Hurts to Laugh

The tears of a clown are among the least interesting tears shed on this earth. Why should other people care that a person who seeks to generate laughter might himself be a needy puppy who only wants love? What makes a funny person interesting is the fact that he is funny. His wounds are no different from anyone else’s. Besides, if all that were needed to produce a funny person was a terrible upbringing and the feeling of being unloved, Stalin would have been a laff riot.

Here is what the writer-director Judd Apatow reveals in his astringent and fine new picture, Funny People: People who are funny for a living are not, for the most part, nice. They are cruel. They are cold. Their subject is human weakness, and they know it better than anyone. They zero in on the weaknesses of others, toy with them, exploit them, and then use them for their own purposes.

Perhaps they too were once wounded, but that history does not prevent them from spending a lifetime inflicting wounds on their own. Worse still, it is a burden for a funny person to be saddled with a sense of responsibility and a belief in treating others as you would be treated. Without the killer instinct, the well-meaning funny person may be doomed to failure.

Apatow tells two stories in Funny People. The first concerns Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling comedian who works at a Los Angeles supermarket and tells uncomfortable jokes about himself rather than aiming his bile at others. The second is about George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a onetime stand-up who has become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars by making lousy high-concept comedies that closely resemble Sandler’s worst movies. Merman is a slam on Sandler’s Little Nicky; The Re-Do is Apatow’s parody of Sandler’s Click. The fact that Sandler agreed to make fun of himself in this way says something very pleasing about him. To describe this as his best performance is to understate; Sandler does things as an actor in Funny People that no one would have thought him capable of doing before this movie.

As the movie begins, George learns he is going to die from a rare blood disease. And we learn, very soon after, that he is an unpleasant, selfish, and thoughtless man. But funny. Very funny. He can barely speak a sentence that isn’t clever. But his humor comes almost entirely at the expense of Ira, who becomes his personal assistant after George decides to begin performing stand-up again to find an outlet for the terror and disappointment he feels at his own death sentence.

He calls his employee “Shmira,” a combination of Ira’s name and the word “schmuck.” He writes a song about how Ira’s last name is actually Wiener. He pounds and pounds on Ira, who is alternately abashed, humiliated, and amused by his boss. George is paying him more money than he has ever made in his life and whom he cannot tell off. Every time Ira thinks they are becoming friends, George reminds him instantly that his job is to fetch.

Ira is not funny the way George is. He’s too halting, too careful, too concerned with the feelings of others. George is disgusted with Ira’s comedy because of its self-deprecating manner; this is not a way to get women, the never-married George complains. Ira does a bit about how, when other men brag about having sex with women in the most vulgar terms, he talks about being friends.

“I friended that woman all night long,” he says. “I friended the s– out of her.”

Ira is a decent person, and after being the only person to share the secret of George’s condition, finally convinces his boss to tell his friends and family. George does so largely because it allows him to reestablish contact with Laura (Leslie Mann), his long-ago girlfriend who is now married with two kids and living near San Francisco.

“She’s the one that got away,” George says. “Two people have that–lovers and serial killers.”

Sobbing, Laura tells George that he is the love of her life and that her husband cheats on her just as George did when they were together. This gives George an opening to revisit his greatest mistake and attempt to rectify it. It is at this point that Funny People takes a surprising and risky turn that is part bedroom farce, part moral drama.

Seth Rogen, who has played major roles in the three movies Apatow has directed (this one, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) once said that “we make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue.” Funny People is the most right-wing of these films because it offers a devastating portrayal of a man who stands outside the borders of a conventional bourgeois life, and suffers mightily because of it. George’s pain is not interesting, but the circumstance of his condition is. Ira’s pain is interesting because he earns our interest. And the movie that contains them is the most interesting American film so far this year.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.