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 fucked. Even the cruise ships 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, fucking around, and just being comics—and time passes, 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 pussy. 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 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.
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 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.