Judd takes a stand
Judd Apatow tells Josh Rottenberg he’s getting back to his stand-up roots.
On a recent morning, Judd Apatow sat in his office on the west side of Los Angeles, surrounded by a jumble of boxes stuffed with mementos from his life in comedy.
‘‘I’m a hoarder,’’ he said, glancing around at the clutter. ‘‘I just save all this weird stuff for no reason.’’ He opened a box and began sifting through its contents with a wry smile. His high school prom photo. A notebook he kept while producing the 1996 comedy The Cable Guy. ‘‘Every box is a little treasure box,’’ he said.
In his work as well, Apatow has lately been returning to his roots. Having firmly established himself as a powerhouse comedy producer, writer and director with films like Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Trainwreck and TV series like Girls and Love, he has circled back to the world of stand-up, where his career began three decades ago. Now, at 50, he has just released his first one-hour stand-up special, The Return.
He is aware of how unusual it is for someone in his position to willingly subject himself to the perils of stand-up after so many years away. ‘‘Stand-up is usually the thing you abandon as fast as you can,’’ he said with a laugh. In The Return, he nods to the inherent risks, joking, ‘‘People have asked me why I’ve been doing stand-up: It’s because I wanted to lower my salary and my self-esteem at the same time.’’
On a deeper level, though, for someone who was a comedy nerd before there was a name for that kind of thing, Apatow’s special represents the fulfilment of his original show business dream. Plus, it’s a chance to rewrite the ending of a chapter that didn’t turn out the way he planned.
Growing up on Long Island – an awkward, TV-obsessed kid whose parents divorced when he was 13 – Apatow fantasised about becoming a stand-up comedian.
‘‘My grandmother was best friends with [comic] Totie Fields, and I’d go see her when I was 10,’’ he said. ‘‘She had had her leg amputated because she had diabetes and came out on a golf cart and talked about not having a leg – and she was so funny about it. On some level, as an insecure kid, I made the connection that you can be very different and get people’s approval and affection through stand-up.’’
As a teenager, Apatow washed dishes in a comedy club and hosted a high school radio show as a way to interview comedic heroes like Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling and Steven Wright. Moving to LA to attend USC film school and pursue stand-up, he eventually landed a coveted spot on an HBO Young Comedians special in 1992 alongside rising comics Ray Romano and Janeane Garofalo.
But, for all his passion and ambition, Apatow found himself struggling to achieve career liftoff. ‘‘When I look back, I’m surprised I ever got on television
‘ People have asked me why I’ve been doing stand-up: It’s because I wanted to lower my salary and my selfesteem at the same time.’ JUDD APATOW
with how bad I was,’’ he said. ‘‘I had no life experience, so most of my material was about girls rejecting me and things I saw on the news. I’d watch Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey or David Spade and I always thought, ‘I’m not as good as these people. They are on another level’.’’
Pivoting into television as a writer and producer on the Fox sketch series The Ben Stiller Show and HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, Apatow fell away from stand-up. ‘‘I think I had burned out my interest in it,’’ he said.
While directing the 2009 dramedy Funny People, which starred Sandler as a comedian diagnosed with a terminal disease, Apatow performed standup a handful of times, mostly just to see how it felt.
Then, in 2014, while working with comic Amy Schumer on the romantic comedy Trainwreck, Apatow found himself feeling the old tug with renewed strength. He started to get up on stage at New York’s Comedy Cellar in the evenings.
‘‘I realised it put me in a great mood,’’ he said. ‘‘It fired up some neurons that had been asleep.’’
He quickly began writing new material, much of it focused on his parental anxieties as the father of two teenage daughters with his wife, actress Leslie Mann.
‘‘A lot of comedians have very strong opinions, but most of what I do in my act is admitting I have no idea if I’m doing a great job or ruining my children,’’ he said. He laughed. ‘‘I mean, I like them. But how do you know?’’ – Los Angeles Times ● Judd Apatow: The Return is now streaming on Netflix.