A Long, Hard Look at What's 'Funny'

by Brett Parker

There’s a wonderful sequence halfway through Judd Apatow’s Funny People that is very telling about the film itself. A famous comedian named George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is doing a stand-up act for an audience at an improv club. George begins singing a goofy song about being a famous clown saying goodnight to his audience. The lyrics are laced with a dry cynicism yet are basked in a playful silliness the audience relishes. The performance plays over a montage of clips showing George in his real life, which appears to be endless moments of despair, misery, loneliness, anger, and regret. We realize that the pain that consumes George in his everyday life has snuck into this shrewd comic number and we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It’s become a well-known reflection that the funniest comedians find their material through their deepest misery. The pain and inadequacies that haunt their daily lives can easily translate into the best ammunition for their stand-up routines. As Angela Carter once observed, “comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” I don’t think any fictional film has ever captured this ideal as wonderfully as Funny People, a film that knows quite a lot about both comedy and tragedy. Not only is this film a revealing look at the inner-workings of the comedy trade, but also a stunningly poignant portrait of a selfish mope who reveals clueless morals in the face of death and possible redemption.

We first meet George Simmons on his way to a doctor’s office, approached by countless fans with cameras on the way in. George started out as a stand-up comedian who rose to great fame by doing commercial comedies that raked in millions of dollars and fans worldwide. George has spent his life sleep-walking through money, women, comedy albums, cinematic trash, and loathing until that fateful trip to the doctor’s office puts a brick wall straight in his path. He is diagnosed with a form of Leukemia that is very fatal and can only be treated with experimental medicine from another country. He is told he only has a short time to live. While most people would seek comfort in their family and friends, George begins to realize that his fame and narcissism has isolated him from most people and he in fact has no one of any great significance left in his world (“I’m glad you don’t know me,” he tells his estranged sister).

Needing something to do in the face of mortality, George decides to put himself back into the stand-up circuit. He pops up for a surprise set at a famed stand-up club but that proves to be a lackluster stunt, displaying George’s comic rust (“I think I can hear the highway from here,” he observes bravely from the crowd’s silence). While at the club, George encounters Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling comedian still trying to find confidence with the microphone. George is rather off-put by Ira’s bumbling oafishness, yet out of an exhausted need he recruits Ira to be his personal assistant and writer. Pretty soon, Ira is tagging along as George’s sidekick in the world of comic fame, flying around on private jets, hanging out in a mansion, and discovering that his famous employer has an approaching date with death. I will not reveal what happens next, just to say that certain events lead George to try and reclaim a former lover (Leslie Mann) from her Australian husband (Eric Bana) while Ira gets seriously fed up with George’s selfish behavior.

I don’t think any other film has ever looked as deeply into the world of comedians as Funny People does. The funny men here aren’t portrayed as goofballs trying to yuck each other up, but rather business people working at a trade and trying to perfect it. We see stand-ups sharing written material with each other back stage, a superstar comedian who sells out to family comedies like Merman and My Best Friend is a Robot, a peek into the making of a generic, single-camera sitcom, and the rapid growth of ego that occurs once a comedian places a career victory under their belt. The comedians we see in the film are friends and respectful of each other, yet the comic world has become a trade of such tight competition that their relationships and motives take on a sort of intelligible fragility. Jonah Hill, for example, plays one of Ira’s friends, but isn’t the usual bromantic comic relief; he is extremely knowing about his craft and plugs away tenaciously to climb the ladder of the business. There’s a nice scene where he flips out on Ira for robbing him of a writing opportunity. We expected to see a movie with extremely hilarious characters, but to see these characters show us how hilarity works and how it is carefully constructed for the public is enormously appealing and refreshes us from the normal bromantic comedy conventions.

Funny People is the third film from Judd Apatow, after The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and it shows him elevating away from being just an exceptional comic director towards a surprising artist of humanism. We feel like he’s trying to become Cameron Crowe with this being his Jerry Maguire (the presence here of that film’s cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, only strengthens that idea). Crowe’s film also examined a successful career man who is walloped with a life-altering blow that forces him to reevaluate what is of true value in life. While Jerry Maguire learned valuable lessons about love and family, George Simmons really never transcends his jaded narcissism. He’s a selfish and temperamental jerk before his death sentence and he shows very little signs of change after he lives through it. It’s rather jarring to see George succumb to his old habits so easily. George’s personality allows us to reflect on the human cost of the alienation that haunts comic celebrity.

George’s unusual journey is elevated by the surprisingly vivid and complex performance from Adam Sandler, giving his best work since Punch-Drunk Love. While aspects of George’s life are obviously biographical (it’s fun matching up George’s filmography to the real life counterparts of Sandler’s own films), it seems that Sandler is showing us a dark vision of how he could’ve turned out in life if he had been exceedingly arrogant and obtuse. The performance unexpectedly shakes you. Seth Rogen displays his usual schlubby charms but it’s refreshing to see it portrayed more realistically here and not as some kind of strange, new-age romanticism as Knocked Up did. Plus I’m reminded that Eric Bana is usually at his most colorful and inventive when he uses his own Australian accent.

Judd Apatow’s real life wife and daughters, Leslie Mann and Maude & Iris Apatow, show up as the woman and family George wishes to claim for himself. Despite the obvious nepotism, it must be said that these ladies are very touching and genuine. We wouldn’t want anyone else in these roles. The film’s only major problem, however, is that it lingers too heavily on their subplot. The film clocks in at roughly two and a half hours, a trying length for any comedy. Most of the film feels like a breeze until it hits this section and becomes rather taxing. Most of these scenes could’ve been cut from the film and we’d still get the point trying to be made. Perhaps because he was filming his own family, which he obviously loves dearly, Apatow couldn’t resist taking away their screen time.

Despite the obvious pacing problems, Funny People is perhaps Apatow’s best film thus far. It reaches for further human heights than The 40-Year-Old Virgin and it blows Knocked Up’s clunky romantics right out of the water. We feel Apatow growing with his camera, yearning for more visual beauty and emotional revelations. If Apatow continues to labor beyond even this career high, then he will truly have some special cinematic surprises for us on the horizon. Hopefully they’ll be just as hilarious as everything else he does.