Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (46 page)

Judd:
I think a lot of the reason why I’ve done okay was growing up with the terror of not doing okay. From an early age, I tried to teach myself how
to think ahead. But I know plenty of people who are funny and don’t have those types of skills.

Sarah:
I’m somewhere in between. I’m so much more famous than I am financially successful. I mean, I live in a three-room apartment. I mostly make free videos on my couch. But I am fine.

Judd:
Is it because, creatively, you’ve done what you’ve wanted to do?

Sarah:
I’ve always kept my overhead low so I could do whatever I want. I think of myself as lazy with spurts of getting a lot done. I find myself rooting against things sometimes because I get excited at the thought of a clean slate. I also really like sleeping. My friends make fun of me because, you know, I love hanging out but I always hit a point in the night where I just want to get home and sleep. I have a very active dream life and I have to be there a lot.

When
Knocked Up
came out, Seth and I had a bit of what is known in Hollywood as “a moment.” People didn’t know our work that well, and the movie was this enormous, unexpected success. We felt, for a second, like we were fully in the zeitgeist, the flavor of the month. At the height of it, we were interviewed by the critic David Denby at The New Yorker Festival—which is a series of words I never thought I would type. It was a real collision of worlds, because the festival, at least to us, felt very literary, and here we were, onstage, talking about an emotionally thoughtful but dirty, dirty movie.

People talk a lot about me being a mentor to Seth, or having discovered Seth when he was a kid, but here’s the truth: Seth’s sense of humor has influenced everything I have done. I feel very maternal toward Seth—so when he makes a movie like
This Is the End
and it includes a scene where Jonah Hill is being fucked by the devil, I’m as proud as a parent whose kid graduated from Harvard and became a brain surgeon.

David Denby:
One of my distinguished predecessors, Pauline Kael, used to put down movies by saying that they were “deep on the surface”—meaning that there was nothing underneath.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
was shallow on the surface with endless depths underneath. It was certainly foul-mouthed, but it was also about, oh God, shyness and bluster and illusion and delusion and many, many other fascinating things. If anything, it was a song of innocence, which ended with this amazing hilltop hymn to love, which was very dangerous to have shot. But you pulled it off. It was earned. Now, those of you who had seen
Freaks and Geeks
on television
from 1999 to 2000 already knew something about this comic sensibility. I’m just catching up to some of that. The great thing about these two guys is that, even though Seth is disgustingly young, he’s been working with Judd for almost nine years. Now, if you print out Judd’s credits on IMDb, you get three single-spaced pages of stuff. So I’m just going to run through the highlights quickly: The pride of Syosset, Long Island. Mother worked in a comedy club in Southampton. Interviewed established comics when he was in high school on the high school radio station, which had ten watts of power. Attended USC for two years, dropped out. Roomed with Adam Sandler for a while and knew other young comics as well as Garry Shandling. Wrote for a lot of them. Did stand-up and gave it up. Wrote
The Cable Guy
in ’96. Paul Feig created
Freaks and Geeks
in ’99 and Judd wrote a fair amount of it and directed three episodes. It was canceled after eighteen episodes—

Judd Apatow:
After thirteen. We shot eighteen.

David:
You shot eighteen and only thirteen aired?

Judd:
Thirteen aired and then they dumped it.

David:
And then
Undeclared
was two years later?

Judd:
Yes.

David:
And was also canceled. Do you ever wake up at night and have revenge fantasies?

Judd:
Well, the same guy who canceled
Undeclared
also canceled
The Ben Stiller Show.
And uh, I don’t want to start out with a randy joke, but, uh—

David:
Oh yes, yes you do.

Judd:
As I realized that we were about to be canceled, that day
Time
magazine put out a list of the ten best shows on TV and they had
Undeclared
on there. I knew we were about to get canceled so I framed it and put a Post-it on it and sent it to him, and the Post-it said, “I don’t understand how you can fuck me in the ass when your penis is still in me from last time.”

David:
I’m sure that you will—

Judd:
This is
The New Yorker
, you know. You don’t hear John Updike say that.

David:
Mr. [William] Shawn, the very squeamish editor of
The New Yorker
for thirty years, has probably turned over in his grave so many times in the last fifteen years, he’s burrowed to Hackensack. But that document, I’m sure, will be deposited at Harvard University in the Apatow Papers. Among your most recent feats was that you held off Stephen Colbert during a pretty rough outing in the summer, and managed to get the words
Jew
and
penis
onto national television—although not always in conjunction with each other. You have described the penis in a movie as the last frontier. Is that the Jewish penis you were referring to and—

Judd:
I guess the first frontier is the Jewish penis and then the last frontier is the uncircumcised penis.

Seth Rogen:
I won’t touch that.

David:
We’re not going to go there. Okay, Seth was born and raised in Vancouver and started performing stand-up comedy in a lesbian bar when he was thirteen. Is that correct?

Seth:
It is.

David:
Now, was this before or after your bar mitzvah—and what in the world was your material?

Seth:
It was after my bar mitzvah and it was just about my life, about my grandparents and my bar mitzvah and high school and trying to meet girls and stuff like that.

David:
I don’t want to get too personal here, but were you prematurely testosteroned? When did you get that bottom octave?

Seth:
The bass? I don’t know, I always had a raspy voice from years of physical mistreatment to myself.

David:
So you were in Vancouver and Apatow shows up with a casting call for
Freaks and Geeks
? I’d love to hear that first encounter from both sides.

Seth:
I had been doing stand-up for a while and it became clear I was going to fail out of high school, so I thought I should try to get some money. I had gotten an agent and I said, you know, maybe I should start to audition for things because stand-up comics don’t make a lot of money from just doing stand-up comedy. So she said okay, and
Freaks and Geeks
was the first or second audition I got sent out on. Judd was in there and Paul Feig was in there, who I actually recognized from the movie
Ski Patrol
, which I was a big fan of. The whole time I didn’t actually pay that much attention to Judd because I was like,
The fucking guy from
Ski Patrol
is here!
That was shocking to me. No one warned me. I thought they warned you when something like that happens. But I got in there and read the scene and I remember they laughed really hard. I remember walking out thinking,
If I don’t get that role I don’t know what they’re looking for, because they really seemed to laugh—unless it’s bullshit and they do that with everybody.

Judd:
They do that for everybody.

Seth:
Yeah, they do.

Judd:
I saw Seth on a videotape at home. They sent me like thirty or forty people from Vancouver and we wrote a generic
Freaks
scene to see who had an interesting personality. The scene was about a kid explaining that he was going to grow pot underground and if the cops came, he would explode the entrance to the tunnel and then they would just see that he had grown corn aboveground and he would say that he was a corn farmer. That was the premise of it and, uh—

Seth:
I related to it.

David:
Seth, you were writing from a very early age with Evan Goldberg, and I think that I read that the first version of
Superbad
was commenced when you were fifteen. You were writing about guys who were seventeen when you were fifteen?

Seth:
Actually, I think we were a little younger—around thirteen or fourteen—but no, it was about guys our age. The characters just slowly got older as we got older until we graduated and then we couldn’t take the characters with us beyond that point.

David:
So you just kept writing it and rewriting it over a period of years.

Seth:
Yeah, for around twelve years. If they made it when we were twelve—I mean, it would be pathetic.

Judd:
But the penis sequence was in draft one.

Seth:
It really was. What’s sad is that a fair amount of the jokes in the movie were in the draft we wrote when we were twelve years old. It’s sad reading it because I have not gotten any funnier in the last fifteen years of my life.

David:
Judd, you said somewhere when you were doing stand-up comedy that you found it hard to develop a persona for yourself as a stand-up comic, and that struck me as interesting because I never heard anyone say that. Explain what you meant.

Judd:
Well, I did stand-up when I was seventeen years old, and you really don’t have any life experience to draw on and so I wasn’t mad about anything. I was just kind of like a really bad Bill Maher. I would go on the road and open up for Jim Carrey, and I would watch him and think,
Wow, he’s a lot better than I am. He seems to have gifts that I don’t have.
And so I gave up.

David:
You wrote for a lot of people and—

Judd:
It was easier to write for other people. I could sit in my house when I was twenty years old and write jokes for Roseanne Barr about stretch marks, which is very weird, but I could write it. I remember I had one joke—and I really don’t understand how I wrote this at twenty because I didn’t even know what a stretch mark was—which was, the only way to get rid of stretch marks is you have to put on another ten pounds just to bang it out. I wrote for Roseanne for a year and I’d go to her house and hang with her and Tom and write jokes, but I really wasn’t thinking about my own personality.

David:
When Seth and his partner, Evan Goldberg, were working with you in Los Angeles, I read somewhere that you sent them writing exercises like: Come up with ten comic ideas in the next three days. Were there other writers you were schooling this way? You sound like a fencing master or Karate Kid or something.

Seth:
I didn’t even finish high school.

Judd:
Oh Jesus. And you know, I saw from day one that this was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever encountered. He was capable of anything. I thought that when he was sixteen years old, watching him act on the show, watching how his mind worked. And so Evan would come out sometimes in the summer and they would do rewrites of
Superbad
and it would get rejected and they’d do more rewrites and table reads and more rejections, and then I just started to find ways for them to make money so they wouldn’t have to go back to Canada.

David:
Let’s get into
Freaks and Geeks
, and we can get the first clip going. It doesn’t go zing, zing, zing like a sitcom. It’s actually very slow—it plays very slowly and meditatively. It’s melancholy, some of it, about all sorts of painful things as well as funny stuff. Was that a very radical thing to do? Is that why NBC lost faith in it?

Judd:
Paul Feig hated all the high school shows that were on TV at the time, which were all filled with very handsome, pretty people. He thought there should be a show about slightly less pretty people. He just thought there should be a show about his goofy group of friends, and that was his inspiration to talk about his childhood in Michigan and—you know, that’s how it all began. He had this idea of a show that moved a little slower. His theory was it would be like what storytelling was before everything got sped up by MTV editing. I was heavily influenced by
Welcome to the Dollhouse
—that’s a movie that I thought about a lot when we were working on the show. And
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, which Paul Feig claims he never saw.

Seth:
That’s bullshit.

David:
I’ve been looking at it recently and some of them really go deep. There’s the episode where Jason Segel plays the guy who is not terribly bright, just wants to more than anything else be a drummer, and he plays with his friends and goes to an actual audition for a real band and totally bombs.

Judd:
It’s the end of the episode.

David:
That’s getting kids where they live.

Judd:
It was a pretty dark episode. “Here’s your dream. You suck at it. End of episode.” And we wondered why we were canceled.

Seth:
I know. People don’t want that?

David:
And there’s a kind of neo–Howard Stern episode—

Judd:
We were trying to come up with a story line for Seth to have a girlfriend. And it was near the end of the run and we clearly knew that we were going to get canceled, so we were being a little bolder with our ideas. As kind of a fuck-you to the network, like, If you’re going to cancel us then we’re going to do the episodes that we want to do and we’ll just go down swinging—or as Michael O’Donoghue said when he was at
SNL
, go down like a burning Viking ship. The episode is about Seth’s girlfriend telling him that she was born with ambiguous genitals and that the doctor had to choose what sex she would be. And so it’s basically Seth’s reaction to that and the question of, will he break up with her or will he be able to handle it? We tried to handle it sensitively. We did it right.

David:
Do you remember shooting that scene?

Seth:
I do. Me and Jason and James really got along well on the show and we had a good dynamic and it was never our instinct to rush through things, I would say. I mean, we would make a fucking meal out of it if we can. I’d say one line all day if I could, but it was always really easy and it never seemed like a
laborious
process. It never seemed like it would take a long time to get somewhere. Everyone was collaborative. It always seemed clear how to do it, I think.

Judd:
I remember watching that scene and thinking,
Seth’s a movie star.
I mean, it just was clear. Like this is the kind of guy I want to watch in a movie. In fact, if you look at
Knocked Up
, a lot of it is the same kind of comedic idea of something happening that’s unexpected and having to figure out if you’re man enough to handle it correctly.