Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (3 page)

Judd:
When did you do your first TV appearance?

Jerry:
Merv Griffin
was my first talk show.

Judd:
And how did you get that first booking?

Jerry:
The same thing. I was out working at the Improv. If you’re clean, and you’re clever, and you’re killin’, they’re not gonna miss you.

Judd:
What’s it like doing
Johnny Carson
or
Merv Griffin
?

Jerry:
It’s the ultimate.
The Tonight Show
is—to stand up there is a dream. It’s like the Olympics of comedy, you know.

Judd:
How do you prepare a certain ten minutes to go on?

Jerry:
Well, you try to put it together like a small regular set. In other words, it’s an hour set condensed into ten minutes. You can’t have a mistake in it. Because it’s—you can’t recover. It goes by so fast so you try and put it together like an opening, and then you build, and you get the audience rolling and you have a big closing finish.

Judd:
Is it like fifty percent of the fight is just going on and walking out there?

Jerry:
Yeah, yeah. But you make one little mistake, or one stupid mistake and in five minutes it’s very hard to get an audience back. People do it, but it’s tough.

Judd:
So where do you go from here? Like right now you’re established as one of the top comedians and you get work, not only in the clubs but in Atlantic City. How much farther can you get?

Jerry:
It’s a tricky point that I’m at. But everyone that you’ll be talking to is that. Because there’s a lot you could do with TV series; you could do a sitcom, which a lot of people don’t want to be associated with. You could do movies; they’re hard to get and it’s hard to have a hit. You could just do stand-up and hope that you catch on after a while—like Gallagher, you know. There’s a lot of different ways. I’m gonna do some acting. Because it’s easy for me and there’s a lot of good vehicles for exposure as an actor. But stand-up is what I am. I’m a comedian, and the acting will just be to improve my visibility.

Judd:
And what kind of vehicles are you looking for?

Jerry:
Quality. That’s my only real consideration. It could be anything, as long as the people are trying to do something good. I don’t want to do a piece of junk. I’m not starving, you know.

I met Adam Sandler when I was in my early twenties. He was known at that time as the stud man from the MTV game show
Remote Control.
He also happened to be an extremely original and gifted comedian. We all knew that Adam was going to rule comedy one day; we just didn’t know yet how that would come to pass. What would the trigger be?

The first step was when he was asked to do stand-up on
David Letterman
, and killed; then he was flying off to audition for
Saturday Night Live;
and then, suddenly, I didn’t have a roommate anymore. Those days living with Adam were, in some ways, the time of our lives; we still get on the phone every now and then, twenty years later, and reminisce about it. It was a time when all we did, all day long, was kill time and write jokes and then, at night, tell jokes at the Improv, then we ate fettuccini Alfredo with Budd Friedman and one of the many comedians we looked up to. It was a special, carefree time. We were all working so hard to succeed, but having fun being knucklehead kids, too.

In 2009, I got to make
Funny People
with Adam, which turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. He was so successful at the time, I honestly wasn’t sure I would be able to maintain control of the project; I worried about how far he’d be willing to go with so much on the line. But Adam was a true collaborator. He was incredibly brave. He never once said, “I don’t want to do that,” or, “That might make me look bad.” And in the process, he revealed a side of himself that most people had never seen before. Even more fun than making the movie was the press tour. From the beginning, Adam declared he didn’t want to do any interviews without me, which led to me and Adam being in rooms together, having to do interviews with a different person every eight minutes
in countries all over the world, and trying to figure out ways to make each other laugh. One of the high points of that press tour, for me, was our appearance on the Charlie Rose show, because Adam is an extremely private person who rarely talks in public about his life and career. We did it together, like old roommates. I liked it so much that I put it on the DVD for
Funny People.
And I present it again here now.

Charlie Rose:
I am pleased to have Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow back at this table. Welcome.

Adam Sandler:
Great to see you.

Charlie:
Now, where do we start? Tell me when you two first met.

Adam:
After I moved out to L.A., I was twenty-two and went onstage at the Valley Improv. There used to be an improv at a hotel in the Valley. They had that for a few years. It’s gone now but, uh, I did pretty well that night. That wasn’t a normal thing. Usually I didn’t do well and so I ran to a phone to call my dad—“It’s going all right, Dad.” And if I remember correctly, I think Apatow was lurking around the phones, kind of looking at me, and I’m,
All right, this guy’s looking at me.
And then he came up to me and said, “Hey, I’m Judd, I saw you out in New York, you do that Baryshnikov bit.” I used to have a bit I’d wear sweatpants onstage and say here’s my impression of Baryshnikov and I’d pull them up and show the lack of bulge—

Charlie:
The what?

Adam:
The lack of bulge. Anyway, Judd mentioned he liked it and we started talking.

Judd Apatow:
It sounds like a come-on. I love your bulge.

Charlie:
So he started talking to you—and then?

Adam:
And then we became friends—very good friends. I was out there with a few guys from NYU. We all made the move together and then they couldn’t afford rent anymore so I was like, I need a roommate who’s going to pay.

Judd:
I don’t remember that. I don’t remember that.

Adam:
Everybody was moving out of that house.

Charlie:
Where were you in your life, at that point?

Judd:
I went to USC cinema school for a year and a half and then I basically ran out of money and interest. How I knew that was, during college I went on
The Dating Game
and I won a trip to Acapulco, but it was happening during finals week—so I dropped out of college.

Charlie:
Oh my God. How was Acapulco?

Judd:
I got sunburned the first day and couldn’t leave the room for the next two days. And so I was living with my grandma Molly and my mom and working the clubs at night and emceeing at the Improv. So I was happy to move out to L.A.

Charlie:
You were doing stand-up and emceeing at the Improv?

Judd:
For money, I worked for Comic Relief producing benefits during the day so I had enough to pay my four-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollars-a-month rent.

Adam:
He was making five hundred bucks a week. He was the only one of us who was guaranteed to pull in five hundred a week. We’d always say, “How’s he getting this Comic Relief job?” He would go in for a few hours and come back—he’s getting five hundred for only a couple of hours a day. There was a lot of anger towards him.

Charlie:
What was he like as a roommate? I mean you were, he was Felix and you were—

Adam:
I guess I was Oscar, you know, yeah. Judd’s a very, uh—

Charlie:
Fastidious.

Adam:
He is.

Charlie:
And after being roommates, you remained friends? You stayed in touch?

Judd:
When Adam got
Saturday Night Live
, he left and, you know, there was a question of whether or not he was going to keep the apartment in
L.A. I quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen. And so I got another apartment.

Adam:
That I had a room in.

Judd:
That, yes, you had a room in.

Adam:
He moved to another apartment, and just for my L.A. visits, which weren’t that frequent, he had an extra room for me.

Judd:
It was very exciting because Adam got the job on
Saturday Night Live
out of the blue, which shocked me because Adam’s stand-up was kind of mumbling and bizarre and he didn’t do characters. He didn’t come from Second City, and then suddenly he’s like, “I’m the new cast member on
Saturday Night Live
.” How did that happen?

Adam:
You know what is insane? How cocky I was back then. When I got offered
Saturday Night Live
, they offered me to be a writer and then eventually a performer and I was going, “I don’t know if I want to do that. These guys don’t understand.” And all my friends were like, “Just do it, you idiot.”

Charlie:
Dummy.

Adam:
Exactly.

Charlie:
So why didn’t you make a movie together until now?

Adam:
We did. We’ve worked on a bunch of movies together.

Judd:
I started doing
The Ben Stiller Show
, which was a show that Ben and I created and was on for a season on Fox. That was the first big TV gig I got after writing jokes for people for a long time. I was doing that while Adam was on
Saturday Night Live
and then we both started writing movies. Adam wrote
Billy Madison
and I co-wrote a movie called
Heavyweights
with Steve Brill, and our friend Jack Giarraputo that Adam went to college with was the associate producer.

Adam:
He [Jack] was your assistant.

Judd:
He was my assistant. And then he moved over to
Billy Madison
, and then we worked together a little bit when I did some rewrites on
Happy Gilmore.
So every few years, I would come in and help out. I always
wanted to do this but I did feel like I needed to have learned enough to be able to take on something so ambitious.

Charlie:
And what did you want to do?

Judd:
To make a movie with Adam and to make it personal because, you know, we know each other so well. I always wanted to tap into that but I also didn’t know how to direct so I needed ten or fifteen years to get that together.

Adam:
I always knew Judd was—you know, we have similar tastes. He’s doing movies differently than I did them but we always made each other laugh. We always felt comfortable with each other. We liked the same things. Judd liked a lot of stuff I never even heard about, a lot of music, a lot of movies. He brought me in to a different world. Then Judd gave me—he said, “Check out my movie,
Knocked Up.
” I was shooting a movie at the time. I watched it in my trailer with a couple of my buddies and I was just like,
Apatow is unbelievable.
I called him up and said, “Judd, whatever is next, let’s do it.” And he said, “All right, I think I’m going to have something.”

Charlie:
See, that says something interesting about him, doesn’t it? Looking out for himself by calling you up and saying, “You know I admire what you do, and think about me the next time you make something that might be right.” And on the other hand, he’s a huge star when he makes that call.

Judd:
I was thrilled and then I instantly had to go in my notebook and be like,
What would be the idea for Adam? Oh, maybe this one?
I’d always wanted to make a movie about comedians. It’s not a subject that’s been handled great on film and if you do it badly, all comedians will hate you for the rest of your life. So you feel that pressure but in the back of my head I thought,
I think I’m one of the few people that know this world enough to get it across on-screen.
It just took a long time to work up the courage.

Charlie:
Before we talk about
Funny People
, both of you know comedians, you understand comedians. You are comedians. What are the common denominators among the people you know who do what you do, whatever variation of it: write jokes, stand-up, comic films, whatever?

Judd:
In personality, it’s different. There are some guys who are kind of smart and witty and funny, and there are some guys who are just a little bit off, and there’s some guys who clearly got a beat-down at some point during their young life and that made them feel the need to get attention.

Charlie:
And so which one is he?

Adam:
So many of those.

Charlie:
All of the above.

Judd:
There is a moment on Garry Shandling’s DVD commentary for
The Larry Sanders Show
where he talks about this with Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry Seinfeld says to Garry, “Why can’t you be a comedian just because you’re talented and you’re smart and that’s why you’re a comedian?”

Charlie:
That’s what I would ask, yes.

Judd:
And Garry just goes, “Why so angry, Jerry?” I think that captures it.

Charlie:
Okay,
Funny People.

Judd:
Yes.

Charlie:
What’s the passion you had for this?

Judd:
I wanted to talk about when I first became a comedian and the moment I was allowed into the world of comics, which was very exciting for me. The people I worked with when I first started were incredibly nice to me and I was just in heaven being around them. You know, I wrote for Roseanne and Tom Arnold. That was one of my first jobs. They bought me a Rolex for Christmas. They paid me eight hundred dollars a week and suddenly I could afford valet parking. It was all positive so I knew I needed to fabricate something and then I had another idea, which is, I wanted to write a movie about someone who is sick who gets better—

Charlie:
Who is sick with a terminal illness and thinks it’s all over.

Judd:
Yes, and it’s about how he realizes that he’s more comfortable being sick and the way that makes him feel, in terms of appreciating life, than he is when he gets better. Suddenly, there’s time again and he starts becoming neurotic and has kind of a meltdown. That was the initial thought.

Charlie:
In your mind, what’s the push-pull between, I want to tell this interesting-but-serious story and at the same time, I make comedies?

Judd:
I thought that if this story happened in the world of comedians it would inherently have a lot of humor in it. But what I thought in my head was,
I’m not going to let the joke count determine what the movie is.

Charlie:
I’m not going to go for easy jokes?

Judd:
I’m not going to go for big set pieces. Usually when you make a comedy, you think,
Okay, every ten minutes something crazy has to happen. The energy has to kick in.
And here, I just said,
Well, there will be a lot of stand-up in the movie and the conversations will be funny and intense, but I’ll let the emotional life of it rule the day in terms of how this works.
And that was tricky to do. It’s tough to shake it off and just say,
Okay, no, this scene’s intense and that’s it.
When you’re testing a movie, if it’s a comedy, you hear the laughs and you go,
That scene works.
But if it’s a sad scene and you’ve watched it two hundred times, it’s a little trickier to go,
How did we do there? Did you feel something?
I wish there was a noise for feeling. Then I could go,
Okay, they made the weird noise.

Charlie:
Adam, tell me about George Simmons, your character. How is he different from anybody you played before?

Adam:
He’s a little more raw. He shows a darker, nastier side—you know, what I like about playing the guy is you’re never sure what the response is going to be. Seth Rogen plays my assistant. He’s a nice young kid and one second I’m warm to him and the next second I’m abusing him. Seth never knew which way we were going to go with it, and when I first read the script I was like, “Oh, man, I am such a bad person in this movie.” And he would always say, “Really? You think so? I don’t know. I think he’s a nice guy,” and I’d be like, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” But the way Judd put the movie together was like, All right, you see why this guy became a certain way and you forgive him.