#1033- Judd Apatow - Why Comedies Suck Now | Modern Wisdom

You said your parents' divorce bought your house and cars.

That's true.

How so?

It's funny because when I first started doing stand-up, I remember writing in a notebook.

And this was years... Actually, years before I ever got on stage.

Some joke about how Richard Pryor's grandmother ran a brothel.

He grew up in a brothel.

And... all I had to work with to be a comedian was my parents getting divorced.

Like it wasn't enough to be a genius.

It was just enough damage to get you in the game that I wished my grandmother ran a brothel.

And then maybe I would be more messed up.

You wanted more trauma.

I needed more trauma, but it was enough.

It certainly was enough.

But back then when people got divorced in the early eighties, uh, people just fought.

They like really like fought.

People weren't aware that you should keep it away from the kids.

Oh, it was all out in the open.

Yeah.

Too much involvement.

Trench warfare.

And you were in the middle of it.

Too much of us knowing what was going on.

And I, we had really thin walls.

I remember I would hear them arguing.

So I knew they were going to get divorced way before they told me.

It was a protracted dispute.

Yeah.

And the funny part was they sat us all down.

I remember like sitting me and my my, my brother and sister, down like on the brick next to the fireplace and telling us they were getting divorced.

And then six months later, they got back together.

And then a year and a half later, they sat us down again.

Oh my God.

So I had the double, the double divorce twice.

Uh, yeah.

I mean, they broke up and then they finally did.

Yeah.

A false start.

And then, uh, a small, whatever, uh, treaty between the two and then, and then back again.

Uh, certainly a lot of the comedian friends that i see are working with, and actually this is the same for music as well.

Um, discomfort and pain seems to be a real creative catalyst.

Yeah uh, some people turn it into trying to earn money and make a business.

Some people turn it into trying to make people laugh.

Some people turn it into beautiful chords and lyrics that make people cry.

Or Is it a prerequisite to be a funny comedian?

Is it difficult to be a funny comedian without a ton of trauma?

There was a really funny conversation that Gary Shandling had about this with Jerry Seinfeld.

And they were talking about, you know, do you need pain to be funny?

And Jerry Seinfeld says, well, what about talent?

What about just talent?

And Gary went, why are you so angry?

But it is true that, you know, when you go through something, it just makes you more sensitive.

And I think you just pay attention in a different way to the world and you don't feel safe and you're looking to understand why the world is the way it is.

So I think it makes you an observer.

In a lot of ways, because you feel like, wait, this isn't working out the way I wanted it to.

Why?

Oh, that's so good.

I think you're really right there.

I think the hypervigilance that people usually try and deprogram once they've gotten a little bit of success.

If they look back at where the success came from, it was the level of obsession and observation and detail that they were looking at stuff with.

They couldn't not.

And that's why they saw in that one interaction between an air hostess, stewardess and a passenger something that went on to be a really funny bit.

Or in their breakup, they tried to work out why did this happen?

I didn't feel safe.

I was dissatisfied with the world.

I don't want it to happen again.

I'll obsess and think and ruminate and reflect.

Oh, out of this is born a beautiful lyric or a harmony or whatever.

And that is my song that, you know, breaks through.

So yeah I, I see exactly the.

I've never.

I've always realized that pain is a genesis of creativity, but I've never worked out the mechanism.

And I think that's a big part of it.

That's, that's cool.

Well, definitely.

I thought I, I need to figure out how to survive in the world.

What am I going to do?

So it made me more obsessed with the one interest I had comedy and And trying to figure out well, how do you get a job?

How do you get in?

So I had way too much energy, as a really little kid, to figure out both the creative side and the business side.

How does an open mic night work?

How do you get hired to write a screenplay?

How do you become a director or an actor?

But that was safety.

Because I thought, I don't know if I can trust...

The people around me to take care of me.

And so I'm going to have to take care of myself.

And that was probably a big exaggeration, but as a little kid, it felt very visceral.

Yeah.

Well, I mean that I have this belief that most of the things that you're super proud of are the light side of something dark that you're ashamed of.

And that uh agency, hyper independence, executive function, the ability to do it permissionlessly all great.

Then, when it comes to relinquishing control, delegating to other people, trusting those around you, opening up with intimacy, you go oh no, the thing that i got a lot of uh props for and has made me real successful is the very thing which is now limiting me in my relationship or my business growth, or my ability to collaborate with others.

It's a funny how that sort of comes full circle a little bit.

Well, you get rewarded for your worst qualities.

So so if you know you're obsessive or you're a workaholic, it does work for you, but it doesn't work for your life for a while yeah, and it doesn't work for your family.

And so then it becomes like well, how emotional am i getting about the work?

Can i calm that down?

Do i have to get so worked up?

I remember i, you know, sometimes i would just be just ranting and raving about some creative fight that was happening.

Because my biggest fear is always someone being able to ruin the TV show or the movie.

That there's someone who has the power to mess it up.

That's because there's safety in doing a good job also.

And so that would be my irrational thing that I would project on all of it.

And I would come home kind of flipping out and Leslie would always say, Meltdown on the set.

And meltdown on the set meant that I was like getting crazy and overreacting and being too emotional about the problem.

And that helped me to tune into like, what am I doing?

And I realized I was just projecting all of my abandonment issues and parental issues and divorce issues onto relationships with executives.

And so when I didn't get my way or I didn't feel understood, I felt abandoned in a primal way that I had to realize oh, this has nothing to do with this debate we're having about this joke.

Yep.

But it was intense, and in a lot of ways, it did make me do good work.

It made me work really hard.

But when you have kids you have to learn how to shut that off before you walk in the door so you can be 100 present with them.

Yeah.

And you're not still running, how are we going to get this deal done or this creative fix done?

Also, I imagine that you learn with kids.

I don't have as much control over them as I do in other areas of my life.

I think this is maybe one of the challenges that people who are self powered, hard charging or relatively independent have, which is well.

I get to determine my life in this area.

And then you have this.

Child has its own consciousness and motivations and wants to wake up at three in the morning four months in a row.

And you go Hey Hey no, usually when this happens I can tell a person to stop doing that thing and they do it.

And if they keep doing it, they get fired or I can leave and move somewhere else.

I can do whatever you go.

Oh, this, I don't have the same kind of control in this world.

I remember not sleeping for a year.

Uh, you know, my daughter would the sec.

I would rock her for like an hour and I I, I would just pray she was in a deep sleep.

And the second her body touched the crib, I'd have to like do another half hour.

And I think that's why I had a herniated disc, because I was just holding this weight hunched over for a year.

And then when she finally started sleeping, I remember my brain fog clearing.

And going, oh, wow, I've been in another dimension for a year.

I'm alive again.

Yeah.

I exhaustion, you know, you know when they talk about if you don't sleep for well for a night or two, it's the equivalent of just being drunk.

Yep.

That's what it felt like for a year.

And then the drinking on top wouldn't have helped.

Exactly.

Um, yeah, that's obsession.

Hypervigilance piece I think is, is really, really interesting for people who are.

Working out where their success comes from and then what their definition of success is.

Certainly when you say I was worried about somebody ruining it, breaking it, spoiling the production or the film or the scene or whatever.

I imagine that part of that is my work needs to be good or is amazing.

Needs to be fantastic because if it's good, the world will accept me and no one will abandon me.

So you have in the like outcome of the work, this, that needs to be right.

And then at each different process along the way, like fear of abandonment because it's not good enough, and fear of abandonment at each different step in the production too.

Yeah.

And each decision even.

And I remember I had a friend who I always said wow, he just takes us so seriously and And it's like life or death.

Like he'll die if this doesn't come out how he wants it to.

And it took me a long time to realize that maybe not to that extent, but that's what I'm doing.

But it's just 15% less than the person I'm judging for doing it.

Right.

Okay.

You would uh, ever so slightly in the shadow of somebody who is even more hyper-vigilant, even more obsessive than you.

Well, because in the beginning I would write for people like Gary Shandling and and you know they, they were obsessive.

And that was a lot of their brilliance.

And I would.

I would think okay, don't be that intense, because they seem like they're not having as much fun as they should.

Yep.

That there's a lot of pain in this.

And so I've always tried to modulate it.

Yep.

But as I get older, I realize I didn't succeed as much as I thought I did.

Like in my head, I was modulating.

We're like, no, you were pretty bad.

Like when I was putting the comedy nerd book together.

I you know, I was writing about things that worked, things that failed and why.

And I could see my intensity as I collected all the photos and wrote all the essays.

Like, well, you were a maniac.

And I would think about some fight I had with an executive where I just, you know, really went too hard, but it was all you know in service of you know.

You know what does it mean if this is really bad?

Well, so maybe I won't work again or I'll get worse jobs or people will find out.

I don't know what I'm doing.

You know how can I be solid that in a career that's not solid at all, because every comedy is an experiment.

So it's not like one working helps the next one ever.

So as soon as you start one, you're like, I think it'll be funny.

And sometimes it is.

And sometimes it's not.

And you go, Oh, I was wrong.

You're only as good as your current performance.

Basically.

There's no way to, it's not like a consistent job.

You can't be.

It's not like a dentist, where you're just a good dentist and you're just making good decisions.

It's.

It's a roll of the dice of if people will like what you did and if it'll make any sense to anybody.

Yeah, the turbulence or the fickleness maybe of comedy is something that I hadn't quite considered in the same way.

I'm pretty obsessed with the difference between music and And every other performance medium, because if you do even the best set of your entire life, the best hour of your entire life, someone will watch it and love it.

Maybe they see it live or maybe they're watching it streaming somewhere.

And then maybe they'll watch it again, like within a month, but they're not going to watch that again for six months or a year after that.

If you find a new song, you can put that sucker on repeat for days and listen to nothing else, and then still listen to it, and still listen to it, and still listen to it.

I wonder whether that means that musicians ride the vicissitudes of what the next single sounds like or the next record sounds like, better than somebody like a comedian, because so few people are going back to watch your old stuff.

Whereas people are still listening to fucking Kanye, right?

Even after all of the fallout and the thing.

And it's like, you know, well, fucking Jesus walks is like a bit of a slammer or whatever.

Um, So you get a much longer tail of success off the back of something really great.

Whereas with comedy, it's that it's fantastic.

But if the next one isn't good, people aren't still being carried by the bit of work before.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Because uh, you know, I guess more of the modern era musicians are trying to build the great concert, right?

So if you have those 10 good songs.

Some people could get away with five or three.

You could sell out shows or do well for your whole life.

I had a friend tell me once, who's in a band, that if they can get one song off of every album that the audience demands to hear, that's a big deal.

But you're writing the, the body of work.

And you're making money off of it and you're performing and you're touring off of it.

And you could play your biggest hit and the place will always go crazy.

So it's like, you've built this thing that grows.

You're like Springsteen and like, Oh, I can do born to run a lot of compounding.

Yeah.

We're in in in comedy, movies and TV.

You have zero.

You just start over and you're like well, I hope, I hope you like this one.

If you do a new hour or if you're our next year includes the three best jokes from last year.

And somebody went, they go.

That's lazy.

They go, is anybody calling the killers lazy for playing Mr. Brightside 50,000 times?

Well, that's a big question for stand-up comedy, which is, should you do specials so often?

You know, Jay Leno was always famous because he never did a special, because he was of the belief and a lot of the comedians from the 60s were like this that you just develop this set For your whole life.

It's just one set.

More like the killers or Fleetwood Mac.

And so Don Rickles had basically the same set his entire life.

And there were tons of people and maybe it grew.

And maybe they, as they got older, there was more time that they could choose from, but they, they didn't put it on TV in a way that wiped it away.

Where with comedians, people think.

As soon as it's an HBO special, they're never going to do it live again.

And I think there are some comedians and I'm among them who thinks there's nothing wrong with doing 10 minutes out of the hour of your favorite stuff that you've ever done.

And I think the crowd loves it.

But you know comedians feel like I have to turn the whole thing over.

Well, I think part of that is at least some of the uh mechanism of the joke is the uncertainty about what's going to come.

Yeah whereas like, the reason that you like mr brightside by the killers is not that you don't know what the chorus is going to sound like.

It's big precisely because you do know what the chorus is going to sound like.

In fact, in many ways, we prefer music that we do know, the music that we don't know.

The opposite is true for comedy, the opposite.

I'm currently on tour.

I'm playing the region this saturday and um, i know, once i've done this, i've done australia with this, i've done the apollo in london, i've done us and canada i, i can't.

I people know the lessons, they know the stories.

They've hopefully taken away the things that need to be there.

The little bit of stand-up i do at the start has you know.

So there is this sense of well, you're looking for a new resource, a new well to draw from.

Maybe it's insightful or interesting, it makes you feel something, but you're not going to.

That well has been dried From the first time, so okay.

We now do need a new one.

So yeah, maybe the like the physics of comedy and different to the physics of music in that way, but it is interesting.

I I'm intrigued by how, having an outlet for the obsession and the hyper vigilance, How you think about in retrospect what you could have done to have blended that with more fun, more enjoyment, more presence, and Is that something you really have that much choice over?

I ask myself this a lot.

I wonder how much we can step into the outcomes versus enjoyment equation.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't think you can speed up the lesson of it.

I mean, it really usually comes from mentors or reading or your observations to adjust yourself.

But I think a lot of it is this intense, youthful madness and passion.

Where it makes no sense that you think you can make it.

You know, the, the, the odds are so against you.

But I remember when I, when I lived with Adam Sandler, like we all were like oh, Adam's the guy he's going to be like what he is now.

We all knew he would be.

And I think he believed that that was what was coming.

And there were other people like that, like Jim Carrey, who felt like this is the trip I'm about to be on.

But there's a madness to that, that I think everyone in all fields have.

But it's mainly when you're in your twenties, where you're willing to take those crazy risks.

It's probably like in our genes to just be believers in ourself, unless something happened that crushed our, our confidence.

And that makes us act just more energetically and ready to fight, because it is like a fight or flight response.

It's like a hunter gatherer energy, which has nothing to do with comedy.

It has nothing to do with art.

It has nothing to do with storytelling.

It's not helpful.

Other than you have to deal with it, because now that I'm older and that has all calmed down, you know I can be creative in a way that's not as stressful.

But maybe it was good.

I mean, I did a lot of stuff when I was out of my mind.

Well, you've repurposed war, right?

You know, you're a warring tribe and you don't know who it is that's on the other side.

But we don't need to pick up a spear in 2025.

We can... go and build this comedy set or i'm really interested in what you said there um well it's like well michael jordan needed to be angry at someone correct that was what drove his performance and that's part of it is that that there's an energy in the that you're you feel opposing forces whether it's i gotta win over the crowd i gotta win over the people paying for this but there's it it kind of gets your adrenaline with something up against as an adversary i'm so two things that you've said so far that i think are really interesting one is um i was worried that people were going to find out i didn't know what i was doing right so that's imposter syndrome uncertainty self-belief self-esteem but on the other side this sort of irrational self-belief that some of the guys thought that they could make it so how do you come to think about this relationship between uh i'm going to try and do this thing that i have no certainty about whether or not it's going to work this seems like a very irrational pursuit to try and go after uh which would suggest self-belief and also the permanent ambient fear of people are going to find out i don't know what i'm doing in your experience for you and the other guys that you came up with what how does that slot together a rampant uncertainty and anxiety with sort of world-changing self-belief well i think when you're young that uh the the madness self-belief part defeats the terrified of failure part it's just more energy there's just more gas there's more gas in that tank when i first started doing stand-up i was just so terrible because you don't know how to do it it's it's uh the only profession that you have to learn how to do it in front of people Like you have to do it to learn how to do it.

It's like if you were a skier and you could, you only could learn by going down.

Sex is another one.

Exactly.

That's why communities talk about sex a lot because it is about like the pressure of that.

That's like the 40 year old virgin, the pressure you know to jump into something that you don't know how to do.

Practicing in public.

I've called it for the podcast.

Practicing in public.

There is no practicing in private.

There's only practicing in public.

And you would bomb and you would, you would have terrible nights and I I'm amazed that I kept going because it was brutal.

But I had talked to so many comedians by that point and they just said that's part of it.

So I thought I'm bombing, but I'm in it.

This is it.

We're doing it.

So I got kind of excited even after a bomb that I was entering the business.

What does bombing is R and D mean?

Bombing is R and D. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, is that, Do you see the opportunity to eat shit as research and development?

Yeah, because every joke is, uh, something that you're adding to your act.

So you know, I have a, a set that I do, and then I'll think of something where maybe it's a line, maybe it's a, a story, and I'll try to do a new joke.

And if it works, then I put it on the, it works pile.

And every night you're doing things at work and then you're trying to figure out if you have the courage to do the experimental part.

Because it kills your set sometimes.

So say you're really funny for 10 minutes and then you think I'm going to go into that new story that just happened.

And then maybe it works.

Maybe you eat it.

And now you have to go back into your real set and win them back and hope they forget this little side path of trying to discover new material.

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So I mentioned, I'm on tour at the moment and, as a part of this, I tried to earn my keep as best I could.

So I did work-in-progress shows and we tested a bunch of bunch of stuff.

Uh, there's a weird kind of liberation and again i'm like secondhand living through a bunch of friends that do this properly really, really fantastic comedians.

And i asked, i was like hey, i'm gonna, i'm gonna roll the dice with a lot like 10 minutes of stuff that's never been said publicly at the start of an hour and a half.

So if all of these go badly, i'm gonna spend an hour and 20 minutes like desperately trying to win people back around.

What's the, the mindset to sort of overcome that performance anxiety?

Uh, and there was a few bits of advice, but the main one that at least stuck with me was, given that their work in progress shows, your goal is to kill as many babies as possible.

So okay, that doesn't work and that doesn't work and that doesn't work.

And fantastic, because it's better to do it now than to do it in front of 1500 people in the town hall in manhattan.

Yeah, way better.

Now, what would you say?

Or what did you learn about dealing with the discomfort of little wobbles during a live performance?

I imagine this expands out into a pitch.

It expands out into whether you're singing in front of somebody, whether you're on a date and things like what did you learn about the?

Oh my God, here we go.

And then, and then bringing it back without being in two in your own head.

Is it, was there a way that you learned to work through that fear compulsion?

I think I still have it.

I, I, Because my frontal lobe shuts down when I get nervous.

There are some people who get a kick out of not doing well.

So they don't get nervous when they start bombing because they find it amusing on some level.

Yeah, exactly.

Like someone was saying I always forget if it was Jon Stewart or Jon Stewart quoting Norm Macdonald that you have to lean into the bomb.

Like you just, you're, You're not resisting it.

When Norm Macdonald would have a joke that didn't work on Weekend Update, he would just slow down.

It's like Andy Kaufman.

Some people, they get a kick out of the tension of it not working.

And I think Norm Macdonald said that his relationship was not with the audience.

His relationship was with the joke, that he loved the joke so much.

And if you don't laugh, he doesn't care.

Like, oh, they didn't laugh.

But he's getting a kick out of the joke.

Right.

When I'm on stage, I'm very aware if they're not laughing.

I can get in that place, but I'd have to really focus because I don't like when they don't laugh.

I'm still sensitive to it.

But it is a good idea to start with new things, because then you can just leap out and get in the real thing.

But it is an art of how you weave new thoughts.

And it does make sense to go.

I'm just going to start with it and then suddenly I'll bail, they won't know, and then the thing will lift off.

But it's really about if the audience thinks you're, Because what happens is when you look nervous, they lose faith in you.

And the reason why you bomb is not because the jokes are bad.

It's because they're just picking up this, you know, wide-eyed tank bomb energy.

And they see that you've lost your step and they don't trust you anymore.

And that happens with movies too.

You know, in a lot of movies if you have a lot of broad jokes in a row, if one bombs, usually the next few bomb too because the audience goes wait, do they know what they're doing?

What's broad jokes like a big, like a big visual joke or a really silly joke, and if it doesn't work and and the movie's just like hanging out there like and it just ate it, it kills the next five minutes sometimes.

And i've had it where you cut that joke out and suddenly the whole run murders because you lost that, that stumble.

That's interesting.

And you feel like that's a similar dynamic in terms of like trust and momentum that you get when you're live too.

Yeah.

And also uh, you know, Gary Shanling had journals.

When I did, when I did the documentary about him, I read all his journals and he said you know, they're not there to see a joke.

Like people go to see Elvis.

They don't go to hear a song.

And so you have to be comfortable in your persona and your character.

They're coming to just be a part of the whole vibe of it.

It's not necessarily about any specific joke.

If you can get into your thing that's funny about you and be able to hang with it.

My failure at times is if I'm having a bad day and I go on stage and I just don't look like I want to be there, then the whole thing falls apart.

Yeah.

Again, it's a challenge that you have in comedy too.

I think about this a lot, like everybody has bad days.

You've just had an argument with the missus and uh, you need to go out there and look like you want to be there.

If you're again, i don't mean to be shitting on the killers as the canonical example of somebody that just does the same thing over and over, but if you're the killers and you play, mr brightside, yeah sure, maybe your dance moves are slightly less electric or whatever, but you hit the notes, you play the chords, you drum the beat.

Mr brightside has appeared, um.

The same isn't true when it comes to comedy, because so much of it is about yourself and the emotion and the pause and the eyes.

And people will walk out, you know, with comedy.

People just leave, you know, if it really falls apart.

Talking about the power dynamic between you and the audience and like that sense of trust.

Jimmy Carr had this line where he said, most comedians are, if you don't like me, I don't like me.

And it's that sort of externalizing of the self-worth and in the desperation is the loss of trust which I think is really interesting.

Yeah.

They see it.

And there are some people that they just never get thrown.

They just.

Who's the most bulletproof or who are some of the most bulletproof guys that you've seen or girls?

Uh, I mean, Bill Burr is, I mean, he's so funny and he always has his energy and his focus.

Uh, he never looks like he isn't excited to be there and isn't very passionate about what he's doing.

And so he's not someone I mean.

I mean he might engage the crowd if he feels like you know, the crowd isn't getting something and it's their fault, you know, and he might have fun with what's happening, but he's always a hundred percent focused.

Uh, and I don't think he's worrying about it.

Um yeah, there's a lot of people like that who who just enjoy, enjoy whatever it brings.

Stuart lee's like that in the uk.

If you know who stuart lee is yeah yeah yeah, he almost makes the audience an adversary and if they don't get it, he'll lean into that and say what's your fault?

Like i can't believe.

Yeah, he's done a lot of stuff that's really exposed sort of his process and i've appreciated watching him and um, One of the methods that he uses is he finds a pocket of the audience and, despite not knowing anything about them, refers to them as sort of the real fans and they get it and then picks out another territory and says look, can we not Because there before I didn't even need to finish and you, Can we have a little bit more of the energy?

And he's called it out as he realized there's some sort of social... dynamic that goes on where the out group wants to be a part of the in group so they try even harder to do it the in group feels prestige the out group feels this desperation to be a part of it and now the i need to please you has turned into you need to please me and you need to be like them i was watching this interview with him i'm like this is fucking wild how cool yeah i mean there are people who understand those dynamics i never do it's all just like i'm just leaping into the soup yeah but but i think all that stuff is true and there's even things where like comedians especially in the old days they would do physical gestures to signal to laugh and people didn't understand that's what was happening and so it might be like johnny carson doing a golf swing or you know bob hope doing his thing but they would do a move or they would turn their head and the audience didn't know it's a signal now yeah now it's good to happen yeah yeah yeah did you uh purposefully expose yourself to uncomfortable situations because again if you've come in as the slightly nervous, slightly uncertain, hypervigilant over optimize a person, uh, getting over the fear of performance anxiety and all the rest of it, uh, asking the crowd to heckle you purposefully almost leaning into exposure therapy.

Is that as conscious strategy to try and sort of get past this?

I don't think I knew what I was doing.

I just knew I need to do it.

I need to do it a lot.

If I do it a lot, I'm going to figure it out.

And a lot of people told me it takes years and years to find yourself on stage.

And so I just set a very slow clock to figure it out.

And, you know, I mean, I literally thought I'm starting to stand up at 17.

If it takes me seven years, I'll be really successful at 24 years old.

And so I didn't mind, when I was 17 and 18 and 19, that I was like still figuring it out, because I'm like, all right, we're getting there.

And I, It's 24.

You want to hit, but not that I hit when I was 24, but, but that made sense to me.

Like, this is like becoming a doctor.

It's, it's a, it's a seven, eight year thing.

The idea of not being able to practice in private, I think is sort of the fundamental difference and why there is a lot of intrigue and sort of romanticization around.

Uh stand up as an art form, because the same is not true of writing a song.

Every time that you try to get a lyric or a melody or a chord right or whatever, there is not an audience in front of you scrutinizing all of the ways that you fucked up.

So it's less of a high wire act.

So the process of developing the body of work is less compelling and less high risk and less socially judged in that way.

So yeah, saying I had to set a long clock.

If someone was to say, I want to learn to play the guitar really well.

So I just set a really long clock.

No one would be like, All right.

Like, obviously you're trying to accumulate a skill.

It's like saying you want to become good at tennis or learn Italian, or something like yeah, you just put the reps in and then it comes out.

But because it's being scrutinized publicly, that changes the entire.

Yeah.

And you have to make money also.

So like, you're not that good.

You're trying to get paid.

You don't want, you're hoping you could not have a day job as soon as you can.

I mean, I had day jobs for years and years and years.

Uh, and then I wrote jokes for other comedians, which most comedians wouldn't do.

But I was like, I need the money.

So I would offer myself up to help people with their acts, even though my act wasn't that good.

And that's part of how I learned to write jokes was to be writing for people who are all better than me.

And then I would figure out their voice and I would try to imagine what I would want them to say.

And so I learned how to do comedy by myself.

Figure out what is a Gary Shandling joke and writing with him.

Because then you wind up writing with people and you just through osmosis, learn how they approach their creativity.

Yeah, I think lots of people in entertainment and comedy are concerned with status and progress, right.

I want to be recognized and admired by the people that I recognize and admire.

And I want to feel like I'm getting better and I want to keep sort of climbing the ladder.

I guess the problem is you're regularly going to go before an act who gets more applause and louder laughs, or whatever.

And this feels like a vicious pairing for most comedians because you've got hypersensitivity.

To the status, which is the thing that they're, and progress, which is the thing that being most exposed to like literally within minutes, there was a.

Was it the golden globes?

Or what was it you did with Adam?

And like you went on and you were like, I'm crushing.

And then he comes out and you're like, the volume just got two X. Like I wasn't crushing.

That was Carnegie hall.

Carnegie hall.

Yeah.

I, I, you know, I was doing Carnegie hall, uh, for the New York comedy festival.

And I asked Adam if he wanted to do a surprise appearance.

And Adam hadn't done standup in a really long time, like more than a decade.

And he had just started doing it again.

And, and he said, okay, yeah, I'll come on.

So I, you know, I did my whole set to perform for an hour.

And then I thought, oh, that went pretty well.

And then Adam came out and the place lost their minds.

Like it was the biggest applause that you've ever heard in your life.

And then He was so funny.

We sang a song together.

He sang the Chris Farley song for the first time in New York.

It was a really special night.

But afterwards, I'm like, I think his laughs were twice as big as mine.

And it was a great learning experience, too, of like, where's the ceiling on this?

Is it difficult to keep your ego in check when you're being friends with people whose career suddenly starts outpacing yours?

Uh, it's.

Uh, you know it makes you question if you're going to make it, or will you make it to the level you want to make it.

I mean, that for me was a, a unique experience.

I don't think a lot of people have where so many people in your social group are like the best of all time.

It's like everybody is like Otani, you know, and you're like 10 Otani friends.

You live with one of them.

Like I'm a pitcher too.

I got my knuckleball and, and, and you could tell like, this is the future of comedy here.

And I would get depressed.

I mean, I remember sitting home one night and getting drunk by myself, just just like you know, losing confidence uh, and just trying to figure out.

You know what am I going to do here?

Because I was young and I didn't really have much to say.

And I wasn't groundbreaking.

I didn't have, you know, a new way to do stand up.

I wasn't that weird.

I was just like a, kind of like a young, smart comic.

And, and I was aware of that and I was bummed out about that.

You know, I wasn't Stephen Wright.

I wasn't Bob Goldthwait.

Like people were really taking chances and doing really cool, interesting things.

And what Adam was doing and what Jim was doing was just so weird and out there.

Rob Schneider had this incredible act back when we first started and, and they were very inventive.

And I could write for people And I could, you know, write for Jim and you know, help him with with stuff.

And I got a lot of confidence from that.

But it took a long time for me to find myself, almost till you know, freaks and geeks, where I realize oh, the more personal I am, the better it is, the more interesting and creative and emotional it is.

But I didn't know how to do that for a very long time, I think.

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Yeah, it's got to be difficult and throw into harsh contrast.

You're working with this person.

Maybe you were peers or maybe you were a mentor or in writer's room together or whatever.

And then this person just is out in the stratosphere.

Yeah.

And you're also happy for them because they're your favorites.

And so you have a lot of mixed emotions about it.

Right.

All of our dreams.

We all have that dream of being on Saturday Night Live or being a part of it.

And then suddenly.

David Spade moved there, and then Rob Schneider moved there, and then Taylor moved there and Chris Rock was on there.

And, you know, you want to be part of the club.

And for me, I had to acknowledge that, oh, I'm not going to get in that way.

And so I created a sketch show with Ben Stiller the Ben Stiller show around the same time, which was a reaction to the fact that I couldn't get a job at Saturday Night Live.

Even though I was helping Jim Carrey write sketches for Living Color, I couldn't get hired in Living Color.

And so you know, me and Ben, we created a show and suddenly we had a show on Fox and it was like okay, I can't do that, but I can do it.

I can do it here.

And, and my path is just going to be a completely different path.

And that's totally fine and kind of great in a way.

But I also think, oh man, I missed out on so much fun.

You know I missed out on like being in the SNL offices and and having that, that camaraderie and that, But you got to do that yourself and bootstrap it.

Yeah.

Permissionlessly with your crew, with your friends.

Yeah.

And then you want to be creating your own crew.

Cause now I realize that as a kid, part of the fantasy of it was the people from SCTV or Monty Python or Saturday Night Live.

They were these little And that was the thing you wanted to be a part of like, oh my God, can you imagine if you were part of one of those?

And so in a way we, you know, in different time periods, you know, created our own.

That's an interesting part.

The fact that uh, so much of creative work now can be done independently.

You know, you can, from your bedroom, track a single with programmed drums you don't need a drum kit and you can have your vocals recorded and your instrument that you play and then just pay somebody to come in and do keys or bass or whatever the fuck it is that you don't do and go.

That's now on the internet, that's on the internet, and then you step up a little bit.

Maybe you've got a producer or something else, But largely it's a very solo enterprise.

The same thing goes for comedy.

Trevor Wallace, if you know who Trevor is, he was sat in the seat a couple of days ago.

Huge, huge, huge comedian, like 40 million play TikToks and 100 million play TikToks.

And him and his video guy and whoever he's starring with can go tomorrow and record the idea he had today.

So you have reduced down... the amount of collaboration that's needed is what I'm saying.

You don't need a big team with cam ops and a set and a union and fucking bullshit, right?

In some ways, that's very attractive and seductive because you think, I don't need anyone.

I can do this myself.

I literally don't need anyone.

And even if I do need some people, I don't need many.

Uh, but the thing that you have gotten rid of is maybe actually the whole reason for doing it in the first place, which was the fact that you get to hang with people.

I've seen it with the show.

You know, when I started this, it was on my own after 15 episodes, Dean editor joins.

We're now a thousand episodes late.

You'll be episode 1030 or something like that.

And um, so much of it especially because a big ascendancy was around covid and sort of the working from home revolution.

Uh, so much of it's just been us solo degenning our way through like caffeine and bedroom offices, and you go oh, it's cool that you can do it lean, but it's probably more fun if you actually do it as a group and that realization might.

It might sound kind of obvious, but it took me a little while to realize.

Well, and it's also the heartbreak of show business, which is you make a movie, everyone gets close and it's over.

And then you make a TV show and maybe do it for, maybe make one, maybe do it for a couple of years and then it's over.

And so you're constantly having all your groups dissolve.

And that that's its own kind of mental stress that I never thought about till years later.

Like, what is?

What is depressing about this is because you, you know you, you fall in love with everybody and you're having this creative experience and friendship experience, and then everyone heads off in other directions.

And that's a weird thing to experience a lot in your life.

Oh, camaraderie speed dating.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And that, and that was a tough one for me.

And I didn't realize that that was what was happening.

Uh, that I was just trying to keep everyone together.

Especially if you want connection, which it sounds like you did.

I want to be accepted and not abandoned.

Hey, guess what?

You're in an industry where you're going to be abandoned every six to 12 months permanently.

Yeah.

And I and I.

You know, I realized I only got in it for the connection because when I was a kid and I was into comedy, no one liked comedy.

There wasn't another kid into it at the school.

And so I dreamed that there would be a place where there would be people like me.

And then there were people like me when I moved to Los Angeles and that I almost wanted to get in the business for that connection.

Even more than the love of comedy.

Was you know what?

What is the language I can speak with, with my tribe?

And, but all that is unconscious.

Then years later, like when you're depressed about something, you're like, why is this so intense?

You don't know.

That's.

That's what, like 30 years of therapy help you figure out like, what is the root of all these emotions that come up around this process.

I've heard you say anything goes as long as it's funny, wise, and true.

Which of those three is hardest to achieve?

Well, funny is always hard to achieve because it's just a gut instinct.

There's no formula that makes anything work, so... you have to trust that it'll happen.

And there are people that really know themselves and trust themselves and they can be really funny and really funny on the spot.

But you are just, you do have to get to a place where your inner critic goes away.

You do have to.

I mean David Milch, who was one of my mentors, uh says it's all about like suppressing your ego.

So you can get in this like clear headed space to let, the creativity bubble up.

And if you're thinking about yourself and what people will think about it, will they like it?

Will they not like it?

It's all like a block to the actual creative moment.

And so you spend so much of your time trying to figure out how can I get in that space?

And especially for jokes.

It's all just jumping off a mountain not knowing if there's a parachute, like every single time.

What have you learned about Overcoming uncertainty, getting into that self-belief, even maybe sometimes before it was warranted.

Is there any speed running this?

Or are you just fuck every time that I sit down with a blank piece of paper?

I just got to have faith.

How does it work?

Yeah, I think it's like a baseball player.

If he gets three hits out of ten, he's one of the greats of all time.

In a way, you have to think that.

You're not going to score all the time, whether it's jokes, whether your script is good, whether your movie came out.

Well, there is, you know.

Even if you look at the greatest directors of all time, you could pick out like oh, these are, their movies are terrible, but they just went and made the next one.

Sometimes the best one they ever made is after the worst one they've ever made.

And I try to remind myself, like, you know, you're just taking swings and that's okay.

It's okay to not be perfect all the time.

But you can't take this conversation to the computer when you're writing.

You just have to see what happens.

I always say, I try to spew and write and free write and not judge it.

And then the next day, I go into judgment mode and read it and decide if there's anything of value.

I try to separate the flow moment from the judgment moment.

And I think that people slow down because they're trying to do it at the same time.

Wasn't that...

Was that Walt Disney's plan as well?

He had three writer rooms, and in the first one there was no such thing as a bad idea.

And then you'd sort of distill it down.

On that point, this wonderful statistic about Roger Federer.

Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches across his career.

He won nearly 80%, but he only won 54% of all of the points that he played.

Wow. which means that one of the greatest to ever do it lost nearly every other point.

So it's about treating every iteration like it matters and then letting it go.

Whether it's an unforced error, a perfect winner, it's still just one point and realizing that okay, we got another shot at this.

But I suppose again, the challenge that you're facing is if you're practicing in public or if you're being scrutinized based on your last performance.

The stakes are well.

What if this is the end?

What if that's such a huge face plant that I can't, I will never come back from this.

Yeah.

He, if he loses, it doesn't end his career, but you can make a movie bad enough to end your career.

Wow.

Or bad enough that like, your budgets are going to get lower and people's faith in you will disappear.

I mean, there definitely have been directors who've made movies that are they're bad in such a bizarre way that people think that they lost it and they don't quite recover.

Are there any examples of that that come to mind?

Um, maybe it was the movie Geely, the Martin Brest movie with, uh, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

I never saw it.

It got a lot of press as a, as a, as a movie that didn't work.

Okay.

But you also felt like it, you know, it breaks, you know, it breaks your career in a way.

Cause people are like, oh, I didn't think you could make one that bad.

Well, it's it, maybe it's a skill.

Who knows?

Um okay, so you've kind of got to.

You've got to face the, the uncertainty every time that you sort of jump into it.

What about wise and true people debate like what you can say on stage.

What you can say on stage, and i also add to that like, if you have a good heart, you can say almost anything.

You know, if you're, if you have a at the core of it, if you're a good person and you're trying to figure something out, then i think you can do edgy jokes and you could do dark jokes, because people can sense your goodness.

Or if you're really screwed up and saying something demented and you kind of mean it and and that's that's like a very subtle human observation that the crowd is making, because there are comedians who get away with saying some wild stuff, but there's something in their spirit that makes it okay.

Like Well, Jimmy Carr is a great example of that.

You know, he's a really fantastic guy and he has the edgiest jokes of anyone on the planet and he can have that career because people know where his heart is.

They know, even in the worst, most intense type of subject matter.

They know the message three levels below the joke.

They just sense it from him.

And so he gets like a free pass and, because we know what he's going for and why.

And other people could do the same stuff, and they would not be allowed to have that type of career.

I'm not sure that you're doing this from quite as equanimous and caring of a place as somebody like Jimmy.

I suppose this is what the accusation of that joke went too far is.

That is somebody imbuing intention beyond what was there and, i think uh, trying to basically sort of fill in the the vacuum of uncertainty of is jimmy carr a nice person?

Is shane gillis actually a nice person?

And them saying, ah well, this joke isn't just a joke, it belies some underlying motivation.

It's like it's a little iceberg peeking above the water that shows the xenophobic racist misogynist transphobic, judgmental whatever that has been hiding below the surface.

And I guess, dealing with a cancellation like that, whatever a news story like that, I don't even know if cancellation fully exists anymore.

Dealing with that is you saying, fuck you, I'm a good person.

Yeah, and especially with those two, the audience loves them and they're good guys.

And that's the thing they bring onto the stage so they could talk about difficult subject matter.

They know when you're goofing, because you know there's a lot of people.

They want to see the edgiest stuff because life is so crazy and they like the comedians to just pop the pressure on it all and to say the thing you shouldn't say, or to like acknowledge how insane it all is through their jokes and some of it.

You know, if you wrote it down you'd be like what?

What does that mean?

But there's another message which is like we're here together consoling each other that the world feels really fucked up right now.

And so there's other levels to it that are really important.

And I always say that people have different tastes.

You know some people, some people love country music, some people, like you know uh, heavy metal, and there's a place for all of it.

I think that in the modern culture one of the big issues of the internet and social media is it's kind of made everyone feel like we're all supposed to like everything.

Where, in the old days, I feel like say, you were into a band and there were these bands that weren't that popular.

But the people who liked them loved them.

They were just obsessed with this band that maybe sold 20,000 records.

And that was fine.

But I feel like in the modern age, people would go, they're not successful.

Where that used to not mean the same thing.

There was more alternative culture, uh, cause you're not supposed to like all the comedians.

You're supposed to pick the one you like.

Maybe you like the clean comedian, maybe like the filthy comedian, but but I feel like the people like the clean comedian might be mad at the filthy comedian.

Yeah.

And so.

And hopefully that's changing.

But I think that is what throws people because you're being fed it.

Like maybe you wouldn't have ever seen that comedian if it didn't show up in your feed.

But in the old days, nothing was fed to you.

You'd had to seek it out.

I think it's such a good point.

First off, the currency of size has been normalized, equalized across the world.

I can see your follower count.

I can see how many plays your last special got.

I can tell whether you're on Netflix or whatever it is.

Secondly, subcultures are being judged globally.

They don't exist in their own little silo anymore.

So you can say that comedians cringe and you shouldn't listen to them, whatever it is, because the communications become decentralized.

Something else that Jimmy said to me was people who say that thing is too sensitive to joke about are saying the exact same as that disease is too serious to treat, and he saw the joking about it as the salve, as the proof that we can try and bring some levity to this really serious issue.

And a final bit from Douglas Murray this is forever ago gay man talking about how, in his opinion, sort of gay rights, the fight for gay rights, it's like, I think, that we're done.

And the coddling in his view of gay people was a type of prejudice that that nobody realized was a prejudice.

He said you can work out when you have fully assimilated into a society and when you've got true equality, when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.

And I saw that as almost like a No longer being paternalistic or patronizing by saying oh we'll, we'll try and treat you with this special sort of source that maybe you mustn't, you can't, we can't, you can't handle it, as opposed to like no, like cool.

In you come along with the bullshit that everybody else has to deal with.

And I think that the the audience can sense, like what I was saying before, that with your heart's in the right place.

Right.

Like they.

They just know when you're doing that, because there is that version of comedy which is inclusive by giving everybody a hard time, but there is the mean spirited stuff.

And just like some music is bad, some comedy is just bad and that's okay.

I mean, you know, if you're going to have a thousand comedians, of course you're going to have some that.

What they're saying makes no sense or it's cruel or it's whatever.

That's just like part of the system of people deciding who they like and who they don't like, because so many of these subjects they're so sensitive and it takes like a really bright mind to know how can I talk about this.

Like, what is the angle to get that across?

And some people are very sophisticated and then some people are very sloppy, you know?

And maybe they don't even mean to be mean, but they're kind of lazy or maybe they're not a great joke writer and it's easier, you know.

So and that's also what's fun about comedy is it's really hard and we're all looking to go.

Who figured it out?

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Yeah.

You say it takes 10 years to really know if you've made a good movie.

I imagine that that must be a difficult world to get into, which is tenure test on a movie which can be using the exact same fundamental skill of comedy, when stand-up gives you the response in 03 seconds.

So immediate feedback mechanism, decade-long feedback mechanism.

Yeah uh, i'm interested in the.

It's not even delayed gratification, it's a delayed assessment of your body of work with this batman versus bruce wayne life of, And also I need to be prepared to accept it immediately if I go and do something very similar tonight at the fucking laugh factory.

Well, you're judged by you know, when you make a movie, the judgment is coming at different stages, right?

So the movie comes out, so there's a critical judgment, and then there's a financial judgment.

Sometimes you have a great movie, it doesn't make money.

Sometimes you have a bad movie, it does make money.

You know, there's every permutation of that.

And then there's this next judgment, which is, did people actually like it?

So you have, there are movies that get bad reviews or make no money.

And then 10 years later you realize wait, everyone talks about that movie and they forgot it got bad reviews or they don't remember that it didn't make any money.

And that's the thing that I noticed.

No one remembers what something did or what the reviews were, unless it was really extreme years later.

So we've had these movies like walk hard, which didn't open.

And then you know, 15 years later you realize oh, this is like in the top three of all the movies we've done.

And people keep watching it and it never goes away.

You can tell when you go on Netflix and it has like the little strip of comedies.

And you go, oh, we got a couple.

We got a couple up there.

And some of them you realize aren't around much because they've just people aren't as into them and they don't move up the algorithm.

Out of the zeitgeist.

And other things you go, wow, that movie like never goes away.

And you could just tell people must like it and they keep showing it.

I don't know how the system works, but like, hey look, Bridesmaids is Still like right there in that key spot.

It doesn't seem to be slipping, and that's the audience judging.

What's been a real U-shaped curve, bad weekend to 10-year success?

I mean there are ones that like did, like okay, but years later you're like I don't know.

That's one of the main ones they talk about.

There's a movie called Heavyweights.

It was about a summer camp for overweight boys.

It starred Ben Stiller.

Kenan Thompson was in it.

Paul Feig acted in it.

And we made that in 1995, uh, and it's on Disney plus right now.

And so it didn't, you know, maybe cause 10 made 20.

It was kind of a wash.

Uh, the reviews weren't very good.

And now you go all right.

All this, like 30 years later, it's in the main spot on Disney plus people watch it.

Like I put it out yesterday.

And it's a lot of people's favorite movie from like when they were kids.

And you're like, wow, we, we really didn't think anyone was paying attention to that.

And that's really fun too, you know, to see things like that.

This is 40 is probably the one that most people mentioned to me.

When people say hi, 90 of the time they mentioned this is 40, and this is where he did pretty good at the box office.

It wasn't gigantic, but it seems to just keep rising in esteem in a really wonderful way, because it's very truthful.

And also people enter that age group and they watch it and they go oh, i get it now.

It is true what they're talking about there, one of the things that me and a few of my friends have talked about especially.

I'm 37, so for me, a 40 year old virgin, as an example, anchorman you know, these comedy movies moved culture and created taglines that people still now are referring to like it's almost part of the lexicon, sort of modern western language.

Yeah, and i don't know the last movie from the comedy world that did nudge that, and it seems like something happened between 2010 to 15 to now.

Where you go, what was the last movie that people quoted by the water cooler ad nausea, like it was just part of the lexicon.

What do you?

What do you come to think about?

What's happened?

There's this streaming stepping in like a box office, people being into their own niches and nobody having the collective consumption that allows it to reach escape velocity at the same time.

Have you considered that?

You know the dynamic i'm talking about?

Oh, absolutely.

I think it's pretty simple that in the old days, comedies would do really well on dvd.

So because people like to own them and watch them over and over again.

So if you made a movie like anchorman, if it made 60 million dollars, it would also make 60 on dvd, so it would be a big hit.

And then, when people switch to streaming, nothing replaced the dvd money right.

So now the bet is different.

You have to make more in the box office To be a hit.

You're optimizing for opening weekend.

Yeah, so it's hard to know the numbers, exactly what the numbers are.

But if you made a movie for 20 in the old days, if it made 40 and 40 on DVD, which adds up to 80, you're good.

So now take away the 40.

You made a movie for 20, it's made 40, but you also had to spend 20 million on marketing.

And then suddenly...

It's negative or a wash, where studios can place a different kind of bet on a giant movie that costs 200 million and they're hoping it makes 900 million, but they have every market in the world to sell it to.

And the same for horror on the other side, a horror movie might cost $5 million.

And it can travel to other countries where comedy doesn't always play well in Bulgaria.

Right.

Culturally specific.

Yeah.

And so all those things just made studios go, we don't want to make as many bets on that.

But then you get into a doom loop, which is the audience gets out of the habit of going.

The writers start writing different types of movies because there's no money in it.

Being eaten up by the horror genre.

Yeah.

And then they're not, uh, breaking new comedy stars because they're not giving people opportunities.

So you don't get your next Adam Sandler or Amy Schumer because they're not taking the risk to give them the movie to prove they're a movie star.

But it's always one huge hit away from reversing itself.

So if someone made the hangover right now, it would be gigantic, and then they would chase it a little bit.

Oh, this is proven, that there is money to be made in that area of the world, so we will start to try and workshop more stuff.

That's like that.

Yeah, i always say it's like where they used to not make pirate movies because they thought no one wants a pirate movie.

There was a big pirate bomb movie that roman polanski made with walter matthew and you hadn't seen pirate movies in forever.

And then pirates of the caribbean happens and then suddenly it's like the biggest thing, and that is how it works.

It is uh, cyclical and you would think, with how rough the world is lately, that comedy would be the genre that would get bigger and bigger.

But also I feel like the other genres decided to also be comedies.

So the action movies are kind of like comedies and the dramas are kind of funny.

And so everyone has pulled it in and the audience is like yeah, Marvel movie is basically a comedy for half of it.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

I uh, I think I had mcconaughey on the show and he was talking about how the biggest cash cow in movie history was rom-coms for him, because he's saying super cheap to make reruns at valentine's day, reruns at christmas, dvd sales through the roof uh, licensing or full works and um, i'd never considered kind of the business of movies.

Obviously it's ultimately a money-making exercise um, but yeah, but then you go and look at avengers and you think technically, a little bit more complex, larger bet in order to be able, but in some ways a little bit more of a safe bet.

Um, i wonder why it is that we haven't had in a time where people can do with a bit more levity.

I wonder why it is that we haven't had that resurgence of i guess there's, you know, independent new series coming through.

Perhaps it is that comedy is being like eaten up by other genres And streaming.

I mean, there's, you know, movies, uh, on streaming, there's TV shows, there's a lot of TV shows and there's tons of, tons of internet comedy and people doing all sorts of things.

So I think some of the talent has.

You know who normally would go.

I want to write for Saturday night live and write big comedy movies.

They're finding other ways to express themselves.

I mean, look at Shane with tires.

Yeah.

And that that is a model that people have, where you, you go off and you raise the money and you show what you want to do and then you sell it to the you know, to the streamer, and you, you prove yourself that way.

And that is probably the answer for comedy, which is for it to do what it did back when I first started, which is Kevin Smith made clerks.

They made, you know, swingers, uh, Doug Lyman and Jon Favreau and.

And, uh, and Vince Vaughn and they did it cheap.

And so I think we have the technology.

We just need some lunatics to make something groundbreaking now cheap, because that's you wave.

That's what changes the genre.

Is that someone just did?

It's like South park, South park started out as a Christmas card.

You know, someone paid them to do a video Christmas card and they did the Santa versus Jesus South park Christmas card.

There was a few minutes and it was just the funniest thing you've ever seen in your life, but they did it with paper cutouts.

It was just hand like stop animated.

It wasn't done for any money.

And then they did a pilot and South Park became South Park.

And it's still the funniest thing out there.

But you need innovation from people who don't have the big money.

I wonder who'll fire the starting pistol on that.

You've got this line, I know my level of fame.

If I say no, they say, all right.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

If someone says, are you Judd Apatow?

If I say no, they go all right.

Oh, i read that's.

That's funny.

That is funny.

Uh, i also had this insight around um, when you get to a particular level of gravitas or impressiveness, how many people tell you no?

Well, it's fucking judd apatow.

Like he knows what he's doing.

Look at this illustrious list of previous productions that he's done.

And is that a challenge to be?

Uh, correction checked, fact checked with your intuition, which sometimes is going to be wrong?

It's like hey hey hey no, this one's a no.

I know you think it's a yes yeah, at the start of your career, it all knows.

And then the tenacity that you've got turns into momentum, turns into respect, turns into pliability and sycophancy and, before you know it, you're putting out something that's not being stress tested by the rest of the team.

Is that a dynamic that you felt?

I think that it's important to just figure out who your collaborators are.

So I've made you know the vast majority of my movies with universal since uh, the 40 year old Virgin, and it's the same people and they

Show you no respect.

Well, you're like, we know each other well enough that we don't have to do any of those dances.

Like they'll tell me like, Hey, I don't need the third act is working so well.

And that's really helpful to have a lot of trust, where people know they can challenge you and they're not going to hesitate to give you notes and and you know that they're smart and that it's all worth listening to because you know the the nightmare is that you're just working for someone who doesn't get it.

And you're having a creative debate with someone that you're very different then.

And that's, that's truly the worst thing that ever happens.

Yeah.

And some people like different things.

So it's almost like you don't, why do you have to like what I'm doing?

You know what I mean?

Like, like.

If you said to a friend Here, all the movies nominated for an Oscar for best picture this year, almost all your friends will hate about two thirds of them.

And it doesn't mean the ones they hate are bad.

It just means they're bad to them.

So when you're in a creative relationship with somebody.

It's not that they're like dumb or smart, but also maybe their entire life experience makes them not connect with what you're trying to express.

If I'm doing a movie about being 40 and I'm talking to a 25 year old who doesn't have kids, I'm having a different conversation.

And so the best thing that ever happened to me was the moments when I found people that got it and were really smart and could go.

But seriously, this part isn't good where I think okay, I'm going to look at that because I trust their instincts.

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Thank you.

So this, I mentioned I'm going to bin this show.

After this run, new one starts, and then we go to Australia in March with a new show.

So I'm starting to think about what this is.

The one that I did for this, which has been going for two years now, completely just like bootstrapped creatively myself, which resulted in me making a ton of errors.

I decided, okay, for the next one, it'd be good to get a director.

Wouldn't that be cool?

So we sort of send up the bat signal and start to ask a few people and start to do a few different interviews.

And the guy that we've ended up going with, this dude called Ed from the UK is fucking fantastic.

I do this interview with him.

It's only 30 minutes and his credentials are impressive and all the rest of the stuff.

And this is before this run around before even the work in progress shows.

I was like, I've got this new section that I'm thinking of doing in the show.

And I was thinking of adding some music to it.

What do you think about that?

Uh, just as a like partly, I can get some fucking free uh insight on a show that he's not working on during his job interview.

And he can't really say no, he can't be like, oh, you must pay me my hourly rate for that.

Um, but also it's like, oh, it'd just be interesting to see what he says.

And he sort of thought for a moment.

I think it's shit.

I think it's a shit idea.

And I think that it's hammy and tacky.

And I think that it's going to destroy what is a really great section.

And he had illustrious history and all the things and the skill set and good demeanor and British and available and the right price and all the rest of the stuff.

But the reason that I decided to give him the job was that he told me no, even when he knew that it would risk everything. his appeasement of me during the job interview yeah yeah and i was like wow if this guy's prepared to tell me no when he's pitching for his own job he cares more about the product about shipping something that's good than he does about his or my ego and i was like it's it just was the first time where i fell in that dynamic had happened like during a job interview you're supposed to like try and make the person feel as good as possible tell them what they want to hear it's like by telling me what i could have not wanted to hear that was actually the biggest green flag that i could have seen i thought that was really no those people are so essential even when it when it's painful you know sometimes i'll do a table read of a script and it doesn't go well you know because it's really helpful to just hear it And you invite all your friends and friends of friends who are writers, and then you have to tell them, okay, hit me with the truth.

There's nothing you can say that will offend me.

And create a space where people will say what they feel.

And it's always helpful.

Even if you disagree with some of it, you'll notice, oh, a few people thought that.

Oh, this is a common criticism.

Especially if one person says it and everyone else goes, yeah, yeah.

I agree.

It's like when they test the movie, they always do a focus group after.

So they'll take 20 people out of a crowd of like 300 and they'll have somebody interview them about the movie and they'll say which parts did you find slow?

Which parts didn't make sense to you?

And so someone will always have an opinion like, I didn't know why the girl kissed him.

He seems like a jerk.

And then they'll go, Who else thought that?

And like 20 people's hands come up and that becomes really helpful, because sometimes you're just not communicating properly and people just aren't understanding what you're you're going for.

But it is like, you have to be like in the mode to like Brace for impact.

Take those bullets because it's... This was my baby.

I was so sure that it was going to be good.

I wanted you to like it and like me and not abandon me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sometimes I'll sit so far up in the movie theater while they're doing the focus group and I'm just so low in the chair and I'm just like eating Kit Kats while they're criticizing it.

Like taking notes but like suffering.

Yeah, yeah.

You've got to have your comfort blanket and comfort food and comfort.

Fucking emotional stress animal.

You mentioned before about mentors.

Do people underprice how influential or important mentors can be?

I don't know if everybody talks about the concept of mentors.

I was lucky that I met Gary Shandling when I was very young and he let me write the Grammys for him, and then he hired me at the Larry Sanders show and then he let me direct and let me co-run it one year, and then he read all my scripts and would give me notes and in encourage me, and so it.

It made me think oh, this is what you're supposed to do for other people, and so that was just like a mindset, like all right well, i'll help people with their scripts and try to help them learn how to do this, so that maybe it's an easier ride if someone tell, tells them what to look out for.

Um, and a lot of times i would have a project and i would give it to gary, and just the fact that he liked the script gave me the confidence to do the work, Because I so believed in his opinion and trusted it that if he was like yeah, this 40-year-old virgin is really, really funny.

This is going to work.

And then he would say, you know, I think you need to figure out the end.

And he would give me notes.

But just that he liked it put so much gas in my tank.

And so him being gone, I think, has really hurt me, because it really was one of the things I really leaned on.

Second brain.

Yeah, does he understand what I'm doing?

And I knew he wouldn't bullshit me.

Yeah, that's cool.

I get the sense.

You know, going back to that solopreneur, lean startup mode production thing that lots of people can do.

The lack of collaboration, the lack of needing somebody else.

Hey, dude, I need you to hold the camera.

I don't need you to hold the camera.

And maybe the person that is doing it for you, you need to do it for next week.

And that becomes mentor, collaborator, whatever it might be.

This siloing has caused a mentor effect.

I see it in what I've done.

You know, thousand episodes and like people stepped in but it was much more of a like contractor, mentor.

It was a.

It was a one night stand, not a, not a long-term relationship yeah um, but you know, to speak to the industry that i'm in, we are really fucking fortunate that kind of the media of the moment podcasting long-form interviews.

Uh, the guy that is at the top of the tree is a really fucking benevolent person, like because it didn't need to be that way.

Yeah, we didn't need to have rogan, who is as sort of selflessly philanthropic when it comes to sharing limelight and pedestalizing people who don't have a platform, and just following his instincts and sticking with something that he likes, regardless of whether or not it's cool or popular or in or trending or whatever.

It totally did not need to be that way.

It could have been some tyrannical asshole that had managed to get themselves into this position and didn't want to ever share the limelight and was very zero sum and scarcity mindset and backbiting and all the rest of it.

And yeah, I mean, maybe this is because I'm exclusively because I'm inside of the tent pissing out.

But, as far as I can see, I think we're real fortunate that the person who kind of got to be the king of the first wave of this was someone who's super pro-social, because it totally fucking didn't need to be that way at all.

I mean, it reminds me of when you used to play.

When I used to play the improv, you weren't allowed to play the comedy store.

Like they were in competition.

And that was like a big thing.

Like, are you an improv person or you're a comedy store person?

It's like the Bloods and the Crips.

Or in the old days, like if you did this talk show, you couldn't do that talk show and things would be cut off dramatically to you.

It wasn't like the, the whole world was, it was embracing.

Yeah.

My, the uh guest booking company that helps us uh, a bunch of the guys and girls that they've got.

They used to work at Fallon or Kimmel or whatever.

And yeah, you'd get one, you'd get one.

It's like, who's going to get Chris Hemsworth or, you know, whatever on the next run.

Gerard Butler's just finished this movie and Oh no, they got whatever.

Um yeah, I that's uh territorial kind of approach to things.

Um, and in the old days, like you know, the way that gary shanning would do it is he had the larry sanders show and he would just have on the people he thought were funny or he would make them the staff writers and there was a mentor system that you'd get.

I was a low-level writer, i'd come in two days a week the first year and just pitch jokes, and then slowly you'd rise and you were mentored just by being allowed to work there, and so you'd be at a table with like, some of the great comedy writers John Rigi and Maya Forbes and Paul Sims and Peter Tolan.

And, and just by watching them work, they were mentoring you just by seeing them.

Maybe you have to go and get a coffee.

Maybe it's a, you know, you're there to service people in a way we're out of ink.

We're out of paper.

Like, you know, it's, it is, it's the mailroom kind of slow, uh, exposure.

Uh, this is like if I had a piece of advice for pretty much anybody that wants to break into at least my industry.

If you're good at what you do and you offer work for free to somebody and you say hey, I'm going to come to wherever you are and do whatever it is that you need.

I'm a great editor.

Get me your files.

I'll just I will.

And you can call this out.

I think that you can actually just break the fourth wall about it and say.

I know that you need this thing.

I can give it to you.

I'm not going to charge you right now.

But in three months or six months time, when you can't imagine living without me, I am going to come with my handout and we're going to organize a deal.

And you can call out the arc that it's going to go through.

It's exactly the way that Dean did it with me.

And for the first two and a half, three years of the show, we basically broke it.

It was a wash.

And now it's not.

And yeah, if you make yourself indispensable to somebody by uh having the early objections of, oh i don't know if i can trust them and i don't know if it's going to make sense financially or i don't know whatever like do the apprenticeship thing, because pretty soon they're not going to be able to remember what life was like without you, and they can Now.

They have no choice.

That was always my approach to everything when I was trying to break in.

Like I just want to over deliver it to a ridiculous extreme.

So if you asked me to do anything, the work would level would be so high.

If Shannon wanted a few jokes for the Grammys, I'd write him a hundred.

I just wanted people to always think no one is going to outwork him.

And maybe when I wasn't as good, but it mattered because like I was you know, I cared so much.

A lot of shots at goal.

Yeah.

And sometimes, you know, like with Chandling, he would fix all the jokes.

So even if they weren't good, he'd be like, oh, that's a good idea, but maybe you should say this.

And it was, it was fun for him to have too many jokes.

Yeah.

And, uh, yeah, I was always a proponent of working for free, just getting the first job I ever had.

I worked for comic relief in the United States, which is, uh, It was a big live aid type event.

For the bear with the eye, right?

We have one in the UK.

Yeah.

So the one here is for the homeless.

And I called them up when I was in college and I said, I'll work for you for free.

And they didn't hire me.

And then three months later, someone called me like, yeah, we need you now.

And then I worked for them for five years after that.

For free?

Well, a couple of years for free.

And then they gave me $200 a week, but I needed that $200 a week.

And then I was writing jokes for another $200 a week and I was doing standup and making $200 a week.

So like, oh my God, I got 600 bucks a week.

And I was always willing to, to scrape that way.

Hmm.

Is there some common advice that you're glad you ignored?

That's something that most people believe is true, but isn't.

People were pretty supportive.

Like my family always thought I could work and believe that something would happen.

I'm trying to think what the bad advice I got.

I mean, I certainly got you know.

There are always people that just don't believe in you, or they.

They tell you to do this instead of that.

Um, notes from standards and practices.

I remember that I was writing jokes for Tom Arnold and Tom Arnold told me, like I'm going to have a TV show and have a sitcom.

And, uh, I told my agent and they're like, he's not going to have a sitcom.

Believe me.

I know, I know the head of the network.

He's not going to have a sitcom.

And then uh, Tom kind of said and I was like and he and he and he didn't kind of line me up to work for it because he just didn't believe it.

And so, you know, those things happen all the time, but there wasn't one bad, bad piece of advice.

I misinterpreted advice.

I mean, but people, uh someone I know said to me when you make television, like when you make a TV pilot, don't take any of the notes you don't agree with, because If you ruin it based on their notes, when it's time to decide if they want to make it a series or not, they're not going to say I'm sorry, I screwed you up with my notes.

Let's do it.

You know, so you should, you know, be judged based on what your idea is and your approach to it is.

But I didn't understand the politics of that debate.

When you reject notes, I would just be like, well, I'm not doing it.

Now what happens?

I mean, I didn't know that.

There was a given to take the appearance of, of, uh, civility and listening.

Cause I would, I would just be so frustrated.

Cause a lot of times when you get notes, you're not getting it from the head person.

You're getting it from like a lower level person who has the terrible job to give you all of these notes.

And so that relationship is always weird, because you know that some of the notes you disagree with aren't theirs.

They're from some crazy boss.

So you don't see very much.

And then you're like, okay, so.

How many should I do to make that person happy?

So though maybe we'll like us enough to not cancel the TV show.

And I would always play that wrong and get canceled over and over again.

I would just not know how to, uh, how to have that relationship.

Yeah.

I think there's definitely kind of a balance between being a slick operator and um being sort of so talented that it's not about the networking, it's about just sort of the raw product itself, whatever.

And um, there's definitely a romanticization of well, i mean, he's just so good, he's a bit eccentric and he's kind of hard to work with and everybody hates him and he's a total nightmare and he turns up late and sometimes not at all, but like he's so good because it feels like artistic purity.

There's a little bit of elitism in there like oh, you don't get it, man.

You know it's like the very technical math rock band or whatever, and you're like oh, you wouldn't, you wouldn't understand, like it's too sophisticated for you.

Um, or like larry david.

You know you always hear about larry david getting bad notes on seinfeld and and the legend i don't know if it's even true was that he was always like well, let's not do the show.

You know he was always willing to walk away, i'd be happy not to do it and uh, i don't know if that's true or not, but it if it is, there is a power in that.

But when I've done it, they've said, okay, let's not do the show.

Wait, I thought this was my power move to do that.

And you never know.

And it's funny because I've been on the other side of the notes because, as a producer, I'm the one giving the notes to the writers.

So I'm very aware I can screw up their script if I give them a bad note or send them off in the wrong direction.

Especially, again, because, holy fuck, it's Judd Apatow.

Like, I'd better listen to what he's got to say.

Like, he must be right about this.

He's more experienced than me, better credentials than me.

So my correction to your thing that I think is an error might also be an error.

Like, there's some infinite human centipede that's just going round and round and round.

And so yeah, you've got the one side, artistic purity, this is the.

But then on the other side, you have the person who is so proficient at the social stuff that it almost makes people start to question how much legitimacy is in the art here.

And have they just finessed their way through this?

And there's, you know, a first order effect skepticism around the person who's too slick of an operator.

And you go there's some there there.

If i poke this thing, is it?

You know, i can wafer thin and there's nothing.

It's hollow.

Um, Because maybe we're, maybe we scrutinize people who feel, seem to us as if they're playing the game a lot, because it feels like compensatory.

Like, oh, this is too hard.

If he was really that good, he wouldn't need to be in all of the rooms.

He wouldn't need to be schmoozing and taking the dinners and all the rest of it.

But, um.

And that's the hard part about Joe business because there is a schmooze aspect to it.

And that's the thing you realize, like part of it is like, so people want you around.

They want to talk to you.

So you know, if you're trying to set up a TV show, the network or the streamer, they're also making a choice.

If they didn't want to interact with you for years.

And if you're not cool and they're on the bubble about whether or not to do it, they're always not going to do it if they don't want to have that relationship.

And with some people are incredibly talented, but they're also kind of fun to be around.

And there are people who are incredibly talented and they are not fun to be around.

This again is, I think, seen nowhere as sharply as in bands touring musicians, because you're living on a fucking bus together, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months.

And that's six months of your life.

Every year is you locked in a moving tube with that guy who's a fucking dick or who rubs you up the wrong way just you or everybody more, whatever.

Uh, but he's so good on the drums, or he's so good as a singer, or she's so fantastic on the bait, whatever it is.

And you go, yeah, but the, the, uh, Cost of morale is not worth the profit of bass playing.

There's a comedy version of that, which is you know, in a, you know on television shows, uh say, you have eight writers in the room and the the writer.

That is the negative vibe.

You know, sometimes it's people who criticize but don't pitch the fix or whatever.

They're distracting or they're annoying.

They always call them a room killer.

Uh, mood Hoover.

Yeah.

Because then you're like, I hate going to work.

Cause that guy's in the room.

And that's a big thing about creating the chemistry of, of those creative spaces.

Cause it only takes one person to just disrupt the flow of, of everybody.

Yeah.

And I suppose you do have this strange balancing act where someone who's just got such fantastic skill needs to learn to be a good operator.

It's like, Hey, Be a good hang.

It's important for you to be a good hang.

It's important for you to respond with positivity where possible.

And it's a much more difficult piece of advice to say to somebody who's a really good hang to be like yo, be better.

You kind of suck at the job you're supposed to do.

I love having you around, but you're sort of useless.

And yeah, finding the right balance of that, I suppose, is a challenge.

Yeah.

Judd Apatow.

Yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, where should people go?

Keep up today with everything that you've got that's going on at the moment.

Uh, there's a juddapatow.com website out there and I'm on Instagram.

I have a little link tree of the shows we're doing.

I do shows at Largo once a month, standup shows that are usually pretty interesting.

I'm doing one tonight with a musician, Andrew Bird, and Tom Papa and Kevin Neyland and Wayne Fetterman.

And.

Oh, it's stacked.

Yeah, we do, we do, uh, these benefits.

So once a month we put on a show.

And we pick a charity.

It's like tonight it's city of hope.

And it's an excuse to just ask people if they want to hang out and have fun and put on a show.

And over the years we've had everybody from Kevin Hart to Randy Newman, to Beck, to to, you know, Amy Schumer.

Come to these events.

And so it's really fun.

Unreal.

It's a real, uh, Russian roulette of who you're going to find this evening and the book.

And the book comedy nerd, uh, which is a autobiography in scrapbook form is, uh, It's out there.

It's been released.

You have access to it.

It's a good holiday gift.

It's the size of a holiday gift.

It's heavy.

It's actually, it's 570 pages and it's heavy.

So when you give it to someone, it's not that expensive.

It feels expensive.

Wonderful weapon if you have a home invader.

Yes.

Good for flattening down any pastries that need to be done.

If you drop it, you could shatter your foot.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate you, Judd.

Thank you.

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.

[Judd Apatow on Comedy, Trauma, and the Art of Creative Obsession]-[#1033- Judd Apatow - Why Comedies Suck Now]

📋 Summary

The Intersection of Trauma and Comedy

The Mechanism of Creative Obsession

The Turbulence of Comedy vs. The Longevity of Music

Practicing in Public and the Fear of Failure

The Evolution of Creative Success

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Judd Apatow on Comedy, Trauma, and the Art of Creative Obsession]-[#1033- Judd Apatow - Why Comedies Suck Now]

📋 Summary

The Intersection of Trauma and Comedy

The Mechanism of Creative Obsession

The Turbulence of Comedy vs. The Longevity of Music

Practicing in Public and the Fear of Failure

The Evolution of Creative Success

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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