Part 38 (1/2)

Sarah: Oh yeah, definitely. We had no religion at all but we were Jews in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and my sister-who is now a rabbi-said it best: We were like the only Jews in Bedford, New Hamps.h.i.+re, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of a.s.sociated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor, that it goes to important things for everybody. We were never to complain about that s.h.i.+t, or be all about keeping your money or whatever. Now I look around and realize that was special. Money is seen as such a positive thing now, we try to get as much of it as we can and that's okay because it equals success. It's sad.

Judd: My parents didn't talk about religion, either. And then, out of the blue, my brother became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel. I always think it's funny how, in the same family, one person looks for answers through comedy and another through religion.

Sarah: My sister and I are so close, and so different. I don't have religion at all. Love and science are my religion. And Kermit the Frog and Mister Rogers.

Judd: That's so funny, because whenever I need to equalize myself and bawl my eyes out, I will go online and watch Jim Henson's funeral on YouTube.

Sarah: I've got to see that. I will not be able to keep it together because, honestly, I'll just f.u.c.king sing ”It's Not Easy Being Green” or ”Rainbow Connection” and cry.

Judd: That's what I do late at night. I just go down the Mister RogersJim Henson wormhole of tears. But those two guys are a good religion. How does your sister talk about Judaism?

Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get c.u.n.ty with her and I'll be like, ”Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?” I just can't get my head around it, you know. And she'll go, ”Well, I like to live my life as though there is one.” And I'm just like, ”Oh, you're beautiful.”

Judd: Why can't you get your head around it?

Sarah: I can be cynical. But I don't think of myself, at my core, as cynical. So much of it is location. Like, who is Muslim? Who is a Jew? Who is a Catholic? Who is a Christian? Who's Buddhist? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is where you happen to be born. So how can one be right and another be wrong? It seems pretty clear to me that it's a coping mechanism for people who cannot handle the not knowing of things. I am okay knowing I will never be able to comprehend the world.

Judd: I wish I could convince myself to believe the way your sister believes because I'm so exhausted from not believing.

Sarah: I actually don't think that she believes in G.o.d, necessarily. I think she just loves the ritual of religion and finding meaning in every little thing. She loves living her life that way.

Judd: Do you think she believes that G.o.d is involved in people's lives?

Sarah: Yeah. But she isn't one of those ”Oh, let's pray for this tumor to go away” people. You know what I mean? She just loves the ritual of finding meaning in everything. I don't know. I don't think she believes in, like, a male G.o.d or anything. She's a major feminist, a liberal hippy-dippy granola rabbi.

Judd: She doesn't believe in a G.o.d that is actively involved in people's lives, making choices?

Sarah: She doesn't believe that G.o.d is rooting for the Giants and not the Patriots. She's not f.u.c.king ridiculous.

Judd: I'm jealous of those people. I plan on tricking myself into believing in religion one of these days. I'm going to pick a religion and then hypnotize myself.

Sarah: When the rest of my family is in a crazy, neurotic tizzy, she'll be like, ”It will work out.” You know.

Judd: I always feel that my only connection to anything spiritual-and this might be sad-is when a joke comes to me. In that moment, I feel a different kind of connection than I do during the rest of the day.

Sarah: Because you can't make it happen. I mean, I have to sit and sit and work on my jokes. And it's just such torture for me and I think, Why don't I love this? Sitting down and fixing my s.h.i.+tty jokes should be my pa.s.sion. But it's torture.

Judd: Do you put time aside to write?

Sarah: No, but when I do, it always pays off. I don't know why I'm so afraid of setting aside twenty minutes of sitting-down time. It's always fruitful, you know. But I just fight it so much.

Judd: Seinfeld said he sits and writes for two hours every single day.

Sarah: Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they're just that incredible combination of funny and not lazy, which is very rare and special and completely failure proof. I remember before I did my HBO special, Chris screamed at me-in a loving way, but still. He was like, ”You need to do two hundred shows in a row and a month straight on the road before you even think about recording a special!” And I had literally booked two weeks on the road and then went right into the recording. It put me in a panic, but it also made me work harder and made me realize that everyone works differently, and that's okay.

Judd: Who are the comics you look up to? Who's had the greatest impact on you, would you say?

Sarah: Early on, Garry Shandling. When I first started hanging out with him, he was always so giving of what he knows and what he learned. I definitely learned to embrace the quiet moments onstage from him-relaxing and not fighting with the crowd, not raising your voice, not ever trying to win them over. I also started out with Louis [C.K.] and David Attell. I remember the very first time Louis saw me. I was just starting and I had this affectation, where I would pull the mic away from my mouth. And he was like, ”You shouldn't do that. It looks weird and it's a bad habit to get into.” And so I stopped, you know.

Judd: What is it like, at this point of your career, to look back on what all these people you came up with have accomplished?

Sarah: It's so exciting. You know, everyone's got their own velocity. Life goes at different speeds and there's no real time frame with comedy. Louis has been brilliant for thirty years, but it has been so exciting to see, these past five years, the world getting Louis fever. On the flip side of that, there is the waste, the ones you know that were everyone's favorite-you know, there's so many times I will find myself talking to someone, ”No, no, you don't understand, he was the king, he was everyone's favorite comic,” and people only see a guy as washed up, with no place to live, who can't get his s.h.i.+t together. It's so frustrating. You just want people to understand. Like I said about Seinfeld and Chris Rock, they're a great combination of brilliance and hard work. There are people who are brilliant and don't work hard, and there are people that are brilliant and sabotage themselves, and both are just so hard to see. Every once in a while, you forget there's nothing you can do about it, and so you scramble around, trying to get something going for them, and then you come to the realization that they'll never let it happen. You don't get what you want, you get what you think you deserve. With people like that, they're just not going to let themselves succeed.

Judd: And you end up with survivor's guilt.

Sarah: It's awful. You must know comics in their sixties who didn't parlay their act into writing or acting or producing, and so they're just f.u.c.ked. Even the cruise s.h.i.+ps don't want them anymore.

Judd: Yeah. I feel like it's a miracle when you can separate yourself from the pack enough to make a real living.

Sarah: Comedy is like alcoholism. You're surrounded by people who are getting high all day, f.u.c.king around, and just being comics-and time pa.s.ses, you know.

Judd: None of us have any other skill to fall back on.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. There are a couple of comics that-like, I have a friend who just found a whole new career as the old black man in a bunch of commercials, and it's exciting for him. Like, he can buy people drinks and stuff and it's nice. But, you know, he didn't have teeth for a while. I mean, you forget that comics, for the most part, don't pay any attention to-I mean, with women comics it tends to be different because we're not disgusting pigs, but a lot of comics don't even know to like floss and brush their teeth, you know what I mean? And their teeth, I have to tell you: There was a time where I just bought a ton of dental care products and gave them out to my guy comic friends because they didn't know any better. I mean, I don't know how they get p.u.s.s.y. When I drive them in my car, and they get out, I have to Febreze the whole area. It's insane. Like hygiene is just something you don't need if you're fly enough to get girls or something. But it's bad and death creeps in through the gums.

Judd: I think a lot of the reason why I've done okay was growing up with the terror of not doing okay. From an early age, I tried to teach myself how to think ahead. But I know plenty of people who are funny and don't have those types of skills.

Sarah: I'm somewhere in between. I'm so much more famous than I am financially successful. I mean, I live in a three-room apartment. I mostly make free videos on my couch. But I am fine.

Judd: Is it because, creatively, you've done what you've wanted to do?

Sarah: I've always kept my overhead low so I could do whatever I want. I think of myself as lazy with spurts of getting a lot done. I find myself rooting against things sometimes because I get excited at the thought of a clean slate. I also really like sleeping. My friends make fun of me because, you know, I love hanging out but I always. .h.i.t a point in the night where I just want to get home and sleep. I have a very active dream life and I have to be there a lot.

SETH ROGEN.

(2009).

When Knocked Up came out, Seth and I had a bit of what is known in Hollywood as ”a moment.” People didn't know our work that well, and the movie was this enormous, unexpected success. We felt, for a second, like we were fully in the zeitgeist, the flavor of the month. At the height of it, we were interviewed by the critic David Denby at The New Yorker Festival-which is a series of words I never thought I would type. It was a real collision of worlds, because the festival, at least to us, felt very literary, and here we were, onstage, talking about an emotionally thoughtful but dirty, dirty movie.

People talk a lot about me being a mentor to Seth, or having discovered Seth when he was a kid, but here's the truth: Seth's sense of humor has influenced everything I have done. I feel very maternal toward Seth-so when he makes a movie like This Is the End and it includes a scene where Jonah Hill is being f.u.c.ked by the devil, I'm as proud as a parent whose kid graduated from Harvard and became a brain surgeon.

David Denby: One of my distinguished predecessors, Pauline Kael, used to put down movies by saying that they were ”deep on the surface”-meaning that there was nothing underneath. The 40-Year-Old Virgin was shallow on the surface with endless depths underneath. It was certainly foul-mouthed, but it was also about, oh G.o.d, shyness and bl.u.s.ter and illusion and delusion and many, many other fascinating things. If anything, it was a song of innocence, which ended with this amazing hilltop hymn to love, which was very dangerous to have shot. But you pulled it off. It was earned. Now, those of you who had seen Freaks and Geeks on television from 1999 to 2000 already knew something about this comic sensibility. I'm just catching up to some of that. The great thing about these two guys is that, even though Seth is disgustingly young, he's been working with Judd for almost nine years. Now, if you print out Judd's credits on IMDb, you get three single-s.p.a.ced pages of stuff. So I'm just going to run through the highlights quickly: The pride of Syosset, Long Island. Mother worked in a comedy club in Southampton. Interviewed established comics when he was in high school on the high school radio station, which had ten watts of power. Attended USC for two years, dropped out. Roomed with Adam Sandler for a while and knew other young comics as well as Garry Shandling. Wrote for a lot of them. Did stand-up and gave it up. Wrote The Cable Guy in '96. Paul Feig created Freaks and Geeks in '99 and Judd wrote a fair amount of it and directed three episodes. It was canceled after eighteen episodes- Judd Apatow: After thirteen. We shot eighteen.

David: You shot eighteen and only thirteen aired?

Judd: Thirteen aired and then they dumped it.

David: And then Undeclared was two years later?

Judd: Yes.

David: And was also canceled. Do you ever wake up at night and have revenge fantasies?

Judd: Well, the same guy who canceled Undeclared also canceled The Ben Stiller Show. And uh, I don't want to start out with a randy joke, but, uh- David: Oh yes, yes you do.