By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up! (@AKessaris)
“Looking back, I was an angry kid who didn’t feel like the world made sense. My parents were not particularly spiritual people in those days, so they couldn’t help much in the existential angst department…This left a bit of a void in my life, and I looked to comedy – and the insights of comedians – to fill it.”
-Judd Apatow (from Sick in the Head)
What is funny? And what makes a person funny (in the “Ha-ha” way)? Why would someone pursue comedy as a career? These are all questions writer, producer, director, and stand-up Judd Apatow asked himself at a young age. He started conducting interviews with comics as a teenager with a high school radio show, broadcast from a 10-Watt station, and he continues to search for answers to this day. The result of his quest is now available in convenient book form as Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy.
Sick in the Head contains transcripts of Apatow’s exchanges with many of the greats of comedy (although a number of them are taken from podcasts, panel discussions, and media interviews conducted by others), with a brief introduction before each by the author. The subjects include both men and women, a few of whom, like Mike Nichols and Steve Allen, are no longer with us, and almost all are Americans (would it have been that difficult to talk to John Cleese or Rowan Atkinson?).
Apatow’s style, even as a young man, is quite unique; this is not shallow, late-night TV talk show rehearsed back-and-forth banter to set up some cheap gag, but serious dialogues about their lives, their craft, and how one inspires and influences the other. He is able to get his interviewees to open up and on more than one occasion they are so candid it is almost shocking.
At times, especially the segments that come from panel discussions, Apatow goes on a little too long (although to be fair many of those instances he is not the interviewer), and the text contains numerous redundancies. Why did every piece have to be verbatim? I believe a little trimming of the fat here and there would have led to a smoother, friendlier, more enjoyable read.
It reminded me of Live From New York by Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller, I Killed by Ritch Shydner & Mark Schiff, and Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, three other volumes I strongly recommend for comedy nerds. Sick in the Head is definitely in the same class and category; at least as interesting as any of them, delivering everything it promises.
It is also important to note that the Apatow’s proceeds from the book are going to literacy charities.
