#1033- Judd Apatow - Why Comedies Suck Now

31:52And 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, 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-optimizer person, getting over the fear of performance anxiety and all the rest of it, asking the crowd to heckle you purposefully, almost leaning into exposure therapy, is that a conscious strategy to try and sort of get past this?

32:35I 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 standup 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 I'm 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 yeah 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 uh so yeah saying i had to set a long clock if someone was to say uh 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 game.

34:22Yeah. And you have to make money also. So you're not that good. You're trying to get paid. 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. 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.

34:58And so I learned how to do comedy by figuring 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 that 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.

35:40And 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 they're being most exposed to like literally within minute i mean 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'd like i wasn't crushing that was carnegay hall carnegay hall yeah i i you know i was doing Carnegie Hall for the New York Comedy Festival. And I asked Adam if he wanted to do a surprise appearance.

36:14And Adam hadn't done stand-up in a really long time, like more than a decade. And he had just started doing it again. And he said, okay, yeah, I'll come on. So I did my whole set to perform for an hour. And then I thought, oh, that went pretty well. 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.

36:58Hmm. Is that, 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 gonna 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 picture too you know i got my that's cute 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're losing confidence uh and just trying to figure out you know what am i gonna 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 i was bummed out about that you know i wasn't stephen wright i wasn't bob goldthwaite 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 stuff.

38:38And 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 realized, 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. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before. and that is because I'm frankly dependent of it. For the last, as long as I can remember, I've started every single day with one of these suckers in cold water. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with everything you need, nothing that you don't.

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40:17yeah it's 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 Sandler moved there and Chris Rock was on there. And you want to be part of the club.

40:58And 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 bed 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 family but you got to do that yourself and bootstrap it permissionlessly with your crew, with your friends.

41:50Yeah, and then you wind up creating your own crew. Because now I realize that as a kid, part of the fantasy of it was that people from SCTV or Monty Python or Saturday Night Live, they were these little families. 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. But the fact that 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.

42:29And 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 you get trevor wallace if you know 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?

43:15In 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. 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 this show. When I started this, it was on my own. after 15 episodes, Dean editor joins. We're now a thousand episodes. You'll be episode 1030 or something like that. And so much of it, especially because a big ascendancy was around COVID and sort of the working from home revolution.

43:55So much of it's just been a 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 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 you do it for a couple years and then it's over and so you're constantly having All your groups dissolve. And that's its own kind of mental stress that I never thought about until years later.

44:38Like, what is depressing about this? It's because 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 was a tough one for me. And I didn't realize that that was what was happening, 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.

45:13Permanently. Yeah. And 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 What is the root of all these emotions that come up around this process?

46:02I'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 do have to get to a place where your inner critic goes away. You do have to. I mean, David Milch, who is one of my mentors, says it's all about suppressing your ego so you can get in this clear-headed space to let the creativity bubble up.

46:52And 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 and getting into that self-belief even maybe sometimes before it was warranted is there any speed running this or are you just fuck like every time that i sit down with a blank piece of paper i just gotta have faith how does it work yeah i think it's like it's like a baseball player you know if he gets three hits out of 10, you know, he's one of the greats of all time.

47:44In a way you have to think that like, yeah, 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, 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.

48:22You 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 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.

49:06He 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 get 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.

49:49Yeah. 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 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 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 breast movie okay with uh ben affleck and jennifer lopez i never saw it it got a lot of press 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 because 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 you know 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 can 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.

51:21And 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 because we know what he's going for and why.

52:04And 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 trying to basically sort of fill in 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 peaking above the water that shows the xenophobic, racist, misogynist, transphobic, judgmental, whatever that has been hiding below the surface.

53:01And I guess dealing with a cancellation like that, like whatever, a news story like that, I don't even know if cancellation like fully exists anymore. Dealing with that is you saying, fuck you, I'm a good person. Yeah. And it's like, especially with those two, the audience loves them and, you know, they're good guys. And so they're, you know, and that's the thing they bring onto the stage. And 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. crazy. And they, they like the comedians to just pop the pressure on it all.

53:38And 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 And I always say that people have different tastes. You know, some people love country music. Some people like, you know, 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.

54:22Where 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 in 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 because 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 you like the filthy comedian but but i feel like the people like the clean comedian might be mad at the Filthy Comedian.

54:58And so 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.

55:32So 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.

56:12And the coddling, in his view of gay people, was a type of prejudice that nobody realized was a prejudice said uh 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 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 need you mustn't you can't oh 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 where your heart's in the right place right like 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 gonna have a thousand comedians of course you're gonna 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 what is the angle to 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 you know a quick aside if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem.

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59:03That's 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 standup gives you the response in 0.3 seconds. So immediate feedback mechanism, decade long feedback mechanism. I'm interested in the, it's not even delayed gratification, 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.

59:45Well, you're judged by, you know, by, 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. There's every permutation of that. And then there's this next judgment, which is, did people actually like it? So 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.

1:00:19And 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 that 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 uh 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 and started ben stiller keenan 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 because 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 and that's really fun too you know to see things like that this is 40 is probably the one that most people mention to me when people say hi 90 of the time they mention this is 40 and this is 40 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.

1:02:35One 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

1:03:132010 to 15 to now where you go what was the last movie that people quoted by the water cooler They do enough to realize the 77 Thing ad nausea, it was just part of the lexicon. What do you come to think about what's happened? There's this streaming stepping in, lack of 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? Do 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. Because people like to own them and watch them over and over again.

1:03:52So 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 so 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.

1:04:35And 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 five million dollars and it can travel to other countries where comedy doesn't always play well in bulgaria right as well 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.

1:05:20Being eaten up by the horror genre. Yeah. And then they're not 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 has 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, well, they used to not make pirate movies, because they thought no one wants a pirate movie.

1:06:00There was a big pirate bomb movie that Roman Polanski made with Walter Matthau, and you hadn't seen pirate movies in forever. And then Pirates of the Caribbean and it 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 saying, oh, full works.

1:07:01And, 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, 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 could 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.

1:07:51So 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 is a model that people have where you go off and you raise the money and you show what you want to do and then you sell it to the streamer and 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 john 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 that 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 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 this starting pistol on that uh 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 at the start of your career, it all knows.

1:10:18And 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 the vast majority of my movies universal since the 40-year-old virgin. and it's the same people and they are show you no respect well 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 think 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 than and that's that's truly the worst thing speaking different 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.

1:11:39It 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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1:13:35thank 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 bootstrapped creatively myself which resulted in me making a ton of errors uh 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 uh the guy that we've ended up going with this dude called ed from the uk who's 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 he's like i think it's shit i think it's a shit idea and i I think that it's hammy and tacky.

1:14:58And 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 his appeasement of me during the fucking job interview. 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.

1:15:37And 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 interesting. No, those people are so essential. Even 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 and create a space where it's a safe space people will say what what uh what they 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 uh didn't make sense to you and and so someone will always have an opinion like i didn't 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 it's it's it's my baby i was so sure that it was going to be good i want you to do 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 kitkats like while they're criticizing like taking notes, but like suffering.

1:17:36Yeah. 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 Shanling 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 encourage me. And so it made me think, oh, this is what you're supposed to do for other people.

1:18:18And 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 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's script 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.

1:18:54and 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, 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 so i don't need you to hold the camera and maybe the person that you're is doing it for you you need to do it for next week and that becomes mentor collaborator whatever it might be um this siloing uh has caused a mentor effect I see it in what I've done, you know, thousand episodes and people stepped in, but it was much more of a like contractor mentor.

1:19:56It was a one night stand, not a long term relationship. 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. the guy that is at the top of the tree is a really fucking benevolent person. Because it didn't need to be that way. 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.

1:20:42It 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 backbitey 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 like when you used to play, when I used to play the improv, you weren't allowed to play the comedy store.

1:21:25Like 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 to you. It wasn't like the whole world was embracing. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guest booking company that helps us, a bunch of the guys and girls that they've got there used to work at Fallon or at Kimmel or whatever. And yeah, you'd get one. You'd get one. It's like, who's going to get Chris Hemsworth or whatever on the next run?

1:22:01Gerard Butler's just finished this movie and oh no, they got it, whatever. about um yeah i that's a 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 stander 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.

1:22:41And, and just by watching them work, they were mentoring you just by seeing their decisions. 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, this, it is, it's the mailroom kind of slow, uh, exposure, uh, thing. And this is look 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 gonna 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 up 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 yeah and now it's not yeah and uh 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.

1:23:59And I don't know if it's going to make sense financially or 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 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 ask me to do anything, the work level would be so high. If Shandling 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 I cared so much.

1:24:38A lot of shots at goal. Yeah. And sometimes with Shandling, 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 fun for him to have too many jokes yeah yeah and uh yeah i was always a proponent of working for free just getting the first time i ever had i worked for comic relief in the united states which is uh you know it was a big live aid type event for the bear with the eye right we have one in the uk yeah so the the the one here is you know for the homeless and i called him 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.

1:25:19And 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 scrape that way. 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 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.

1:26:19And, uh, I told my agent and they're like, he's not gonna have a sitcom. Believe me, I know, I know the head of the network. He's not gonna have a sitcom. And then, uh, Tom kind of sitcom, you know? 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, 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 a series or not, they're not going to say, I'm sorry I screwed you up with my notes.

1:27:06Let's do it. So you should 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 give and take at the appearance of civility and listening because I would just be so frustrated. Because 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.

1:27:49They're from some crazy boss who you don't see very much. And then you're like, okay, so how many should I do to make that person happy? So they'll maybe will 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 You wouldn't understand.

1:28:54It's too sophisticated for you. Or like Larry David. You always hear about Larry David getting bad notes on Seinfeld. 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. He was always willing to walk away. I'd be happy not to do it. And I don't know if that's true or not, but 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 is 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.

1:29:29So 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 um 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 oh there's some there there is if i poke this thing is it you know i can wafer thin and there's nothing it's hollow um because maybe we 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 to hot if he was really that good he wouldn't need to be in all of the rooms he wouldn't need to be schmooze 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 the network or the streamer they're also making a choice of they didn't want to interact with you for years and and if you're not cool it 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 or whatever, but he's so good on the drums or he's so good as a singer or she's so fantastic on the bass, whatever it is.

1:32:08And you go, yeah, but the cost of morale is not worth the profit of bass playing. There's a comedy version of that, which is on television shows, say you have eight writers in the room And 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. Ah, mood hoover. Yeah. Because then you're like, I hate going to work because that guy's in the room. And that's a big thing about creating the chemistry of those creative spaces because it only takes one person to just disrupt the flow of everybody.

1:32:53Yeah. 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. Judd Apatow. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, where should people go?

1:33:41Keep up to date with everything that you've got that's going on at the moment. 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 stand-up shows that are usually pretty interesting i'm doing one tonight with a musician andrew bird and tom papa and kevin nealand and wayne fetterman and no it's stacked yeah we do you 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.

1:34:25And 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 and scrapbook form is, uh, it's out there. It's, it's been released. You have access to it. It's a good, uh, 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, but it feels expensive. It feels expensive. Wonderful weapon. If you have a home invader, yes, good for flattening down any pastries that need to be done.

1:34:59If you drop it, you could, you could shatter your foot. Okay. Well, I appreciate you, Jed. Thank you. Thank you. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, real life stories. And there's a description about why I like it. And there's links to go and buy it.

1:35:32And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.