Judd: I was a stand-up comedian. I was like you—a stand-up comedian who realized I could get better people to act. At some point, I realized my friends were way funnier than I was as a performer. So I started writing. I would write for them. And then slowly they would give me jobs, which turned into punch-ups and screenplays. But I really wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. That was my only intention when I was younger.
Mike: What did Seinfeld mean to you?
Judd: In terms of what comedy meant to me, I liked Seinfeld, but I liked that comedians were pissed off. I liked that they said everything wasn’t fair. People like George Carlin would talk about the injustices of the world. Richard Pryor and Monty Python mocked how society worked—class systems and government. I was just attracted. I must have been very hostile as a kid. I didn’t know why, but I liked that people were telling everybody to fuck off. But I found that I didn’t have very strong opinions when I was a stand-up comedian. I didn’t have the anger to do it. So I wrote.
Mike: You saved yourself, you know. Because the one thing I understood the minute we were all comedians in this group—and I saw what happened to some people and less to others—is that it’s very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. You have to be almost a saint like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid being corrupted by it. There’s very little work where the work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that. And you can see it doing terrible things to people because it’s constant, instant gratification. There are people who can resist it, like Chris Rock. People of a certain character and high intelligence know how to avoid it. Were you aware of having to build certain things in to protect yourself from that happening?
Judd: I would always get post-stand-up shame. If I was really funny, when I got home, it wasn’t that I thought, Oh, I need to do it again, I was just so embarrassed that I had been so arrogant to feel the need to do that. Is that how you felt when you were doing the Nichols and May show? How did it feel for you?
Mike: I never told this to anybody, because it’s so sort of depressing and pointless, but I had a sadist fantasy onstage. I figured each laugh was me cracking a whip. But there’s this weird thing that happens to you when you’re out there, dressed funny. You can wear better pants and stuff because you’re not a character. You can feel like you’re even sexy in everything because you’re up there and the audience is doing what you want. I didn’t love it but I also didn’t suffer from it as Elaine did. We closed the show while we were still sold out because she couldn’t take it anymore. I kept saying, “Take what? It’s an hour and a half and all we do is talk!” But it took something out of her. She’s a better actor than I am, for one thing, so she really went through stuff that I was faking. But it’s also something else. It cost her something. It didn’t cost me anything because I didn’t really like it. To risk everything on a play, I mean, your feelings and ideas and secrets and everything, is, to me, much riskier than laugh, laugh, laugh. But the greatest comic writers, like Noël Coward, always had contempt for the funny stuff. They liked the prefaced boring stuff because that was so meaningful. I hate boring stuff and I like laughs, but I don’t wanna do it.
Judd: Who’s the funniest in person that you’ve collaborated with? Neil Simon?
Mike: Neil was very, very funny. I think the most difficult person to work with, because we were in such pain all the time, was Robin Williams. You just pray he’ll stop because you might get in real trouble if you don’t stop laughing soon. While they were lighting a scene, he would do these improvs that I can’t begin to describe. Once there was an astounding one that lasted about twenty minutes—we were all begging him to stop. The next day I said, “How much of that could you do again today?” And he said, “Oh, none. It’s gone.” It was all unconscious.
Judd: In your directing, do you prefer doing comedy? What’s the difference between doing something like Angels in America, which is also funny at times, and—
Mike: I think all good plays are both. You can’t be only funny. And God help any play that is never funny.
Judd: I’m always happy when the idea is something serious and we find a way to get people emotional about it but still get some laughs in. We were talking about, you know, scenes where people fight, where you still can get laughs but the fight is still real and intense. Maybe we could show a clip from This Is 40 and talk about conflict in these movies. Let’s take a look at a scene.
(Clip from This Is 40: Debbie catches Pete playing with his iPad on the toilet.)
Mike: Your movie is so entirely about being that thing that isn’t two people but something more. How you get it and how hard it is to maintain and how, since it leads to the best thing of all, which is children, how central it is to our lives. It is our lives. But your take on it, which is to concentrate on the most unsentimental parts of it, that every—even taking a dump. How much more down-to-earth can you get? But it’s not only about love; it’s about spirit and it’s about what love really is, which is not mawkish; it’s an everyday happiness that you couldn’t describe to a Martian because it looks like something else. Happy people look like something else. They don’t look like happy people. Have you ever noticed that? They look like involved or maybe even angry people.
Judd: Happy people look crazy. I mean, the people who seem happy.
Mike: Yes, there’s something wrong with them, clearly. But I think that in a weird way, your trademark is: How far do we go in our ludicrousness? There’s no end to it. It can go as far as you like. But the thing that happens when you have a baby and you’re both in bed with a baby—for the first week, two weeks, three weeks, and then forever—is simply like nothing else in the world. You can’t celebrate it in a mawkish way because then it’s somebody else. To do it your way, you can’t do it without laughs. You can’t do it in life without laughs, either, because you’re right into it. And also, I have to confess, I’m a sucker for metaphor. I go on about it too much and I keep saying metaphor is dead, nobody wants metaphor. As Nora Ephron said once: “Well, I feel terrible about the metaphor, but what can I do? It’s like the whale, you know?” And then I realized it was bullshit and I was very pretentious to worry about it because it’s there or it’s not there and you don’t have to name it or analyze it. Sometimes I get a script and I think, How do I tell them that there’s no reason to tell this story? Here’s a question that I can’t answer: Why is it worth telling one story and not another? Well, the easy answer is it’s, it’s really secretly about all our lives. And there are plots like that, we know that. Virginia Woolf reminds you of the hardest parts of your own life. But to throw that all out and go and put on the screen or on the stage what actually happens without a metaphor, I think that’s very exciting. That’s a gearshift that we haven’t had.
Judd: We’ve talked about the fact that life is overwhelming. There’s a lot, there’s too much to handle. You’re trying to be a good spouse and a good parent and have your kids do well at school and you’re trying to take care of your health and you’re trying to deal with your extended family. And, at some point, it really brings you to the brink of losing your mind. You’re trying to get along with your spouse at the same time and there always seems to be a lot of humor in this failed attempt we all make to just be able to do it all. And that was the original idea behind the movie. But I think that what happened was, as we got more specific, it became more universal. The smallest details are the details that people come up to me and say: “I’ve had that conversation seven times this week.”