie. We really had a lot of
fun.
And I can’t believe that the three of us can’t find the time to come together again and do something creative. Seriously, I hate you guys.

Judd:
We’ve all priced ourselves out of the business.

Jim:
You guys got huge kingdoms. I can’t even get inside.

Judd:
I’ll work for free. I’ll say right now, I’ll get it going.

Ben:
Get my assistant, okay? She’ll hook it up.

Judd:
Call my assistant’s assistant.

Jim:
We really should do something, because this is not enough. We just cut our teeth on this thing.

Judd:
It’d be fun now that we know more. But do you think we’re scared now?

Jim:
I’m not scared.

Ben:
Fear is part of the experience, but—I’m beyond fear now.

Judd:
I paid off my house, I’m okay.

Jim:
You can live forever.

Judd:
Is that where we stop?

Ben:
I’m glad we did this. We’ve wanted to do this for about ten years, right?

Judd:
Ten years.

Jim:
Well, I’d never done this before. How’d we do, by the way? Did we do okay?

Ben:
We can always come back and do it again.

Jim:
Let’s start it over. We’re going to do it again. Turn it over and I’ll be you this time, Judd.

This interview was originally featured on the DVD of
The Cable Guy
and appears courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

I don’t understand Jimmy Fallon. He’s fast, witty, handsome, musical, inventive, a confident performer, a great listener—and he is definitely having more fun than the rest of us combined. I always thought comedy came from pain. I thought the people who created it were drawing from some bottomless well of existential angst. I thought it was impossible to do it well if you are also an enthusiastic, hopeful, energetic person. Most talk show hosts are fun to watch because they seem so miserable, but Jimmy is the opposite. He is more of a Steve Allen or Martin Short type of guy. He is exactly what he seems to be when you see him on TV—a warm, chipper, funny guy. A good person. I wanted to speak with him to figure out how he became this way—with the secret hope that it would help me shed some of my old, boring, neurotic, my-pain-is-so-old-I-don’t-even-remember-where-it-came-from BS. I think I got my answer but I am not sure I can make it work for me. (I think he is happy because he is not a Jew.)

Judd Apatow:
I had the loveliest time with your wife at the wedding the other night.

Jimmy Fallon:
She just got back. She’s like, “Thank God for Judd Apatow. He was fantastic.”

Judd:
I was a stand-in for you.

Jimmy:
Did you do all my bits?

Judd:
Yeah. If she didn’t look over, she may have thought that you were there.

Jimmy:
Was it fun or was it just a wedding?

Judd:
It was great. When you go to a wedding and Lionel Richie comes out and sings “I’m Easy,” what more do you want?

Jimmy:
Goose bumps.

Judd:
He was really funny, too. I always get annoyed when someone like that is funny.

Jimmy:
I know. What did he say, “I only do this if I get paid or invited,” or something?

Judd:
Yeah. (
Laughs
) I was—I wanted to say, “Hey, I used your song ‘Hello’ in
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
!” But then I realized I used it in the sequence where Steve Carell prepared to masturbate.

Jimmy:
That’s why I don’t go out anymore. Because I’ll see somebody—“Oh, hey, I just talked about you. I talked about your bad plastic surgery. Sorry!”

Judd:
That’s your biggest conflict. You have no choice but to be nice to their face, and then take them down in the monologue.

Jimmy:
(
Laughs
) What a big tough guy I am.

Judd:
Someone told me a funny story about the
South Park
guys—they had, I guess, torn Janeane Garofalo apart in something, and then they were in a restaurant and saw her across the way, and just ran away before they could be spotted.

Jimmy:
Did you ever hear the story about Wayne Newton punching Johnny Carson?

Judd:
No, no.

Jimmy:
There’s a story that Wayne Newton got pissed off that Johnny Carson was making jokes about him, so he stormed into his office, past his secretary, grabbed his collar, and said, “You say one more joke about me and I’ll fucking knock your block off.” I don’t think Johnny mentioned him ever again.

Judd:
I love people almost getting in fistfights over jokes.

Jimmy:
What is wrong with people?

Judd:
Your show seems so well run. I guess my first question—as somebody who had to run shows when I didn’t know how to do it—would be how, in the beginning, did you know how to set up your show, not only for it to work comedically, but for it to be a place that was happy and functional?

Jimmy:
We just went in knowing that we might get canceled. And if you’re going to go down, you have to go down doing what you like doing and what’s fun for you, because I don’t ever want to do something painful and then have everyone go, “Hey, that works. Keep doing that painful thing for years.”

Judd:
SNL
is famous for being a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere. It’s almost built for people to turn on each other because everyone is under so much pressure to get on the show. But all these other shows that Lorne produced seem like happy places.

Jimmy:
It’s so—I watch
SNL
all the time and I see a new cast member, and I think,
Oh, man, no one’s going to write for that person next week.
Because they scored too hard.

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Jimmy:
Got to take them down a notch.

Judd:
You’re very close to Lorne. What is the thing you think people don’t understand about him?

Jimmy:
Maybe that he does not care about money. He’s very successful, so he doesn’t need money, but it’s like—if it was anyone else, they would have made some contract deal where they would get five percent of every person who leaves to become uber-famous. Will Ferrell would be giving Lorne five percent after the next
Anchorman.
But Lorne doesn’t care. He’s proud of the people who do something else off the show. It makes him happy.

Judd:
What was exciting about SNL—well, I’m a little bit older than you, but when
SNL
was originally on, it was before the VCR was something
that most people had. And when
SNL
was on, you really thought,
I may never get to see this again.
You had to watch it because there was no way to know if you would ever get another shot at it.

Jimmy:
I taped every
Saturday Night Live
as soon as I could afford videotapes. I taped every episode that I could tape. Then I would go to my friend’s house with the tape and show them the best sketches—you got to see Chris Farley and stuff like that, you know. I was like the human Funny or Die.

Judd:
Where did you grow up?

Jimmy:
Saugerties, New York, which is Woodstock.

Judd:
Did you have friends who loved comedy? Because I was totally alone. No one gave a shit.

Jimmy:
I had a good crew of maybe like five to ten kids I could watch the tapes with. They’d have a party and sneak booze in the basement or something and I’d come in with a tape and show a couple of funny sketches, and they’d all laugh, and we’d just hang out and listen to music and stuff like that. I was really into it. And then my dad bought a VCR, because he wanted the video camera that came with the VCR that attached with the wire—

Judd:
Yeah.

Jimmy:
—and you had to carry around a box.

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Jimmy:
He used that to tape home movies, but I used it to tape
Saturday Night Live.
They had like a weird rerun thing of
Saturday Night Live
that was on in the eighties. I taped
Saturday Night Live
as well, but they also ran old ones from the seventies.

Judd:
I remember that.

Jimmy:
And so I used to tape them, but I couldn’t always play the tapes back because that was the only VCR we had in the house, so what I would do is play back Richard Pryor’s monologue, and record it on a reel-to-reel
that I bought at a garage sale. Then I would go up in my room and play it and lip-sync Richard Pryor’s monologue in the mirror.

Judd:
Oh my God.

Jimmy:
I did Steve Martin, too. I would do all of their bits and lip-sync them like they were songs.

Judd:
I’m always fascinated what draws people to doing any of this, but you seemed to have super-cool, healthy parents.

Jimmy:
They’re not healthy, but they are definitely—

Judd:
You liked them?

Jimmy:
They were great. I had a great childhood.

Judd:
Are your parents still around?

Jimmy:
Yeah, I talk to them almost every day. They are great. They belong in a mental institution, but besides that, very nice people.

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Jimmy:
They were funny people. We were an Irish Catholic family, so we’d have parties. My dad loved to listen to music, so we always had the radio on, and so they would have parties and people came over and after a couple of hours people would stand up in front of everybody and sing a song. And then everyone clapped and then someone else would go, “No,
you
sing one,” and then someone would sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and then someone would sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and then my grandfather would get up and sing last, some song, and everyone would start crying because it was a really sad Irish song. And that was the end of the night. But we’d all have a good laugh, my grandmother did bits—my grandparents lived right next to me, almost in my backyard, in a little guest house almost. They kind of helped raise me. I really got a lot of my sense of humor from watching them do bits, but we would listen to comedians on Sunday mornings. They would play this channel, an AM radio station that would play comedians, and we would listen and—it was fantastic. We used to listen to the radio and just laugh, and go, “Oh my gosh.” And then I started getting into it. I really loved comedians, so my
dad would buy an album like Rodney Dangerfield,
No Respect
, and he would—I remember this—he would take a key and scratch out any of the dirty words, so that when I played the record, it would skip over the curse word.

Judd:
That is hilarious. And you were never a dirty comedian.

Jimmy:
I never was a dirty—no, I never was.

Judd:
But your show now, in a way, is like sitting around, singing songs at the piano, enjoying people. Is that how you see it? I mean, the idea of my crazy Jewish family sitting around, singing a song, is unfathomable.

Jimmy:
This was a weekly event. This would happen all the time, and everyone would get involved. My sister wasn’t as into performing as I was, but we would play “King Tut” and come downstairs in my mom’s dresses—the ones that looked kind of Egyptian—and we would dance and lip-sync “King Tut.”

Judd:
See, I did all that and no one cared and I was alone.

Jimmy:
(
Laughs
)

Judd:
It’s like we have the same story—if everyone ignored you and you just watched
Love Connection
alone in your room every day for seven years.

Jimmy:
I look back, I mean there are tapes of me doing Pee-wee Herman and impressions of people, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy—

Judd:
I remember meeting you when you first got to
SNL
, I remember seeing you there. And I remember you did an impression of Adam Sandler.

Jimmy:
That was my breakout episode. Ben Stiller was hosting.

Judd:
That’s right. It was the Stiller episode. That’s why I was there.

Jimmy:
It was a Halloween episode, Ben Stiller hosted, and I remember Ben said to Higgins, “Hey, this kid does a great Sandler.” They go, “Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen it, but Adam doesn’t have a movie coming out, so we’ll wait until something—” and Ben goes, “No, it doesn’t matter. You should have him do it.” So we wrote up celebrity
Jeopardy
, where I did Sandler
and Ben did Tom Cruise and Daryl did Sean Connery. That same episode is when I played guitar and did guitar impressions with Colin Quinn on “Weekend Update.”

Judd:
Yeah. Wow.

Jimmy:
Usually, if they know that a bit is going to kill, they’ll put it at the end of “Update,” but they didn’t think I was going to work that well, so they put me in the middle—and I crushed. It was a good bit. I did impressions of Alanis Morissette and all this stuff and no one knew—I was brand-new. It was my third episode, I think.

Judd:
That’s the biggest moment, when you realize you’ve found something that will make you break out a little bit.

Jimmy:
And that was it. I was the impressions guy. It all started happening from that one episode.

Judd:
You try so hard to figure out what will make people notice you—

Jimmy:
I remember I called Adam before I did it, because I wanted to make sure I had his blessing. They called him and put him on the phone with me, and I was so nervous. I was like, “Hi, Adam.” He goes, “How ya doing, man? Let’s hear it.” I go, “Okay.” I go (
making funny sounds
), I go, “All right, I talked to my mother the other day and she said, “What is wrong with you? There’s something wrong with you….’ ” And I was doing this whole bit, and he goes, “All right, that’s good. That’s good. You gotta do it.” He was awesome.

Judd:
That’s because no one ever calls or shows any respect in that situation. I remember Dana Carvey did Shandling on
Saturday Night Live.
It was really mean, and not a great sketch—I think Carvey called Shandling up after and was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and Shandling wasn’t thrilled about it. Garry just said, “You know what? We’re going to do a
Larry Sanders
episode about it.” And then they wrote an incredible
Larry Sanders
where Larry was mad when Dana Carvey guest-hosted—he did an impression of him and tore him apart.

Jimmy:
I remember that. It was a great one. Out of all the things I watched to get ready for this job,
Larry Sanders
was the ultimate—that’s the ultimate
piece of advice I’d tell anyone to watch if you’re doing a talk show. It’s so real and so well done. That’s how a show gets made.

Judd:
It seems like effortless, the way you generate all this material.

Jimmy:
Well, I think you have to keep trying and keep swinging and get up to bat and try a different type of joke, because you don’t know which one is going to connect. We try a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, and you go, like, “Wow, that one did not work,” but we tried it. And that’s what you have to do. I remember—it was the first season of
Late Night
, and you were nice enough to come on the show and you go, “This is great, this is fun, but honestly, remember these years because you will not be doing this much pre-tapes and stuff down the road because you guys will burn out. There’s no way.” And I really took that to heart. Every time I’m like, “We don’t have time to do that,” I think,
No, you know what, I’m going to make Judd Apatow proud and I’m going to stay late, I’m going to stay till two in the morning.
I swear to God, I think about it all the time.