Sit-Downs With Stand-Ups By DAVE SHIFLETT June 23, 2015 6:58 p.m. ET Writer, producer and director Judd Apatow is probably best known for movies like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up” and “Anchorman,” any one of which, given their unbuttoned sexual humor, would earn him a ticket to the chopping block from any respectable caliphate or two thumbs down from most mothers superior. Yet there is more to Mr. Apatow than his pop-culture triumphs indicate. His collection of interviews with comedy’s top tier—including Mel Brooks, Steve Allen, Albert Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon, Harold Ramis, Louis C.K. and Roseanne Barr—reveals an intelligent man with a searching soul. Born to a Jewish family (as were a large portion of his interviewees), Mr. Apatow was raised without religion, except for being constantly reminded by his parents that “life isn’t fair.” As he tells us in the introduction to “Sick in the Head,” this mantra “left a bit of a void in my life, and I looked to comedy—and the insights of comedians—to fill it.” He was a diligent and resourceful searcher from early on, using credentials from a high-school radio station to line up interviews with the likes of Steve Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, who were shocked to find that Mr. Apatow was a 15-year-old whose station had a broadcast power of 10 watts. Yet the youthful Mr. Apatow was thoughtful, and his subjects responded in kind. Steve Allen complained about the canned laughter on “Laugh-In” and talked about Lenny Bruce, noting that “he was the first guy—first comedian, I should say—to speak the language of musicians, which is now common. Even squares now say ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and ‘I dig.’ ” Back in 1983, Mr. Seinfeld told Mr. Apatow that his generation of comics didn’t “seem too daring as a group, if you compared us to say, the sixties or the fifties.” (What daring there is today is thwarted on college campuses by political correctness, Mr. Seinfeld noted in a recent podcast.) The interviews in “Sick in the Head,” which mainly took place between 2009 and 2015, allow lots of room for Mr. Apatow’s views and thus feel more like free-ranging conversations, full of quips, occasional nuggets of wisdom and anecdotes. Albert Brooks admits to writing jokes for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Eventually, he says, he was “so disenchanted with him” that he prayed for his defeat. He had a better time, he says, hanging out with rock star Keith Moon, despite his habit of tossing televisions out hotel windows, and with John Lennon, whom he calls “a frustrated comedian.” Among the stand-out interviews is the one with Mel Brooks, who Mr. Apatow says may be responsible for five of the top 10 comic movies ever made. Despite Mel Brooks’s standing as a comic deity, he comes across as a regular guy who is unimpressed by having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. When you get older, he explains, “you’re more interested in your cholesterol.” He says that “Blazing Saddles” (1974) probably couldn’t get made today, because of the rabid vigilantism of the language police. “The N-word couldn’t be used as frequently and spiritlessly,” he says, even though the movie lampooned racial prejudice. A few interviews are somewhat flat, including those with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Mr. Apatow: “Your mom sounds wonderful.” Mr. Colbert: “She was a lovely lady.”) Others underscore the link between anguish and mirth suggested in the book’s title, including the one with Roseanne Barr, who says that she has had “severe mental illness my whole life.” When asked what hell is she replies, “This planet.” More amusing is the discovery that comics who have made their names pushing the envelope can end up sounding as if they had been raised by nuns. Louis C.K., whose routines might make Blackbeard blush, sees the cellphone as possibly of satanic origin. “It’s a sickness,” he says of iPhone infatuation, and he promises that his daughter will be “the last one of her friends to get a smartphone.” He forces her friends to surrender theirs at his front door, as if they were submachine guns, and watches in horror as withdrawal symptoms set in. “They itch, they shake, they can’t listen to each other.” Chris Rock, meanwhile, has no time for stripper jokes. “I have two daughters. That joke is never silly.” Musician Eddie Vedder (included because Mr. Apatow likes his music) denounces the Disney Channel in tones reminiscent of a Focus on the Family press release: “I challenge you to find a single character, if not just even a single line in a half-hour show, that has anything of value and that isn’t said with an attitude other than, you know, being snarky.” Mr. Apatow rarely lets a conversation pass without bringing up religion, often discovering voids similar to his own. Albert Brooks, however, confesses that when his children resisted going to temple, he said: “Let me explain something to you: If Hitler came back, he’s not going to ask if you went to temple. You’re already on the train. So you might as well know who you are and why they’re going to take you.” Mr. Seinfeld, in a second interview two decades after the first, tells Mr. Apatow that he practices Transcendental Meditation and that he used to post pictures from the Hubble telescope in the “Seinfeld” writing room to provide cosmic perspective. “It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.” Mr. Apatow replies that such vastness makes him feel insignificant and depressed. Yet he also expresses the hope that he may one day find traditional religious consolation, though it will require, he says, bringing his intellect to heel. “I plan on tricking myself into believing in religion one of these days,” he tells Sarah Silverman. “I’m going to pick a religion and then hypnotize myself.” All things are surely possible for a man who played a central role in Ron Burgundy’s immaculate conception.
