CULTURE

Evan Goldberg on perfecting the dick joke with his new comedy series.

Netflix’s new action-comedy Game Over, Man! — starring Workaholics trio Adam Devine, Anders Holm, and Blake Anderson, and co-produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg — contains just about all the phallic humour you’d expect. And while Rogen and Goldberg have recently received flak for continuing to employ frat-boy comedy in the #Metoo era, the Superbad duo says their production company, Point Grey Pictures, takes great measures — such as employing more women than men — to make sure their jokes don’t cross the line.

“The basic concept of comedy is that it’s insulting and dark in some ways,” says Goldberg. “So, it’s not shocking to me that amid this movement that’s important and necessary, people are oversensitive to it. Because comedy is inherently straddling the line. When you’re in a writing room, you’re always saying, ‘Did this go too far?’ And you have to make sure the people working to answer that question all have very different opinions and backgrounds, because eight old white dudes may not be the best judges of that.”

Do he and Seth feel weird still writing jokes about penises and weed in their mid-thirties? “No!” he says. “It’s harder, but we’re better at it. We keep our game sharp.” — ANG