Funny People: Death Comes for the Sausage King
By Stephen Marche
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GUYCO
Judd Apatow is not a boy anymore. He's not a man-boy, either. The walls of his Los Angeles production offices are lined with photos of friends and family; his collection of autographs has grown extensive (latest addition: Truffaut). At forty-one, gray-stubbled and begutted, he is fully, unmistakably, irretrievably a grown-up now, and he has a long, semen-stained résumé to prove it. For the past decade, all the difficult moments of change in men's lives have been Apatowed one by one: surviving high school (Freaks and Geeks), starting college (Undeclared), losing your virginity (40-Year-Old Virgin), moving out and having kids (Knocked Up). Weren't those fun? Yeah, they were. Now he's moved on to growing old and dying with Funny People, a long, risky, dark departure from anything he's done before.
But what darkness, what profundities, can we possibly expect from a man whose most successful movie to date had a bunch of guys giving one another pinkeye by pillow farting? Apatow showed me an hour of his half-edited film this winter, and it's full of the juvenile obsessions that you've come to expect from the Judd Apatow Experience: masturbation and its accoutrements, the color and consistency of feces, the effect of marijuana on speech and mannerism, penis size and girth, the whole shadowy borderland between male camaraderie and homosexual panic. If you find any of that funny, and I do, Funny People will make you laugh. (I did, a lot.) But it is also the story of a comedian who confronts death and becomes a more selfish person from the experience. The lord and master of fart jokes wants to make you cry, and what's more, he wants to make you cry about fart jokes. Fart jokes, it turns out, can be unbelievably sad.
All the characters in Funny People are, in key respects, just like Apatow. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, the successful comedian at the film's center, who's achieved superstardom in movies but with mixed feelings. (Apatow is now as big as it gets in Hollywood, but he has, in the past, been crippled by anxiety attacks.) When he's diagnosed with a fatal disease, George hires an assistant, struggling stand-up Ira Wright, played by Seth Rogen, to help him through dying and to write jokes. (Apatow dropped out of USC film school in 1987 to live with the real Adam Sandler and pursue stand-up and joke-writing full-time.) Together, George and Ira journey to confront the lost love of George's life, Laura, played by Leslie Mann, who has two kids with a handsome, athletic husband played by Eric Bana. (Mann, famously, is Apatow's wife, and her two kids in the film are played by their daughters, Iris and Maude Apatow. That the world's sexiest Bana in no way resembles Apatow is a joke fraught with implication.)
Autobiographical is the wrong word for what's going on here; though Apatow insists that "nothing [in the film] is accurate, but it's all true," Funny People is practically documentary. In the rough cut, which may or may not change drastically by the time the movie hits theaters, Apatow uses clips from Adam Sandler's early stand-up as stand-ins for George's early stand-up; scenes from Birdland, the medical drama in which Mann briefly starred in the nineties, become scenes from her character's previous life as an actress; and the opening shot is a young Sandler (as George Simmons, of course) in bed with underwear on his head, making a prank phone call to a deli to complain about indigestion caused by its pickles. That scene was shot by Apatow when he was living with Sandler after dropping out of USC, before anyone had heard of Apatow or Sandler. The youthful innocence and explosive untapped talent isn't acted — it's captured. To try and retain that energy, the stand-up scenes in the movie were taken from real shows done in Los Angeles, and they are genuinely unpolished. When the audience half-laughs at a failed joke, it's because the joke doesn't work, not because they worked on making it sound like a failed joke.
A key scene in the movie, and the best scene in the movie that I saw, is when Laura shows George a clip of one of her daughters singing the song "Memory" from the musical Cats, and it's a real clip of eleven-year-old Maude singing at a real school recital. A chicken-pox outbreak at her school has Maude hanging out in the offices on the day I visit, and she wanders in and out of our interview with utterly unself-conscious charm. But the self-reference soon becomes vertiginous: She leaves the room when she sees the scene coming, and then, onscreen, Maude's character leaves the room when she sees the clip coming. I understand why she leaves. The scene is uncomfortably personal. Watching it with Apatow in the room makes me squirm a little. His confidence in his daughter is incredible; he doesn't feel she needs protection from the camera, or from an interviewer, for that matter. Is it selflessness and candor, or is it the deepest possible neediness, a hunger to share everything with the world, even his daughter?
Nathan Fox
Seth Rogan channeling Apatow, sitting next to Adam Sandler channeling Apatow.
Apatow may seem like the quiet one, the reserved one, the one who avoids the spotlight, but ultimately his comedy derives from the same inexhaustible fountainhead that drives more obvious head cases like Sandler or Jim Carrey. He willed himself into being funny. In grade five, he started writing jokes. As a teenager he traveled from his Long Island home to interview comedians passing through New York for his high school radio show. During his twenties he tried stand-up. He knew that career wasn't going to be after HBO's Fifteenth Annual Young Comedians Special in 1992, in which he performed beside Dana Carvey, Ray Romano, and Janeane Garofalo. "I knew I was the weak link," he says now, "and I just didn't find myself all that interesting." Which is, of course, bullshit. He finds himself plenty interesting, and even after he became the most successful producer of juvenile masculine comedy in Hollywood, Apatow's neediness may be even deeper for being sublimated. Adam Sandler is happy so long as we're laughing at one of his silly little personas, but for Apatow, at this point in his career, a laugh isn't enough. He wants us to know who he really is. He wants us to see his real family, his real daughters. Funny People is like a family home video, except it's been shot by Janusz Kaminski (responsible for both the searing Saving Private Ryan and the luscious Jerry Maguire) and the family includes virtually every comic of note in America. The pictures on the walls of Apatow's office are of the same people who fill up his movies. Sandler making silly faces with Apatow's younger daughter, Iris: Is that her fooling around with her dad's friend or a still from Funny People?
Maybe it doesn't matter. No one is better at making the interests of work and family coincide than Apatow, and the key to his brand of comedy is the easy intimacy of it. It projects so casually the sense of being in a replacement family, of overwhelming loyalty that nurtures and sustains you no matter how gross you are. He has worked with the same people over and over again, no matter whether they're fresh or funny or beautiful or fat. Seth Rogen has been in everything he has directed; Paul Rudd in almost everything; Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill. Not since Preston Sturges has a director and producer drawn so much out of such likable but indifferent actors. Not that Apatow sees them that way. He believes that he has stumbled upon comic geniuses and doesn't seem to notice that most of them do their best work — sometimes their only good work — for him. Apatow's early experience with Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, routinely included on lists of the best television shows ever canceled after a single season, were as traumatic as divorces — "Dad is the network. Mom is the head of programming," Apatow says. "They would fight and break up, and they would cancel you" — and the tumult has obviously given him a craving for stability: "All I'm doing in my career is proving that I was right about Freaks and Geeks to two people who were fired ten years ago."
The camaraderie between his actors is not feigned; he's earned their trust, and he's made them a part of his family. "I love them all as people," he says. "Many of these guys I've known before and after they lost their virginity." And who really wants professional comedy when you can hang out with some guys you've known forever while they goof off? That is fun. That is probably the most fun you ever had in your life. It's way more fun than listening to a bunch of jokes. Better actors would ruin the delicate web of fine roots that nurtures his movies. His gift is the ability to conjure spontaneous intimacy. It is one of the rarest, and most valuable, abilities in the world, and the craving for intimacy, and not death, is the real problem for the funny people in Funny People. George is the most successful comic on the planet not because of any trauma he's suffered but because he's stumbled into quicksand narcissism. Death makes him momentarily conscious of his self-involvement, but in the end it only makes him more selfish. Once he has recovered from his illness — and spare me the spoiler tantrum: it's written into the trailer — he decides to pursue Laura; he's quite willing to destroy her family for what he admits is only a chance at happiness. Why is he so selfish? No one knows, least of all him, but we learn the secret to his professional success. George is funny because he doesn't care about other people, and his audiences thank him for it. Is there a more bleak vision of what makes people laugh?
Apatow denies that comedians are inherently screwed up — he mentions Steve Carell as someone who is both funny and solid. My favorite scene from any of his movies is from 40-Year-Old Virgin, when Carell, playing Andy, is uncomfortably watching a woman masturbate with a showerhead and says, "Wow. This is graphic." Which is, of course, a great Freudian joke. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, one of the least funny books ever written, Freud wrote that comedy is a way of releasing pleasure that social inhibitions deny us without violating the inhibition. That double requirement — to violate without violating — means that the joke, and the joke teller, are always at least in part hiding their intentions. "Strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing at," Freud wrote. With Funny People and its meditations on falling, flailing, dying, and, yes, farting, Apatow shows us: Laughter usually comes at the cost of spiritual disintegration, because comedy, as Apatow puts it, "is a way to point out that nothing makes sense." (I told you fart jokes could be unbelievably sad.)
What happens to Judd Apatow after this grand reveal, and, more important, what happens to the Judd Apatow Experience now that it's expanded, or perhaps simply deepened, into the terrible anxiety that underlies all laughter? "There's a part of me that thinks, If this movie goes well, I'll take a long break," he says. He mentions something his therapist told him, that success is the ultimate crutch. "Some people have cigarettes and some people have arenas. People wonder, Why did that musician stop recording? Why did that comedian stop performing? The truth is they probably became sane." Funny People is the opposite of your typical midlife-crisis movie, the opposite of American Beauty: It's a film about how deeply Apatow loves his wife and kids, how much old friends matter and how little nice houses and fancy cars do. "As I get less nutty, I do better work," he says before leaving the editing suite to take Maude to lunch. And that very well may be true, but it contradicts everything George Simmons, and Judd Apatow, just taught me.
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