Known for hit movies such asThe 40 Year-Old VirginandKnocked Up,Apatow, in October, published a memoir calledComedy Nerd: A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures.He was interviewed for Esquire on October 1.
I sometimes thinkI tried to get good at comedy so comedy people would talk to me.
I'm not sure wherethe instinct to hoard came from. I started doing it when I was little. Every autograph I ever got, I would put in a photo album and treat it like it was the Shroud of Turin. My Phil Collins autograph poster was handled with so much care. I always joke: It's not hoarding if all your shit is awesome. I'm a hoarder who takes good care of his hoard.
I was obsessed fromthe earliest age with the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello. That turned into George Carlin and Steve Martin. I went deep down the Lenny Bruce well as a seventh grader. That's how much of a comedy nerd I was.
My grandfather owned a record companycalled Mainstream Records. He put out jazz, blues, and experimental music. He produced the first Janis Joplin record, Ted Nugent, Charlie Parker. And my dad worked with him. So the vibe was very cool. What everyone was doing seemed so interesting.
My family loved comedy.So when I became obsessed withSaturday Night LiveandSCTVandMonty Python,they encouraged it. And the amazing thing is they always told me that I could succeed. They were the type of parents who had no doubt that if I went after this, it would work out.
My high school radio stationwas run by this man named Jack DeMasi, who was a teacher, and he allowed us to use it in any way we wanted. Some kids were interviewing congressmen, and some were interviewing R.E.M. I realized I could interview comedians. So I started a show and interviewed people like John Candy and Jerry Seinfeld, and that became my education. I was able to sit with people for hours and ask them, How do you do it? And they told me!
So many things they saidturned out to be valuable, the main one being that it takes a long time. You have to have patience. A lot of them said it takes about seven years to figure out your character onstage as a comedian, so it set a much slower time clock for me. When I was doing stand-up and I was bad at it, I thought,Oh, I'm supposed to be bad at it right now. That's okay.
I interviewed Garry Shandlingwhen I was in high school. And then I met him later and he was a mentor to me. So much of what he talked about was that stand-up and writing are about self-exploration. I just thought comedy was jokes. I didn't know it was about storytelling and the way humans behave.
Then he gave me every break in my career.He let me write forThe Larry Sanders Show. Let me co-run it for the last season. Asked me to direct. It's really remarkable how kind he was to me.
I love comedy.I love the people who work in comedy. And I wanted to make connections. I always felt like I was a fan of people, even if I was the mentor. The feeling I would get was,I wish this person would make a movie, because it would be fantastic. And then my job as a producer or writer is to help them figure out how to do that. What kind of story would you tell? What would your problems be? I love that process.
The fear of failureis always hanging in the air.
I don't write every day.But when a project starts, I'll set a schedule. Once I have a draft, I'll try to rewrite twenty pages a day for six days. Then I take a break. And then I do it again. I'll keep doing that till we shoot. I just start on page 1 and go, All right, what else could be better? It's just grinding it line by line, over and over again, a thousand times.
Then you get to setand you hope your script is good. But you also improvise. It's an organic process. You're trying both to lock it down and keep it open at the same time.
There are certain people that are just touched.You can't even define why, but they're the best. They obsess over everything. And they're also completely free with their creativity. You have to create an environment where they feel very supported, so they can just get into some insane flow state.
It gives you a lot of energy,because you think,Oh, if I have a good joke, this person is going to do it ten times better than I can even imagine.
I learned everythingabout writing for women from my wife, Leslie Mann. When we got married, I would see the scripts she was sent and you could tell that people weren't writing women well. And I'm sure I wasn't. It made me see it from a different perspective. We talked about it a lot. What was wrong with these scripts? A lot of it was that women would be just a vehicle to get a guy from A to B. So I tried to see if I could improve.
My parents never talkedabout religion or spirituality ever. Not a word. So there was always a real hole.
About a year ago,I took ayahuasca. And at the end of this long, complicated trip, I just suddenly saw Jesus on the cross. And I thought,Oh, I get it now. I get what that means.In the simplest form—as someone that's never read anything, who's Jewish—I thought,Oh, he died for us. He's looking out for us. We should look out for each other.
It's all about being there for other people.And that's it. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It's actually easier if you just keep it to that. So I try to keep that in my head while still fighting my existential dread in all sorts of ways.
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