Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (29 page)

Key:
Yeah. You’ve got to just do the show first. I mean, that’s the way it’s always worked.

Judd:
So now that the sketch show is ending, do you guys have a vision for the next phase of your career?

Key:
Yeah, I mean, in my mind—and I think I have probably said this to Jordan in some form or another—it’s almost like, boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could be the next Pryor/Wilder? You know, go off and do maybe three projects that fulfill us, and then come home and see each other? I think we have the ability to do that.

Peele:
We’re never going to have another version of this.

Key:
We’ll never have another version of this.

Judd:
You really have very few people in life you get along with, especially in a creative situation. Some people are great together but then they just can’t stand each other because every time an idea is accepted or rejected, there’s so much on the line emotionally or self-esteem-wise. When you find people who make it work, it’s that much more important.

Peele:
Absolutely. Before I met Keegan, I could spend a week with my best friend in the world before getting sick of him. But because we’ve got something more important than us that we’re working for, it has put us in this category where we could spend years with each other and always have this positive working relationship where we’re trying to make each other laugh. It’s a special thing.

Key:
The love—our love—is wrapped up in the work. There’s this goal that we’re always trying to achieve together. We know we can’t achieve it alone. It works because of a mutual respect for each other.

Judd:
It doesn’t seem like it takes you two a lot of effort.

Key:
No, it doesn’t, and I think that’s because, as different as we are energy-wise, we’re very similar in a lot of other ways. Our backgrounds are similar. We’re nonconfrontational guys. You know, I don’t believe in the idea that conflict must exist for creativity to flourish. That’s such a false thing. For us, it always goes back to the respect thing. It’s just releasing the ego. I just hold his hand and we jump off the cliff. He’s got me. If he says, “This bit is going to work,” it’s gonna work.

Judd:
That’s just so rare. In the world of comedy, so many people are so damaged that even though they say, “I got you, no matter what,” a fair amount of time they’re really like, “Well, fuck you, I’m doing it this way.” So for two people who are healthy to say to each other, “I got you”—and to believe it—is a beautiful thing.

Peele:
The best moments I’ve ever seen in improv are funnier than the best stand-up bits that I’ve ever seen. There’s something that can only happen between two people collaborating, and I just think that two people with the same vision is better than one.

In 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked me if I was interested in putting a panel talk together. I said yes, but only if I could invite James Brooks and Larry Gelbart, and spend an hour talking about comedy. I knew I had no business being on the same stage as these guys; nobody does. I was simply thrilled to have the opportunity to sit there and talk to them, and I knew at some point that a photograph would be taken of the three of us onstage, which I would cherish for the rest of my life. So yes: I did it for the picture.

Why did I pick James Brooks and Larry Gelbart? Because two of the most formative shows of my life, the shows that trained me in comedy—not to mention how to be a human being—were
M*A*S*H
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
The work these men did was emotional and hilarious and, I felt, spoke to the best part of human beings. I mean,
M*A*S*H
was the highest-rated program in the history of television: More than 100 million people watched the finale. James Brooks has won nineteen Emmys, for shows like
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant
, and
The Simpsons.
And I’d like to point out that
Freaks and Geeks
lasted eighteen episodes.

Everything flows from these guys.

Judd Apatow:
There’s an enormous amount of pressure here right now. This is a pressure cooker.

Larry Gelbart:
For the record, dying is harder.

Judd:
Oh, yeah.

James L. (Jim) Brooks:
This means I have to go.

Judd:
Anyway, it’s exciting to be here. It is an honor to share the stage with the two men who are the primary reasons I wanted to be involved in comedy, and I also feel bad about your being here, which clearly demeans you. I was looking at everyone’s credits on Wikipedia last night, and it was embarrassing. I felt bad. I read them and thought,
I should not be here.

Jim:
You’ve done more pictures than I’ve done this year.

Judd:
Oh, Jesus. Anyway, when I was a young man and, you know—
M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi
, these were what made me want to do this. So this is very exciting for me—not so much for you, but for me. We are going to show a few clips tonight. We’re going to start off—each of us has picked a clip from a film that influenced us in some way. The first clip is mine, from
Punch-Drunk Love.
It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and Adam Sandler is one of the stars. This is a scene where you see him with his family and all of his sisters, who don’t treat him very well. I was working on
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
simultaneously, but this struck me as the much better way to do it, so I wanted to show that.

(Clip from
Punch-Drunk Love:
Barry is uncomfortable at a dinner party with all of his sisters.)

Judd:
I really like that movie. It’s a great, strange movie with a tone that’s all its own. Whenever I’m working, I get nervous when there aren’t laughs—I’m always trying to figure out what that balance is: How do you deal with the question of how funny should it be, and is there a moment when things become too funny and you lose the humanity?

Jim:
It’s a great clip and it’s a great question.

Larry:
And here’s a great answer: You are your own gauge for what is funny and what is not.
You
have to decide. If it gets to you, it’s good enough to be put in the script. Too funny? It’s too funny if it’s not character-driven or situation-driven. If it’s just funny for funny then it’s not worth keeping.

Jim:
Great answer.

Larry:
Thank you.

Judd:
(
To Jim
) Well, the next clip is your clip.

Jim:
Can we just show it, and then talk about it afterwards?

Judd:
Okay. I hope it’s one of my movies.

(Clip from
There’s Something About Mary:
Mary mistakes Ted’s semen for hair gel.)

Judd:
You just went blue. You went blue.

Jim:
I think the unfortunate expression is “seminal joke in motion picture history.” I think it changed movies a little. And I think the film itself had about as many tens in it as anything I’ve ever seen—just huge, huge jokes. But everything sort of pivoted off of this one joke.

Judd:
And the masturbation sound effect was good work. Good sound work there. I think it might have been Ben Stiller but someone was telling me about having to do a scene where they masturbated on the screen and they said that what’s embarrassing about it is that in a way you’re revealing to your crew how you masturbate.
Ah, so
that’s
how Ben Stiller does it….

Jim:
There was a very forlorn masturbation scene in
Punch-Drunk Love.

Judd:
That’s right, the phone sex sequence. You know, when we were working on
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
there was a masturbation question, which was: Does the forty-year-old virgin masturbate? And of course, it’s a very important issue because you’re trying to decide how sexualized he is. So I brought in a team of the great comedy writers to help me with this question and Garry Shandling cracked the code on it. Garry’s pitch was, you don’t see him masturbate. You just see him
prepare
to masturbate. You see him put on his pajamas and brush his hair. And I thank Garry for that. Okay, now, Larry, do you want to say what your clip is?

Larry:
To Be or Not to Be.
The original version. I used to think that anybody who wanted to write screen comedy should see this picture once a year. It’s just a marvel of construction, casting, and wit on an impossible subject, the Nazis. Let’s show it.

(Clip from
To Be or Not to Be:
Ehrhardt stalls Professor Siletsky while running to manage his acting troupe in the next room.)

Jim:
Larry, Jack Benny was singular, don’t you think?

Larry:
I think it’s his only successful film. He was in a string of terrible movies, but this worked for him.

Jim:
But his energy just—

Larry:
Amazing. It was amazing. The story of this film was that Carole Lombard, who co-starred with him, was touring the country selling war bonds and she died in a plane crash and so they did not promote the picture. They thought it would be in bad taste to have her laughing on screens all over the country when, in fact, she had died. Mel Brooks redid it, of course, with his wife, Anne Bancroft, a number of years later.

Judd:
Larry, how did you become a good writer? Where did that transition happen?

Larry:
I learned the difference between good and bad and I opted for good.

Judd:
That will help all aspiring writers. But was there a moment, as you transitioned from writing jokes for comedians and sketch comedy to storytelling, that was seminal for you?

Larry:
The stage play A
Funny Thing Happened
was the transitional period—I had to write something that was more than twelve minutes long, like a Sid Caesar sketch, and they didn’t pull up the scenery every night afterwards. It was an education in construction, and the teacher, of course, was a Roman playwright named Titus Maximus Plautus, who did his best work in 253
B
.
C
. It’s wonderful working with dead authors because their lawyers are dead, too—and their agents. But that was the transition for me.

Judd:
(
To Jim
) And what about for you?

Jim:
Well, I had television, and there’s nothing better than to do a show every week. That was my college: I learned from the actors on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
You know, I had been writing for just a relatively short time and Allan Burns and I were able to do what we wanted and we had a great boss. We were too dumb to know how rare it was.

Judd:
There’s so much depth in the work, though. Was there someone that taught you about that early in your career?

Jim:
I don’t know how that happened. I remember there was a writer named Leon Tokatyan, who was on the
Lou Grant
series, and he used to love writing these long speeches. He made me just want, in every script, a place where I could pull off somebody talking for a page, a page and a half. If I could make
that
work, if I could make people sit for that, it became a big deal for me. He was a direct influence on me, I think.

Larry:
The worst thing we had to accustom ourselves to was self-censorship—not the censorship that we all know about, but
anticipating
the censorship so that you knew certain areas were strictly out of bounds and that’s, you know, the death in a sense of some part of your creativity. Knowing you can’t say something or do something.

Judd:
And now look what’s happened.

Larry:
There’s Something About Mary.

Judd:
Which obviously was a big influence on me because it’s a sweet story but it also has some very broad set pieces. That’s always fun to do—

Larry:
You have an ability to mix the crude with the sweet, which is amazing. People talk about laughing one minute and crying the next, but to be repulsed one minute and then enchanted the next? That’s a gift.

Judd:
I remember watching episodes of
Taxi
where there would be big, broad comedy and then it would land on something very emotional or sweet and seem to go back and forth with ease. I always think of the episode where Judd Hirsch was addicted to gambling.

Jim:
It’s so weird. We were just talking about that today, and I got so messed up, being so heavily nostalgic about it because I—that was the best job of my life. There was nothing better for me than
Taxi.

Judd:
In that scene, Judd Hirsch wants money so badly that he steals it out of Reverend Jim’s pocket and then slowly you realize that Reverend Jim knows that he did it and shames him. It’s a really powerful moment. Those kinds of turns were very influential to me, in what I try to do. Okay, now we’re going to show some clips from our own movies. Do we want to see that?

Larry:
Sure. I’m tired of watching them at home.

Judd:
I guess, you know, the first one is mine—

Larry:
That’s amazing.

Judd:
Well, then it can be topped by yours. You see, if I’m last then I don’t look good.

Larry:
Of course. We’ll do it according to our gifts.

Judd:
Exactly. So this is a clip from
The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
It’s a fight scene between Catherine Keener and Steve Carell, where she realizes that they’ve had twenty dates and it’s time for them to have sex for the first time, and he’s trying to get out of it. There’s some improvisation in here, which is why it seems real—they really went at it for a while.

(Clip from
The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
It is Trish and Andy’s twentieth date.)

Larry:
Good stuff.

Jim:
Were you nervous about that scene? Was it always looming for you?

Judd:
Well, when we hired Catherine Keener we were all a little scared of her. It was amusing that she was there, every day, and going really hard-core Method with our movie. We tried hard to make her scenes good, mostly because I thought that she would yell at us if they weren’t. For this scene, I wasn’t sure how funny it would be. There was a script but then we let them go to town on each other, and then they ended up with this weird Einstein run. A moment like this only works because you’re really getting a sense of how Catherine Keener fights in real life.

Larry:
She must have had a great time, right?

Judd:
She seemed to enjoy that day. I have to say, she fought well. When that scene worked, it surprised me that it could get dark and the laughs could continue. I was really excited by that because it worked in a different way. Okay, now we’re going to go to the next clip, which is from Mr. Brooks. Can I say where it’s from? Do you want to introduce it?

Jim:
Which one is it?

Judd:
Broadcast News.

Jim:
Oh, yeah. The reason I picked this is because I think of anything that I’ve ever done—you know, what I got a chance to say in this scene, and it’s always a little dangerous to delve into that territory, was and is enormously important to me. So that’s why I wanted to show it.

Judd:
I know it well and I’m excited.

(Clip from
Broadcast News:
Aaron tells Jane how awful his time on the desk was, and that he’s in love with her.)

Judd:
That was amazing. A perfect scene, and a perfect movie. It really is, as is
Tootsie.
They are two movies that just function perfectly in every possible way. What was it like working with Holly Hunter? What was that process like with her?

Jim:
It was great. First of all, she and Albert both did four years in acting school, totally trained actors. They both went to Carnegie Mellon. Which is interesting because not a lot of people assume it about Holly, and not everybody knows it about Albert. She’s a very dedicated actress. Well into the shoot, I finally said to her, “Am I allowed to talk to you about making something funny?” And she really thought about the question. She took it seriously and then she said, “Yes, you can.”

Judd:
What is the gestation period like for one of your screenplays?

Jim:
Seasons pass, years fall away. I take a long time.

Judd:
And what about you, Larry?

Larry:
First comes the phone call—you know, I’m the odd man out here because you guys get to direct what you write. I get to defend what I write—and not always successfully. I’ve had every kind of experience, from terrible to rotten, and no two are alike.