There are many books in the production offices of Judd Apatow \u2014 bookshelves full of books in rooms full of bookshelves. All sorts of books. Biographies, photo books, children\u2019s books, essays, stories. Has he read them? \u201cSo little,\u201d he says. \u201cBut as long you buy them, that\u2019s 90% of it. As long as I have a lot of books, I\u2019m immortal \u2014 you can\u2019t leave the Earth when you have more books to read.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apatow has a new book of his own, \u201cComedy Nerd,\u201d following the interview collections \u201cSick in the Head\u201d and \u201cSicker in the Head.\u201d It\u2019s a thick, glossy, photo-filled, endlessly browsable scrapbook that covers the entirety of a life and career \u2014 from fanboy to mogul, as writer, director and producer \u2014 that shaped 21st century comedy, encompassing the highlights, the lowlights and the never-lit. (Apatow\u2019s profits after expenses go to Fire Aid<\/a>, helping those affected by the January wildfires, and the literacy charity 826 National<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Iris and Maude Apatow, Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd in \u201cKnocked Up,\u201d written, produced and directed by Judd Apatow.<\/p>\n (Suzanne Hanover \/ Universal Studios Licensing LLC)<\/p>\n You\u2019ve just finished a documentary on Mel Brooks, with your partner Michael Bonfiglio, and you\u2019re working on another about Norm Macdonald. Did they whet your whistle for the book?<\/p>\n I love having the opportunity to tell the story of these people\u2019s careers but, more important, their lives. Mel Brooks is the reason why so many of us went into comedy, is why young Jewish boys thought it was possible to get into show business. So to get to talk to him for 10 hours about what it felt like to be Mel Brooks, what was it like to be in World War II and then become a good TV writer and struggle in Hollywood and then figure out your approach to comedy. <\/p>\n I was a big fan of this \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d scrapbook when I was a kid, because I loved the show and wanted to know more. It had scripts and behind-the-scenes photos and little notes and gave you a sense of how it was made. And I also had one about the Marx brothers. And I thought, \u201cI think I have enough stuff like that to put together a book about comedy obsession.\u201d<\/p>\n Did that obsession make you an outlier among your childhood peers?<\/p>\n It was the glory days of comedy \u2014 \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d Monty Python, \u201cSCTV,\u201d Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Carol Burnett \u2014 but there wasn\u2019t anybody at school who wanted to talk about it with me. But that also made me feel I might be able to get a job in this industry because it didn\u2019t feel like there was any competition whatsoever. I think it was also connected to learning about alternative music and thinking that the bands that didn\u2019t have very many fans were better and loving them for that. Being into \u201cSCTV\u201d felt like being into the Replacements.<\/p>\n \u201cIt felt like a form of mania on some level,\u201d Judd Apatow says about his workaholism. <\/p>\n (Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Did you have a vision of what that world was like?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think I did. On one level I dreamed of being a stand-up comedian like Jerry Seinfeld or Garry Shandling. I was really scared to admit that and to get on stage and attempt it. I wasn\u2019t watching movies thinking I was gong to make movies. I wasn\u2019t someone who was looking at the coverage and wondering what type of lens they used. I just liked the movies. I had this vague sense of maybe I could be a comedian, maybe I could be an actor, probably in the back of my head I wondered, \u201cHow do you become Bill Murray?\u201d I didn\u2019t have that level of confidence myself. But I did get onstage at the end of 12th grade; even though what I was doing was awful, I did begin the process of trying to figure it out. When I interviewed comedians for my high school radio station they all said it takes a while. And I thought, \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be terrible at this for a year.\u201d And I was excited that I was in the terrible stage. I thought, \u201cIt\u2019s begun.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Steve Carell in \u201cThe 40-Year-Old Virgin.\u201d<\/p>\n (Suzanne Hanover \/ Universal Studios Licensing LLC)<\/p>\n Did you learn anything new about yourself going through all this stuff?<\/p>\n Making the book I thought, \u201cWas it healthy or unhealthy to work this much?\u201d I\u2019m trying to entertain and tell stories and make work that is meaningful to people, and on another level just trying to fill some insecure hole with accomplishment. I definitely put a lot of energy into trying to succeed as a way of feeling safe: Life won\u2019t fall apart if I just do a good job on this. There was definitely the thought that this is work of a crazy person. He needed to take a nap and slow down. So I was both proud and embarrassed. It felt like a form of mania on some level.<\/p>\n Your commentary does give a picture of your psychic journey, not just \u201cAnd then I made \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n So much of it was driven by the fact that I loved comedy and people who were in the world of comedy. For a long time it was, \u201cCan I be funny enough that those people would allow me to be in the same room as them?\u201d I realized writing the book that the great part of all of it was the collaboration; when you\u2019re in the middle of things, you\u2019re worried about making a living and your career and taking care of your family. But when you look back, you go, \u201cThis was so fun because we all did it together.\u201d When I look now, I\u2018ll just think, look how hilarious Kathryn Hahn is in \u201cStep Brothers\u201d<\/a> or how funny Kumail Nanjiani is in \u201cThe Big Sick.\u201d<\/a> We put in so much effort, and it\u2019s amazing some of them are what we wanted them to be and people liked them.<\/p>\n Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley asleep on the set of \u201cFreaks and Geeks.\u201d<\/p>\n (Gabe Sachs)<\/p>\n When I was a kid I was so into \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and \u201cSCTV\u201d and Monty Python, I must have thought, \u201cIt would be nice to have a crew.\u201d Without even realizing it, I was trying to assemble families. So when \u201cFreaks and Geeks\u201d<\/a> ended, which was really devastating, I tried to roll it into \u201cUndeclared,\u201d<\/a> and when that was canceled I tried to roll it into the movies. The saddest part of show business is that when a project ends, everyone goes their separate ways. I probably as a child of divorce wanted to keep the groups together as long as I could.<\/p>\n You seem to have included everything you\u2019ve been a part of here.<\/p>\n I tried to put all the failures in too so I could tell the story of how things fall apart. But \u201cWalk Hard\u201d<\/a> opened to $2.9 million for the weekend and 15 years later it\u2019s the one a lot of people mention first. [Editor\u2019s note: The movie opened to $4.1 million.] You suffer when \u201cThe Cable Guy\u201d<\/a> doesn\u2019t do well at the box office and some of the reviews are pretty rough, but 30 years later they\u2019re putting out a new version on Blu-ray because people are still into it. And the opposite is also true \u2014 certain things you like you realize no one\u2019s ever mentioned them to you. But all the projects were done with passion and the hope they would be creatively successful. You know that something didn\u2019t work when you see it on DirecTV and feel bad for the people watching it. There\u2019s not too many of those.<\/p>\n \u201cThe saddest part of show business is that when a project ends, everyone goes their separate ways. I probably as a child of divorce wanted to keep the groups together as long as I could,\u201d Judd Apatow said.<\/p>\n (Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n When I first met you, toward the end of \u201cFreaks and Geeks,\u201d you were simultaneously protecting this group of young actors and writers and yelling at executives on the phone \u2014 you had a business side and a summer camp side.<\/p>\n That\u2019s something that\u2019s helped me \u2014 because I\u2019m very hypervigilant, all my mental health issues are about being in a constant state of fight or flight. I\u2019m always looking for a problem to solve. I always think that if I\u2019m not on it, things are going to fall apart. Which is a good way to be if you\u2019re a producer, but not as a human being. Because it consumes you. It\u2019s hard to be present in the moment. The hard part\u2019s learning how to switch gears \u2014 trying to be funny when you\u2019re in a bad mood from the business call you just had to deal with. If you know you\u2019re about to be canceled it\u2019s hard to go into the other room and punch up the scripts.<\/p>\n Judd Apatow, left, and Adam Sandler were one-time roommates at a North Hollywood apartment.<\/p>\n (Judd Apatow)<\/p>\n How did it feel to see the book all together?<\/p>\n I was really, really happy with it. There\u2019s a part of me that just thinks, \u201cDoes anybody really care about any of this?\u201d But I try to remind myself that when I was young this is the type of book I wished existed. There\u2019s the instructional aspect, script pages and notes from the studio, and there\u2019s the personal journey of having a life while attempting to do this work. Most of it is about hard work and patience. It takes a while to become good, and you have to be the hardest worker, and you have to be willing to take massive risks. Everything about comedy is an experiment; there\u2019s no way to know anything\u2019s going to work. It\u2019s just a giant shot in the dark, and instinct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the Shelf Comedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures By Judd ApatowRandom House: 576 pages,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[422,412,9412,63524,146,85,46,63525,25581,2400,63526,63527,740,1266,22676,63528,789,9475,1264],"class_list":{"0":"post-94766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-book","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-career","11":"tag-comedy-nerd","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-judd-apatow","16":"tag-level","17":"tag-life","18":"tag-little-note","19":"tag-mel-brooks","20":"tag-movie","21":"tag-people","22":"tag-saturday-night-live","23":"tag-stand-up-comedian","24":"tag-story","25":"tag-thing","26":"tag-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n