Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

530 Pages·2015·3.92 MB·English

by  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.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE 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:
CONDÉ NAST: 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.
EMPIRE MAGAZINE: “Mann and Husband” by Olly Richards, from the March 2013 issue of Empire Magazine.
Reprinted by permission.
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE: “Apatow and Shandling” by Mike Sager, from the October 2014 issue of Esquire Magazine.
Reprinted by permission.
HUCK MAGAZINE: “Judd Apatow vs. Miranda July,” from the May 2013 issue of Huck Magazine. Reprinted by
permission.
WTF WITH MARC MARON: Judd Apatow on WTF with Marc Maron podcast. Reprinted by permission.
MEADOWLANE ENTERPRISES: Judd Apatow interview with Steve Allen. Used by permission of Meadowlane
Enterprises, Inc.
SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT: 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
www.atrandom.com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno
Cover design and illustration: Rodrigo Corral and Zak Tebbal
v4.1
a
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Why Comedy?
The Beginning: Jerry Seinfeld, 1983
PART ONE: A–J
Adam Sandler, 2009
Albert Brooks, 2012
Amy Schumer, 2014
Chris Rock, 2014
Eddie Vedder, 2013
Freaks and Geeks Oral History, 2013
Garry Shandling, 1984
Garry Shandling, 2014
Harold Ramis, 2005
Harry Anderson, 1983
James L. Brooks, 2014
Jay Leno, 1984
Jeff Garlin, 2013
PART TWO: J–M
Jerry Seinfeld, 2014
Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller, 2010
Jimmy Fallon, 2015
Jon Stewart, 2014
Key and Peele, 2014
Larry Gelbart and James L. Brooks, 2007
Lena Dunham, 2014
Leslie Mann, 2012
Louis C.K., 2014
Marc Maron, 2010
Martin Short, 1984
PART THREE: M–S
Mel Brooks, 2013
Michael Che, 2014
Michael O’Donoghue, 1983
Mike Nichols, 2012
Miranda July, 2013
Roseanne Barr, 2014
Sandra Bernhard, 1983
Sarah Silverman, 2014
Seth Rogen, 2009
Spike Jonze, 2014
Stephen Colbert, 2014
Steve Allen, 1983
Steve Martin, 2014
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION: WHY COMEDY?
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.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to study screenwriting at the University of
Southern California, a whole new world opened up to me. The comedy scene was
booming back then. Suddenly I was able to go to clubs and make friends with fellow
aspiring comedians. Many of those people, like Adam Sandler, Wayne Federman, Andy
Kindler, David Spade, Jim Carrey, Doug Benson, and Todd Glass, are still my friends
today. I felt like the bee girl in the Blind Melon video, running onto the field and
looking around and…finding all the other bees I didn’t know existed. I was so happy to
no longer be alone. Later, when I pursued stand-up comedy for real, I would sit and talk
all night with the future comedy legends who were performing at clubs like the Improv
or the Laugh Factory, asking them questions while eating fettuccini Alfredo and hoping
Budd Friedman would notice us and give us more stage time.
Even after my career took off, the interviews never stopped. Sometimes I would get
interviewed while promoting a project, and other times I would be on panels, or doing
commentary recordings for a movie, interviewing my funny friends just like the old