Judd Apatow has spent much of his career trying to illuminate the deep emotional core of humankind through comedy. Now, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, he just wants to “make people happy.”
In a return appearance for the 150th episode of The Last Laugh podcast—taped before everything that went down at the Oscars—Apatow talks about why he decided to go for “hard jokes” in his new Netflix movie The Bubble. He also shares his unvarnished thoughts on his daughter Maude’s performance on Euphoria, the Pete Davidson-Kanye West feud, his upcoming George Carlin documentary, his comedian friends who “can’t handle” criticism, and more.
“Like most people, I was trying not to go insane from just the isolation of lockdown,” Apatow says when I ask about the origins of his latest film. He would go on long walks every morning and think about concepts for a movie he could direct during—and ultimately about—life during the pandemic. Originally, he considered trying to make a film about the NBA bubble, but when he started hearing about all the trouble happening on the sets of huge blockbusters like Mission: Impossible 7 and Jurassic World: Dominion, he had a new idea.
The director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up imagined The Bubble as something along the lines of a Christopher Guest ensemble piece or even a Mel Brooks farce, with a bit of his old friend Ben Stiller’s Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder thrown in. “I thought someone’s going to make a movie about this moment,” Apatow recalls, figuring it might as well be him.
Then, after assembling a cast that includes actual franchise stars like Karen Gillan and Pedro Pascal, comedy heavyweights like Keegan-Michael Key and Fred Armisen, his wife Leslie Mann, daughter Iris Apatow, and the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova in her first post-Borat film role, Apatow decided that The Bubble would be even funnier if the fictional movie within his movie felt as real as possible. That’s when Cliff Beasts 6 became a reality.
He started to laugh thinking, “What if every time we cut to them shooting the dinosaur movie Cliff Beasts, it looked exactly like Jurassic Park? We have perfect special effects. And then when things would go wrong, the special effects would disappear and you would just see them on this crappy stage. So as a result of that, I had to learn how to make a dinosaur movie.”
Apatow enlisted Industrial Light & Magic, the company that actually does the special effects for everything from Star Wars to Jurassic Park, to help him pull off “the dumbest dinosaur dick jokes” he could think of.
In the end, Apatow made his most purely silly movie to date—reversing a trajectory that has moved in a somewhat darker direction in recent years with films like Funny People, This Is 40, and, most recently, The King of Staten Island, on which he worked closely with star Pete Davidson.
“We all need to have a lot of compassion for each other,” Apatow says when the subject of Davidson’s ugly, public feud with Kanye West comes up, explaining that there are “a lot more levels to everything than people think” when they get caught up in the gossip.
“As a culture, it’s very easy to be amused by the struggles of celebrities,” he adds. “But if you take a minute and think about what’s really happening, it really isn’t entertainment. There are people involved, there are families involved, and you want everybody to be safe and you hope that they all look out for each other and take care of each other. So all that conflict just concerns me for all involved.”
Since our conversation, Apatow has issued a similar warning about the violence that occurred onstage at the Academy Awards, calling Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock a “terrible, embarrassing, and dangerous mistake” that he hopes will become a “teachable moment” for Americans moving forward. “I’d be very surprised if it didn’t, because, basically, if that becomes the way it is, then you know, what’ll happen to Ricky Gervais on the next Golden Globes?” he wondered.
As much as he enjoyed working on those aforementioned, more intense projects, Apatow says, “I do feel like maybe the world really wants a hard laugh right now. When I was making this movie, I found myself watching things like Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek and looking for funny things to make me happy and give me a break.
“It’s fun to try to go for hard jokes,” he continues. “Usually I’m trying to get to a deep, emotional place and I’m trying to find a way to be funny while on some level trying to do a Cassavetes movie or something. This time I thought, the world is really suffering and I don’t really have anything to offer except a break. And maybe we all need to commiserate and laugh about how hard this has been. And maybe I could figure out a way to do that that would make people happy.”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing—including stories about interviewing David Letterman for his new book ‘Sicker in the Head: More Conversations About Life and Comedy’, making his late-night stand-up debut with a ruthless Bill Cosby bit, and more—by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
I want to talk about your upcoming George Carlin documentary, which I’m very much looking forward to. I really loved your two-part Garry Shandling documentary. Are there things that you learned working on that one that you are now applying to this new one about Carlin?
I got asked to do this right before the pandemic started. And I got nervous about it because I didn’t know him. And I wondered if you could capture him without having known him.
Because you didn’t have the kind of personal relationship you had with Shandling?
Yeah, that definitely was my biggest concern. And I soon found out that it wasn’t like he had a ton of friends you could go to who would just tell you everything. But slowly the story revealed itself, mainly through his daughter Kelly Carlin. It really is a fantastic story about a young guy from a family that struggled. He found a way into show business and then he evolved into this very honest comedian. And then he kind of ran out of gas, and then he got inspired by people like [Sam] Kinison and he went harder than any of them for the last 15 years of his life. His body of work is ridiculous. And the thing that’s most interesting about it is most comedians’ work ages out. It’s just not that funny after a few decades; there’s very little comedy that holds up. And for some reason, his stuff gets better. Everything that he was talking about in the ’90s up to 2007 applies to today. He’s trending on Twitter all the time.
It does seem like he was very ahead of his time politically, and his old bits still go viral regularly. Do you have any insight into how he was able to do that or why he was so ahead of things?
I think he just spoke very difficult truths way back, starting in the late ’60s. He talked about Big Pharma back then, how it’s OK to buy all these drugs at the drugstore, but you couldn’t smoke pot. He had a really funny bit about diet pills, which were basically speed, but you can’t smoke a joint. He was very concerned with the corporate control of the government and how they basically want you stupid—smart enough to work, but not smart enough to ask difficult questions about how everything is run. And I think he called attention to things we know now when we look at the Koch brothers or Mark Zuckerberg. He’s basically talking about all of that but decades ago.
He was so progressive in a lot of ways. And it made me think if he was around today, would he be a bigger force against the “anti-woke” comedy that we’re seeing a lot of? Because it seems like some of the biggest names, some of the loudest voices, are not as progressive now and that there are not as many people pushing back on the other side, at least at that level.
Well, he certainly was a free speech absolutist. He always said that less speech is what’s more dangerous. But he wasn’t around for Facebook. He wasn’t around for algorithms and all of the ways that it trains people and hypnotizes people and turns people into a cult. So we don’t really know what his opinion would be about communication right now. His daughter Kelly said, “Whatever you think his opinion would be, you’re probably wrong. And what it would be would blow your mind.” Because back then he would always say, “Hey, if you don’t like something, change the channel.” But this idea of how the algorithms feed you news and information and want you depressed and want you angry and what it does to your mind and what it does to your belief system is something that he was never made aware of.
Do you feel like it’s had any impact on your stand-up and what you want to do on stage, watching so much of him and taking this deep dive into Carlin?
I think the most important thing I take from him is to just say what you believe. Colin Quinn says, “You can say whatever you want, you just have to mean it.” And I think that’s true. If you’re thoughtful and you have opinions, there is a way to say things in a creative way, in a funny way. I’m not a big fearmonger about, “You’re not allowed to say anything anymore!” I understand that environment. And I do see what’s going on. But I think in every generation there were limits and people found innovative ways to express what they wanted to express. The great comedians that I enjoy are not having any problems performing right now. And most of the people who are saying that it’s difficult are selling out arenas. So I’m not sure exactly what the big problem is at this moment. It seems like everyone’s doing well and their careers are very solid.
The big problem seems to be that people don’t like being criticized.
Well, certainly comedians are very thin-skinned. For people who sit onstage and call everybody out, if you call them out, they just fall apart or get enraged. And I never understood that part of stand-up comedy. If I make a movie, you’re allowed to say it sucks. But comedians, for some reason, can’t handle it if you say a joke isn’t good.
Or they feel that it somehow goes against free speech to criticize what they’re saying.
It’s OK to have part of the crowd mad at you. You’re not doing anything interesting if part of the crowd doesn’t get mad at you or not get it. I’m sure there are people who do a certain type of challenging comedy who feel like the environment has made it much more difficult to do that. And it certainly is annoying when you’re just trying to make people laugh and people in the crowd act offended and yell things out. But I don’t remember it ever being much better than it is right now. I feel like it’s always been that way. But as a fan of comedy, I really am enjoying what people are doing. I feel like there’s a pretty big mix on all sides of the political spectrum right now. There are riotously funny people and there are incredible podcasts and people are expressing themselves. So nothing seems to be going wrong, I don’t think.
Have you ever had the experience of feeling it from the other side, of being criticized for something that you felt you shouldn’t be criticized for?
I remember doing a bunch of Donald Trump jokes at a show I did in Boston and someone wrote an article about it and it was a very positive review. And then it got picked up by a bunch of right-wing sites, and then people were calling my office with death threats because of some probably generically harsh Donald Trump jokes. That certainly isn’t fun when it happens. And it always feels a little organized in some way. It doesn’t feel that organic when that happens. It makes you think twice about how you express yourself. But we all still have to do what we do. No one did show up to get me, so I guess that was a good sign.
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