by Apatow, Judd
Judd Apatow: All right, I’m holding the mic. Is it happening now?
Marc Maron: Yeah, sure.
Judd: This is it.
Marc: I am in Judd Apatow’s war room. Is this the war room?
Judd: This is the situation room.
Marc: Ah, the situation room. So this is your office? A lot of boards, things being outlined. It’s like—I can’t read your fucking writing.
Judd: Well, part of the reason why I have bad handwriting is when I used to do stand-up comedy, I would write jokes on planes and I was always embarrassed that the person next to me would see what I was writing about.
Marc: Is that true?
Judd: Yes. And so I found a way to have terrible handwriting that only I could read, so if I was writing some joke about impotency or something, it would be unreadable.
Marc: You did it by design?
Judd: I did. And I still do it now, so if my wife sees any weird notes or joke ideas or things that might be offensive, there’s no way she can read it.
Marc: Because I’m sitting here thinking, like, Man, I got the scoop. There’s a whole Apatow movie outline on that board but all I can make out is—I think down on the lower left, does it say “sperm issues”?
Judd: It says “sperm issues.” Yes, it does. But that would be in all of my movies.
Marc: And then it just, the rest is undecipherable.
Judd: Exactly. And it shall be until America gets to see this.
Marc: So I just watched Freaks and Geeks for the first time.
Judd: Oh, wow.
Marc: It’s nothing personal. I miss a lot of things. And the interesting thing to me is—the scene that resonates almost more than the rest to me is when Bill is watching Garry Shandling after school. It’s one scene, but, for some reason, I was like, That was beautiful.
Judd: There’s a scene in the show where Bill Haverchuck, played by Martin Starr, comes home after school and you can tell he’s a latchkey kid and no one’s around and his mom’s a former stripper. And he looks really sad and he watches Garry Shandling on The Dinah Shore Show while making a grilled cheese sandwich and eating chocolate cake. And he goes from being really sad to laughing his ass off. After we made it Jake Kasdan said to me, “That’s the most personal thing you’ve ever done in your career. And it’s the best thing you’ve ever done, too.”
Marc: That scene?
Judd: That scene. And that was probably the turning point for my whole career, realizing that the little moments that I thought were boring or just not interesting to other people are actually the things that people would be most interested in. I always thought I was a bore. That’s why I quit stand-up comedy.
Marc: Was your mom not around?
Judd: I lived with my dad after my parents got divorced. And I just didn’t do any after-school activities. I just went in my room and closed the door and I was in my fantasy world, watching, you know, Michael Keaton do stand-up on The Mike Douglas Show, and I couldn’t have been happier. I look back on it as a great time.
Marc: I had that same experience. Because one of them—like I still remember one of the moments I decided to be a comic was watching Jay Leno. I don’t know if it was on Mike Douglas but I remember the joke—they were cutting away to a commercial and he was on that ridiculous set and he said, “What happens now, does the chair fold up into the wall like we’re on a game show? Am I going to disappear?” And it was just a moment. It was a beat. But I remember thinking it was the most hilarious thing I had ever heard in my life.
Judd: I remember going to see The Merv Griffin Show being taped. That’s how into it I was.
Marc: In New York?
Judd: In Los Angeles, when I was in high school. Dr. Ruth was the other guest, and she’s taking calls, giving sex advice, and Jay Leno realizes that this makes no sense because the show doesn’t air for a month and where are the calls coming from? Like, is there someone backstage doing this? He calls her on it, like, “These are not real calls. Where are these people coming from?” And I thought, That is the coolest guy in the world. I want to be that guy. I couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve looked back on it and wondered, Why did I like it so much? What was it that I was attracted to? I was obsessed to the point of highlighting the TV Guide so I knew when the comics were on.
Marc: Did you read “My Favorite Jokes” in Parade magazine? Maybe you’re a little younger than me. But in Parade magazine, on the last page, there used to be a thing called “My Favorite Jokes” where they just had comedians’ jokes written there.
Judd: I used to transcribe Saturday Night Live. I would record it on an audiocassette.
Marc: How old were you?
Judd: Ten. I have the transcriptions of Bill Murray’s Oscar picks bit from “Weekend Update” in notebooks.
Marc: Why did you do that?
Judd: I don’t know. I think that I was in some way trying to figure out how to get into that world—how does it work? I wanted to break it down somehow. It wasn’t conscious.
Marc: Did you used to do that with stand-up as well?
Judd: I didn’t. I did it with Saturday Night Live sketches and some Twilight Zones. And then Steve Martin hit in ’76, ’77, ’78. Richard Pryor, Monty Python—I was losing my mind with comedy nerdness.
Marc: You were an original. Comedy nerds didn’t exist yet. You were just a kid who was precocious in a sense. I was the same way in that I related to these comics. They made me feel better. They had a certain amount of control, it seemed. They could handle shit.
Judd: They had a stance on why the world didn’t make sense, and they would call everyone on their shit. I couldn’t get enough of those people.
Marc: I’ll tell you something Harry Shearer said to me, and I want to get your opinion on it. He said the reason why people are comedians is to have control over why people laugh at you.
Judd: I look at it this way: When someone is laughing, I know they don’t dislike me. I don’t know if they like me, but I know that in that moment they don’t dislike me. And that’s why I get the need for constant approval, because if you’re smiling I know you don’t hate me. You know, Why do I need that much approval? Is there any point where I get enough approval and I’m full? And I’ve realized that there is no point.
Marc: Really?
Judd: I once received a call from Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg, who I used to work for at DreamWorks, was trying to reach me to say that he liked Knocked Up. And I so wanted a letter from him. Paul Feig got one when we made Freaks and Geeks and I was so jealous that he got a letter from Steven saying that he loved Freaks and Geeks. So I didn’t return the call and I told my assistant, “Can you say Judd’s out of town and is it possible that he could write a note just so I can have the letter?” He sent me the dream letter, the beautiful letter with nothing but kindness. You know, a great guy. It’s just what you want. And I have it. But what happened afterwards is I thought to myself, This is the best you can do. Who else do I want to compliment me? How many of these do I need to feel good about myself? And, Why doesn’t it last? The wound is still there.
Marc: What is the wound? Because I know I have it.
Judd: You know, I’m not sure exactly. I’ve had therapists who say everything that happened to you happened in the first three years of your life—
Marc: Yeah, let it go.
Judd: It may have just been the way your mom looked at you. I mean, who knows?
Marc: You believe that?
Judd: I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that in every situation that I walk into I feel like the weirdo. I feel like that awkward guy picking up my kids from school. I feel that way on the sets of my own movies.
Marc: Uncomfortable in your own skin?
Judd: I never feel like I own the moment, you know.
Marc: You feel like you’re a victim of the moment?
Judd: I just feel like a punch could come from any direction even if I’m everyone’s boss. And the thing is, no one ever pun
ches me. What I’m realizing is, Okay, that’s how I’m wired, and if I just acknowledge it, some of it will disappear. That’s a little bit of what Funny People was about—he gets sick and says, you know, What was the point of all this? I’m here in this house and I’m all alone and everyone outside likes me and I don’t have any strong relationships. Why did I do this?
Marc: A lot of that movie was drawn from your early career with, you know, I mean in the sense that Garry Shandling was your mentor, right?
Judd: I had a bunch of mentors. People were very nice to me when I was young. Shandling hired me to write the Grammys for him in 1990.
Marc: How old were you?
Judd: I was twenty-three. And then he hired me on The Larry Sanders Show and, and has been helpful to me on everything I’ve ever done. I used to write jokes for Jim Carrey and I worked on some of his movies. So I had to fabricate a character that was an amalgam of a lot of people but slowly you realize, Oh, it’s just me. It’s the worst part of me. And then suddenly it all makes sense: Here’s me at my worst. Here’s me at my angriest.
Marc: Here’s me as a pregnant woman.
Judd: Exactly. Here’s me at my neediest. Here’s me screaming at the crowd. I mean, your thoughts are coming out in different ways. And some of it is observations of other people. Some of the rants in Funny People were based on me watching Rodney Dangerfield yell at the crowd at one in the morning, you know. One night he was in his bathrobe or something. He gets onstage at the Improv and he just didn’t do his act and it was fantastic. He said to the crowd, “Yeah, sometimes life makes perfect sense, and then you cum.” There was a woman there and he says, “Oh yeah, yeah, you’re beautiful. You’re beautiful. You’d be different. You’d love me for me.” It was brutal. It was brutal to watch. And it was fantastic to watch. I’ve just seen a bunch of people have that meltdown, where it’s one in the morning and they drop the act and they tell you what they’re going through. That’s my favorite part of comedy, when you go to that next place.
Marc: You don’t see it as much as you used to. I mean, in the clubs. I don’t know how often you go out there anymore, but there was a time when that generation—there seemed to be a little more freedom and a little less eyes on everybody. There was a time in the eighties where the meltdown was fairly commonplace.
Judd: Those moments between midnight and one-thirty in the morning at the Improv—that’s where a lot of the great things happened.
Marc: How many of that generation have sort of disappeared, or no one knows anymore? Are you ever saddened by that?
Judd: I did go into Best Buy once and a comic who was hilarious was a salesman there. That was rough. That made me sad because I thought, I was never as funny as that guy. That guy used to kill. But at some point you can’t go on the road anymore. If you want to have a life and kids, you can’t be on the road thirty-five weeks a year.
Marc: But is it that that same sort of wound that you’re talking about can also swallow people? And the fact is that you were able to manage your talent and be political and ambitious enough to get what you wanted to get done, done.
Judd: I was very lucky that part of my dysfunction as a person is a terror of bankruptcy—financial bankruptcy, not emotional bankruptcy. So as a young person, I thought ten years ahead. I had a show in high school where I interviewed comedians like Leno and Seinfeld and John Candy.
Marc: How did you manage to get hold of them?
Judd: I used to call their publicists and say I was from a radio station in New York, and they were too lazy to look it up and figure out that it was a high school radio station. I was afraid that I was going to not be able to take care of myself in my life, so in my head I always thought, Well, what do I need to do? Okay, I’ll interview comedians and they’ll tell me how to be a comedian. They’ll tell me how to write.
Marc: Were you freaking out inside, talking to Seinfeld? What were you really trying to do there?
Judd: It happened right after my parents got divorced and I just thought, I got to get something going in this life. I really need to take care of myself. Because when your parents get divorced they just make terrible mistakes and they fight and you see that adults have very real flaws. And I think my instinct was, Oh my God, maybe they’re wrong about all sorts of stuff they keep telling me. And if my mom thinks my dad’s the devil and if my dad’s enraged at my mom, then maybe some of this advice they’ve been giving me is wrong. I mean, I don’t think he’s the devil. He’s very nice to me. And it just completely threw me—like, it’s important that you believe your parents. So when you see them at a terrible moment, screaming at each other—my reaction was, Nothing is true. I don’t believe anything. I can’t rely on these people because they can’t rely on each other and they’ve bailed on each other, and, like, “Our family isn’t important enough for you guys to just figure out how to get along?” It was terrible. Now that I’m older I realize it was much more complicated than that.
Marc: You were sort of in crisis mode.
Judd: I was totally in crisis mode. I was losing my mind. I thought, I need a job, but I also had a sense that my parents were not going to be able to afford college because they were having financial problems. And so I thought, Why don’t you jump right into your dream, just have the balls to do it. Anyway, when my parents got divorced, my mom moved to Southampton and we—my parents used to own a restaurant, and the bartender there was Rick Messina.
Marc: Oh my God.
Judd: Rick Messina is the great manager who went on to represent Tim Allen. Back then he managed the East Side Comedy Club on Long Island, which was the first comedy club on the Island, and a bunch of other clubs. So when my parents got divorced, my mom got a job seating people at her former bartender’s comedy club. I mean, this was the dream situation for me. This was ninth grade, and it’s the summer, and my mom is seating people at a comedy club. Every weekend, I would go watch every show—Leno, Paul Provenza, first show I ever saw of a young comedian. And years later I thought, That’s really kind of the worst job ever. What could Mom have gotten paid to do it? I’d like to think that she did it because she knew I would like it. And my dad was great. He would drive me to comedy clubs a few times a week and was a big supporter.
Marc: That’s sweet. So okay, you saw Leno, you saw Provenza. This was 1980…what?
Judd: This was ’82 or ’83, and then I got a job at Rick Messina’s comedy club as a dishwasher so I could see the comedians. Then I realized that I can’t see the comedians, I’m in the fucking kitchen. So I switched to a busboy at East Side Comedy Club. Eddie Murphy used to come in, and Rosie O’Donnell was just starting at that time. I would watch the comedians, and I thought, I don’t have the balls to tell these people that I want to do this. It may have been obvious to them but I couldn’t even tell anyone, I was so scared. In my senior year in high school, I finally got up at open-mic nights and was awful, so awful.
Marc: It’s terrifying.
Judd: And John Mulrooney’s hosting the open-mic night. And he just, I mean, it was pandemonium. He would kill and insult the crowd—
Marc: I remember him.
Judd: And he was fantastic. But to go on after that, when you have no idea what you’re doing and you’re seventeen years old? There’d be twenty comedians who’d all get five minutes. And you never knew if Mulrooney was going to do twenty minutes between acts and so you might get on at eight-oh-five, or one in the morning.
Marc: You are the real deal. You came from a real comedy background in a way that none of us did. Many of us who started on those open mics didn’t watch comedy until we were stuck in those rooms and we had to. But you were actually just compelled to be there as a busboy. What were you, sixteen?
Judd: From the earliest time, I understood that people got onstage with mics. I never had any interest in doing anything that I’m doing right now. It was not part of the dream. If you listen to those early interviews I did, it’s all about joke writing. It’s not screenwriting. I’m not talking abou
t how I love movies. I want to understand the mechanics of a dick joke. That’s my vision quest. When I interviewed Seinfeld the first time my brother was with me and you can hear him laughing. He’s laughing in the background, and to us, it was like being in the room with Paul McCartney. It was. I think, to some extent, we had a vision for what Jerry Seinfeld was more than Jerry Seinfeld had a vision of what Jerry Seinfeld was. It was like being in a small club seeing R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia, in the early eighties and knowing what they would become.
Marc: A really small club. Just you and your brother.
Judd: Exactly. And the great thing about it was most of those people were very, very nice and so it also made me feel like, Oh, this is a world of strange people who might accept me one day.
Marc: In retrospect, have you brought it up to Leno and Seinfeld and Shandling that you interviewed them when you were sixteen?
Judd: I’ve mentioned it and none of them remember it—and they don’t seem very interested in it, either.
Marc: But these guys gave you a blueprint for your life.
Judd: Yes, they did. And they don’t completely get the significance of it. Because they might be having that effect on a lot of people.
Marc: I find that hard to believe, because if somebody writes me an email or even says that I’ve changed them in any way, not only does it make me feel good but I have to fight the urge to go, like, How? What did I do?
Judd: Maybe they do get it. Maybe it’s just something that—it’s hard to express or connect about because it is such a powerful thing. It’s weird to look someone in the eye and say, “You’ve changed my life.” You know, I treasure when Seinfeld sends me a note and says he likes Funny People or something. It means more to me than he could ever know because I literally thought about him as I made it. And I thought, One day Seinfeld’s going to see this. I better not fuck it up.