The Day the Clown Cried 2

FUNNY PEOPLE

I don't want the post title to give the wrong impression. Funny People isn't "so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy . . . so wildly misplaced," as Harry Shearer described Jerry Lewis's never-released Holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried. It's actually quite a good movie, if not Apatow's best then certainly his most mature. (I mean "mature" in the artistic sense; don't worry, the dialogue is just as scatalogical as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.) However, the Apatovian balance between humor and drama is tilted markedly toward drama in Funny People. Whether that makes it a better movie or a worse one will probably be much debated among Apatow fans. In my opinion, it merely makes it a different animal from what we've seen from Apatow before, and so should be judged on its own terms, not on The 40-Year-Old Virgin's or Knocked Up's. And according to those terms, it's a very touching, heart-felt film, but one that also happens to be really funny when it wants to be.

Ira (Seth Rogan) is a struggling LA stand-up comedian (so struggling that his actual income comes from a job at a supermarket deli), living with two other comedians (Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill) whose careers seem to be going somewhere, unlike Ira's. This begins to change when he meets movie-star comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler, in many respects playing a thinly veiled version of himself), who hires him to write stand-up material for him, act as his personal assistant, and generally do whatever the spoiled celebrity wants him to do (including sitting beside his bed and talking to him to help him to fall asleep). Ira soon discovers that his comic idol isn't just past his prime creatively (George's filmography (examples) is eerily similar to Sandler's in its dubious quality) and suffering from a serious case of middle-aged-celebrity ennui, but also dying from a rare blood disease. However, the just-might-work treatment his doctors have him on ends up working—they explicitly show this in the trailers, so there's no way that's a spoiler—and George uses his new lease on life to reconnect with Laura (Leslie Mann), the love of his life who left him and is now married to an often absent, questionably faithful husband (Eric Bana). Ira, however, comes to feel torn between his loyalty to his idol/employer/friend and his moral qualms about breaking up a family for self-centered, undependable George's sake.

As I said above, while all of Apatow's movies mix comedy and drama, Funny People leans much more heavily toward the dramatic side; not only that, but for much of the movie the drama is fairly dark, dealing with George's illness and what he expects to be his last months of life. That doesn't make Funny People a black comedy, because it doesn't derive its humor from its dark subject matter; rather, the stand-up-comedian humor and the approaching-death drama simply exist side by side. This could have made the movie schizophrenic, with disastrously wide shifts of tone between funny and sad, but Apatow wisely gives primacy of place to the drama and allows the humor to supplement it naturally and organically. There aren't really comedy set-ups, like the speed-dating or drive-home-with-Leslie-Mann scenes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, just funny dialogue and interactions (in addition to the actual stand-up, of course). Lest this be read as not giving the movie's humor its due, let me emphasize that the humor is really, really good; everybody's funny, from Rogan, Sandler, and Hill to more surprising comedic quarters like Bana (I knew he started out in comedy back in Australia, but I've never seen that material; I may have to rectify that now).

Though the movie's drama ostensibly comes from George's illness and how he and those around him deal with it, much of its poignancy actually comes from its depiction of professional comedy, in which Sandler, Rogen, Mann, and Apatow himself have all participated. Sandler and Apatow lived together in the late '80s while both were struggling stand-ups—the movie opens with a video of their actual prank-calling hijinks together—before Sandler landed SNL and Apatow devoted himself to behind-the-camera work. They, and others they knew and worked with, spent years working on their material and honing their delivery, struggling to make ends meet (by, for instance, living with other comedians, like Ira and his roommates), dreaming of making it one day. While Ira lives at one end of the stand-up way of life, George lives at the other; a decade or more after hitting the big time, he has little to look back on except a series of high-concept movies he's half-embarrassed by, a big empty house, no real friendships (despite all the fellow-celebrities he socializes with; this is one cameo-heavy movie), and memories of how alive he felt climbing up to where he is now. When I called this movie Apatow's most mature movie, I meant it both in its mechanics—its confidence in not needing to bombard the audience with humor and giving center stage to the dramatic aspects—and in its subject matter—nostalgia, regret, appreciation for the little things in life. It should surprise no one who watches this that it was made by a man entering his 40s.

I don't know how fans of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, or of the myriad other projects with which Apatow has been involved to one degree or another, will react to Funny People. The humor's still there, and it's very good, but it's there to augment a dramatic story, instead of the drama being there to tie the comedic elements together. And the drama succeeds just as the humor does, in large part due to how deeply personal it comes across, for both Apatow and Sandler. (Maybe I'm just projecting my views of most of Sandler's movies, but I can't help but see scenes like George watching videos of his old '80s stand-up autobiographically as Sandler saying, "I used to be good, I used to experiment and really put myself out there. When did I get content with collecting paychecks?") Those looking for a duplicate of Apatow's prior movies might be disappointed, but those looking for a heart-felt, poignant, bittersweet film that also happens to be funny as all get out should be well-pleased.

P.S. — One respect in which Funny People stands out is the amount, and quality, of pre-release viral marketing they produced. In addition to the George Simmons movies linked above, there's a website dedicated to Ira's more successful roommate, said roommate's crappy sitcom, and the stand-up of one of Ira's particularly untalented (and so, of course, very popular) fellow-comedians, played by the great Aziz Ansari. Enjoy.