Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 38

Sarah: Oh yeah, definitely. We had no religion at all but we were Jews in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and my sister-who is now a rabbi-said it best: We were like the only Jews in Bedford, New Hamps.h.i.+re, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of a.s.sociated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor, that it goes to important things for everybody. We were never to complain about that s.h.i.+t, or be all about keeping your money or whatever. Now I look around and realize that was special. Money is seen as such a positive thing now, we try to get as much of it as we can and that's okay because it equals success. It's sad.

Judd: My parents didn't talk about religion, either. And then, out of the blue, my brother became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel. I always think it's funny how, in the same family, one person looks for answers through comedy and another through religion.

Sarah: My sister and I are so close, and so different. I don't have religion at all. Love and science are my religion. And Kermit the Frog and Mister Rogers.

Judd: That's so funny, because whenever I need to equalize myself and bawl my eyes out, I will go online and watch Jim Henson's funeral on YouTube.

Sarah: I've got to see that. I will not be able to keep it together because, honestly, I'll just f.u.c.king sing "It's Not Easy Being Green" or "Rainbow Connection" and cry.

Judd: That's what I do late at night. I just go down the Mister RogersJim Henson wormhole of tears. But those two guys are a good religion. How does your sister talk about Judaism?

Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get c.u.n.ty with her and I'll be like, "Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?" I just can't get my head around it, you know. And she'll go, "Well, I like to live my life as though there is one." And I'm just like, "Oh, you're beautiful."

Judd: Why can't you get your head around it?

Sarah: I can be cynical. But I don't think of myself, at my core, as cynical. So much of it is location. Like, who is Muslim? Who is a Jew? Who is a Catholic? Who is a Christian? Who's Buddhist? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is where you happen to be born. So how can one be right and another be wrong? It seems pretty clear to me that it's a coping mechanism for people who cannot handle the not knowing of things. I am okay knowing I will never be able to comprehend the world.

Judd: I wish I could convince myself to believe the way your sister believes because I'm so exhausted from not believing.

Sarah: I actually don't think that she believes in G.o.d, necessarily. I think she just loves the ritual of religion and finding meaning in every little thing. She loves living her life that way.

Judd: Do you think she believes that G.o.d is involved in people's lives?

Sarah: Yeah. But she isn't one of those "Oh, let's pray for this tumor to go away" people. You know what I mean? She just loves the ritual of finding meaning in everything. I don't know. I don't think she believes in, like, a male G.o.d or anything. She's a major feminist, a liberal hippy-dippy granola rabbi.

Judd: She doesn't believe in a G.o.d that is actively involved in people's lives, making choices?

Sarah: She doesn't believe that G.o.d is rooting for the Giants and not the Patriots. She's not f.u.c.king ridiculous.

Judd: I'm jealous of those people. I plan on tricking myself into believing in religion one of these days. I'm going to pick a religion and then hypnotize myself.

Sarah: When the rest of my family is in a crazy, neurotic tizzy, she'll be like, "It will work out." You know.

Judd: I always feel that my only connection to anything spiritual-and this might be sad-is when a joke comes to me. In that moment, I feel a different kind of connection than I do during the rest of the day.

Sarah: Because you can't make it happen. I mean, I have to sit and sit and work on my jokes. And it's just such torture for me and I think, Why don't I love this? Sitting down and fixing my s.h.i.+tty jokes should be my pa.s.sion. But it's torture.

Judd: Do you put time aside to write?

Sarah: No, but when I do, it always pays off. I don't know why I'm so afraid of setting aside twenty minutes of sitting-down time. It's always fruitful, you know. But I just fight it so much.

Judd: Seinfeld said he sits and writes for two hours every single day.

Sarah: Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they're just that incredible combination of funny and not lazy, which is very rare and special and completely failure proof. I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris screamed at me-in a loving way, but still. He was like, "You need to do two hundred shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!" And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.

Judd: Who are the comics you look up to? Who's had the greatest impact on you, would you say?

Sarah: Early on, Garry Shandling. When I first started hanging out with him, he was always so giving of what he knows and what he learned. I definitely learned to embrace the quiet moments onstage from him-relaxing and not fighting with the crowd, not raising your voice, not ever trying to win them over. I also started out with Louis [C.K.] and David Attell. I remember the very first time Louis saw me. I was just starting and I had this affectation, where I would pull the mic away from my mouth. And he was like, "You shouldn't do that. It looks weird and it's a bad habit to get into." And so I stopped, you know.

Judd: What is it like, at this point of your career, to look back on what all these people you came up with have accomplished?

Sarah: It's so exciting. You know, everyone's got their own velocity. Life goes at different speeds and there's no real time frame with comedy. Louis has been brilliant for thirty years, but it has been so exciting to see, these past five years, the world getting Louis fever. On the flip side of that, there is the waste, the ones you know that were everyone's favorite-you know, there's so many times I will find myself talking to someone, "No, no, you don't understand, he was the king, he was everyone's favorite comic," and people only see a guy as washed up, with no place to live, who can't get his s.h.i.+t together. It's so frustrating. You just want people to understand. Like I said about Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they're a great combination of brilliance and hard work. There are people who are brilliant and don't work hard, and there are people that are brilliant and sabotage themselves, and both are just so hard to see. Every once in a while, you forget there's nothing you can do about it, and so you scramble around, trying to get something going for them, and then you come to the realization that they'll never let it happen. You don't get what you want, you get what you think you deserve. With people like that, they're just not going to let themselves succeed.

Judd: And you end up with survivor's guilt.

Sarah: It's awful. You must know comics in their sixties who didn't parlay their act into writing or acting or producing, and so they're just f.u.c.ked. Even the cruise s.h.i.+ps don't want them anymore.

Judd: Yeah. I feel like it's a miracle when you can separate yourself from the pack enough to make a real living.

Sarah: Comedy is like alcoholism. You're surrounded by people who are getting high all day, f.u.c.king around, and just being comics-and time pa.s.ses, you know.

Judd: None of us have any other skill to fall back on.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. There are a couple of comics that-like, I have a friend who just found a whole new career as the old black man in a bunch of commercials, and it's exciting for him. Like, he can buy people drinks and stuff and it's nice. But, you know, he didn't have teeth for a while. I mean, you forget that comics, for the most part, don't pay any attention to-I mean, with women comics it tends to be different because we're not disgusting pigs, but a lot of comics don't even know to like floss and brush their teeth, you know what I mean? And their teeth, I have to tell you: There was a time where I just bought a ton of dental care products and gave them out to my guy comic friends because they didn't know any better. I mean, I don't know how they get p.u.s.s.y. When I drive them in my car, and they get out, I have to Febreze the whole area. It's insane. Like hygiene is just something you don't need if you're fly enough to get girls or something. But it's bad and death creeps in through the gums.

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. .h.i.t 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.

SETH ROGEN.

(2009).

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 f.u.c.ked 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 G.o.d, shyness and bl.u.s.ter 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-s.p.a.ced 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 f.u.c.k me in the a.s.s when your p.e.n.i.s 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 doc.u.ment, 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 p.e.n.i.s onto national television-although not always in conjunction with each other. You have described the p.e.n.i.s in a movie as the last frontier. Is that the Jewish p.e.n.i.s you were referring to and- Judd: I guess the first frontier is the Jewish p.e.n.i.s and then the last frontier is the uncirc.u.mcised p.e.n.i.s.

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 ba.s.s? 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 f.u.c.king 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 bulls.h.i.+t.

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 neoHoward 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 f.u.c.k-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 s.h.i.+p. The episode is about Seth's girlfriend telling him that she was born with ambiguous genitals and that the doctor had to choose what s.e.x 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 f.u.c.king 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.

David: When are girls going to figure out that the jocks become used car salesmen and the nerds become, you know, Judd Apatow and Bill Gates? Why aren't they on to that by now?

Judd: You know, that's-uh, maybe they are. Any high schoolers here getting laid? Any nerds getting a lot?

Seth: Have you seen Kelsey Grammer's wife?

Judd: David Spade.

Seth: David Spade. Bill Maher, even. Come on.

David: The 40-Year-Old Virgin started as a skit, right, that Steve Carell did about a middle-aged guy who had never had s.e.x?

Judd: Steve was really funny when we were shooting Anchorman-crazy funny, like we were all watching him every day going, What is going on with this guy? He's just playing so over his head every day.