Why did I pick James Brooks and Larry Gelbart? Because two of the most formative shows of my life, the shows that trained me in comedy—not to mention how to be a human being—were M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The work these men did was emotional and hilarious and, I felt, spoke to the best part of human beings. I mean, M*A*S*H was the highest-rated program in the history of television: More than 100 million people watched the finale. James Brooks has won nineteen Emmys, for shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and The Simpsons. And I’d like to point out that Freaks and Geeks lasted eighteen episodes.
Everything flows from these guys.
Judd Apatow: There’s an enormous amount of pressure here right now. This is a pressure cooker.
Larry Gelbart: For the record, dying is harder.
Judd: Oh, yeah.
James L. (Jim) Brooks: This means I have to go.
Judd: Anyway, it’s exciting to be here. It is an honor to share the stage with the two men who are the primary reasons I wanted to be involved in comedy, and I also feel bad about your being here, which clearly demeans you. I was looking at everyone’s credits on Wikipedia last night, and it was embarrassing. I felt bad. I read them and thought, I should not be here.
Jim: You’ve done more pictures than I’ve done this year.
Judd: Oh, Jesus. Anyway, when I was a young man and, you know—M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, these were what made me want to do this. So this is very exciting for me—not so much for you, but for me. We are going to show a few clips tonight. We’re going to start off—each of us has picked a clip from a film that influenced us in some way. The first clip is mine, from Punch-Drunk Love. It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and Adam Sandler is one of the stars. This is a scene where you see him with his family and all of his sisters, who don’t treat him very well. I was working on The 40-Year-Old Virgin simultaneously, but this struck me as the much better way to do it, so I wanted to show that.
(Clip from Punch-Drunk Love: Barry is uncomfortable at a dinner party with all of his sisters.)
Judd: I really like that movie. It’s a great, strange movie with a tone that’s all its own. Whenever I’m working, I get nervous when there aren’t laughs—I’m always trying to figure out what that balance is: How do you deal with the question of how funny should it be, and is there a moment when things become too funny and you lose the humanity?
Jim: It’s a great clip and it’s a great question.
Larry: And here’s a great answer: You are your own gauge for what is funny and what is not. You have to decide. If it gets to you, it’s good enough to be put in the script. Too funny? It’s too funny if it’s not character-driven or situation-driven. If it’s just funny for funny then it’s not worth keeping.
Jim: Great answer.
Larry: Thank you.
Judd: (To Jim) Well, the next clip is your clip.
Jim: Can we just show it, and then talk about it afterwards?
Judd: Okay. I hope it’s one of my movies.
(Clip from There’s Something About Mary: Mary mistakes Ted’s semen for hair gel.)
Judd: You just went blue. You went blue.
Jim: I think the unfortunate expression is “seminal joke in motion picture history.” I think it changed movies a little. And I think the film itself had about as many tens in it as anything I’ve ever seen—just huge, huge jokes. But everything sort of pivoted off of this one joke.
Judd: And the masturbation sound effect was good work. Good sound work there. I think it might have been Ben Stiller but someone was telling me about having to do a scene where they masturbated on the screen and they said that what’s embarrassing about it is that in a way you’re revealing to your crew how you masturbate. Ah, so that’s how Ben Stiller does it….
Jim: There was a very forlorn masturbation scene in Punch-Drunk Love.
Judd: That’s right, the phone sex sequence. You know, when we were working on The 40-Year-Old Virgin there was a masturbation question, which was: Does the forty-year-old virgin masturbate? And of course, it’s a very important issue because you’re trying to decide how sexualized he is. So I brought in a team of the great comedy writers to help me with this question and Garry Shandling cracked the code on it. Garry’s pitch was, you don’t see him masturbate. You just see him prepare to masturbate. You see him put on his pajamas and brush his hair. And I thank Garry for that. Okay, now, Larry, do you want to say what your clip is?
Larry: To Be or Not to Be. The original version. I used to think that anybody who wanted to write screen comedy should see this picture once a year. It’s just a marvel of construction, casting, and wit on an impossible subject, the Nazis. Let’s show it.
(Clip from To Be or Not to Be: Ehrhardt stalls Professor Siletsky while running to manage his acting troupe in the next room.)
Jim: Larry, Jack Benny was singular, don’t you think?
Larry: I think it’s his only successful film. He was in a string of terrible movies, but this worked for him.
Jim: But his energy just—
Larry: Amazing. It was amazing. The story of this film was that Carole Lombard, who co-starred with him, was touring the country selling war bonds and she died in a plane crash and so they did not promote the picture. They thought it would be in bad taste to have her laughing on screens all over the country when, in fact, she had died. Mel Brooks redid it, of course, with his wife, Anne Bancroft, a number of years later.
Judd: Larry, how did you become a good writer? Where did that transition happen?
Larry: I learned the difference between good and bad and I opted for good.
Judd: That will help all aspiring writers. But was there a moment, as you transitioned from writing jokes for comedians and sketch comedy to storytelling, that was seminal for you?
Larry: The stage play A Funny Thing Happened was the transitional period—I had to write something that was more than twelve minutes long, like a Sid Caesar sketch, and they didn’t pull up the scenery every night afterwards. It was an education in construction, and the teacher, of course, was a Roman playwright named Titus Maximus Plautus, who did his best work in 253 B.C. It’s wonderful working with dead authors because their lawyers are dead, too—and their agents. But that was the transition for me.
Judd: (To Jim) And what about for you?
Jim: Well, I had television, and there’s nothing better than to do a show every week. That was my college: I learned from the actors on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. You know, I had been writing for just a relatively short time and Allan Burns and I were able to do what we wanted and we had a great boss. We were too dumb to know how rare it was.
Judd: There’s so much depth in the work, though. Was there someone that taught you about that early in your career?
Jim: I don’t know how that happened. I remember there was a writer named Leon Tokatyan, who was on the Lou Grant series, and he used to love writing these long speeches. He made me just want, in every script, a place where I could pull off somebody talking for a page, a page and a half. If I could make that work, if I could make people sit for that, it became a big deal for me. He was a direct influence on me, I think.