It's hard to think of a comedian who it hasn't happened to. Once pigeon-holed as a laugh-getter, the comic's desire to be taken seriously grows and grows. And for some strange reason, Judd Apatow's current project Funny People wants to have it both ways: the yuks and the tears. This "hilarious drama", as Apatow refers to it, has a high profile cast that includes former standups Sandler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Eric Bana, and while Vanity Fair is already on the movie's jock over a recent table-read, history tells us that Funny People will be more sad than hilarious.
Since the sad part is already in the script, Sandler and Rogen were practicing their in-character stand-up routines from Funny People (mostly about masturbation) at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater last month in anticipation of honing material for the film. But Funny People isn't just about a bunch of hilarious folks — it's about how much they learn.
From what an early draft of the script for Funny People revealed, we know that Adam Sandler's character thinks he's dying from a blood disorder, and hires Seth Rogen to be his friend/assistant. Sandler's journey brings him to the doorstep of his lost love, a depressed housewife played by Apatow's wife Leslie Mann, where he competes for her affection opposite husband Eric Bana.
You see, Apatow can't stop at being hilarious, he has to make everyone to know how deep he and his friends are:
It's a comedy, but it has more drama in it. A hilarious drama is what I'm going for. Every movie, I'm trying to find a way to go deeper, to tell stories about subjects that are important and make them less and less broad while making them equally as funny. [This film is] another step in that progression.
As he works on the film, Apatow is getting the full hagiography treatment from Vanity Fair, the kind of word-love they usually save for glamorous stars, or Twilight: "He is made for humor the way certain people are made for speed. It’s a humor perfectly tuned to the moment, which is fearful and diminished and small, so in terrible need of belly laughs." It's all part of Apatow's desire to be taken sooper-serious — unfortunately, there has never been a film about stand-up comics that's been anything but depressing at portraying the tears of a clown.
In his 1982 fameball epic The King of Comedy, Martin Scorcese cast a dramatic actor, Robert De Niro, as comedian Rupert Pupkin. Pupkin's sad quest to get known and stay known is the darkest of dark comedies, channeling the introverted, violent desperation of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (Pauline Kael famously called Pupkin "Jake LaMotta without fists") in a more extroverted form. If the film is funny, it's by accident — it's mostly scary and sad.
The Weitz brothers (American Pie) tried to make a sentimental fantasy about a stand-up comic wanting to play the Apollo in the Chris Rock vehicle Down to Earth, a roundly panned project that was a re-make of the more successful 1978 movie Heaven Can Wait, in which the comic was a football player instead. Down to Earth is a wistful post-death fantasy with no actual jokes to speak of. Even the 2002 documentary Comedian about Jerry Seinfeld and aspiring stand-up Orny Adams was so depressing as to be unwatchable.
These films have one thing in common — they're sad, and they're not funny. When people go to an Apatow film, they're first and foremost expecting to laugh.
Of course, Seinfeld was the all-time greatest story about the real life of a stand-up comedian, and Larry David and Co. portrayed his existence honestly: Jerry was an empty, womanizing wannabe that spent more time making inside jokes to his friends than working on his material. Seth Rogen, Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill as hapless comedian roommates do have some potential along those lines. Since we have no desire to start an Apatow backlash, we will reserve judgment and hope that by the time Funny People is finished, they have at least 40 of the best 50 masturbation jokes ever told in the final cut to make up for all the gooey stuff.
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