Judd Apatow talks about comedy behind the camera and in front of the bricks

Published 3:51 pm Friday, July 17, 2015

Headlining the recent Trainwreck Comedy Tour when it passed through Seattle last month, Amy Schumer is clearly having a moment. She’s on magazine covers, has a hit Comedy Central show, and wrote and stars in “Trainwreck,” projected to be one of the summer’s big comedies.

Schumer feels important because she’s part of a distaff wave — along with Lena Dunham, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and the all-female “Ghostbusters” remake coming next summer — that is reinvigorating American screen comedy.

Nothing certifies the moment more than Schumer’s partnering with Judd Apatow, whose golden directing and producing touch has yielded hits including “Bridesmaids,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and “Knocked Up.” In his new book of comedian interviews, “Sick in the Head” (Random House, $27), each with an autobiographical intro, he writes, “I feel like we’re in the middle of a great moment in comedy,” a new golden age comparable to that of his impressionable youth.

For a review of “Trainwreck,” click here.

So why, I ask Apatow in the quiet lobby of a downtown hotel, is the comedy scene so much better now than when he abandoned stand-up some 20 years ago?

“When I was a kid, nobody was a comedy nerd,” he recalls. “I loved comedy, but I had nobody to talk about it with. It wasn’t part of the culture in a big way. People liked SNL and The Tonight Show and Letterman, but there wasn’t an obsession with humor and comedians at the scale that there is now, with Funny or Die or Upright Citizens Brigade. Look at Broad City, or what Amy Schumer is doing, or Key and Peele. There’s just so much great comedy happening right now.”

In “Sick in the Head,” Apatow also writes how “the Internet has just turbocharged everything” in the comedy scene. We now live in a world of viral videos and performers emerging from YouTube — far different from the period when high-school student Apatow convinced Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, and even Steve Allen to sit for interviews now contained in his book (the majority are recent). Today, in essence, he’s written the book he wanted then.

“When I was a kid in love with comedy in the early ’80s,” says Apatow, “there were only a few books about comedy. That’s part of the reason I started interviewing comedians when I was 15. I just needed an excuse to get them in a room with me, where I could hit them up for information, which might help my attempts at being a comedian.”

By the time Apatow got to the University of Southern California (soon to drop out), doing stand-up by night, he saw how the profession had become bloated. All the young comics were chasing the past examples of Steve Martin (interviewed for the book) and Robin Williams (not). Today, with some relief, he says, “I missed the collapse. I think it was still peaking when I stopped. I stopped performing when I was 24, after seven years. It was all of those TV shows that made it collapse.”

The brick-wall backdrop of a comedy cellar became cliché, thanks in part to cable TV — one reason Apatow transitioned to writing for Garry Shandling. He also watched as his roommate Adam Sandler shot to stardom on SNL. In his book, he recalls wondering “Why don’t I have the magic fairy dust?”

Apatow then worked productively in TV for Shandling (interviewed) Ben Stiller (not), Roseanne Barr (yes), and helped create “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared.” Subsequent success in movies, plus marriage and kids, have brought him to a better place — as is evident in a book thick with references to past anger and therapy.

Yet after a two-decade break from performing, Apatow is again telling jokes in small clubs — and opening with other “Trainwreck” comics for the headlining Schumer (also interviewed in his book).

“I missed the camaraderie of hanging out with comedians,” he says.

As the current king of Hollywood comedy, Apatow can afford to treat stand-up as a hobby. But his star Schumer only recently emerged from the trenches of the trade. Why, I ask, did he want to work with a woman — though very talented — who only had a small club and cable following? In answering, Apatow still sounds like a teenage comedy nerd. “I was just sitting in my car listening to her on the Howard Stern show,” he recalls, “and she was just so funny. But she was telling this pretty intense story about her dad having multiple sclerosis. I had seen a little bit of her comedy, but … this type of storytelling was at a whole other level. She was brutally, painfully honest, but also very warm and very funny. And there aren’t that many people who can do that.

“So we started talking about doing something that was very personal… And that evolved into ‘Trainwreck.’

“I just had a quick instinct: ‘Oh, I wish she had a movie,’ and that if I don’t push her to make it, maybe it won’t ever happen. So it’s like being a fan. I have to jump in if I want to watch her movie.”

Brian Miller is a writer and reviewer for the Seattle Weekly. Contact him at bmiller@seattleweekly.com.