Apatow gets serious with ‘Funny People’

By JOHN ANDERSON

Imagine Mel Brooks directing Strindberg. Or Groucho, Chico and Harpo playing the Brothers Karamazov. Or Kevin Smith announcing an all-slacker version of “Gotterdammerung,” replete with spear-carrying convenience store clerks and bong-sucking Valkyries.

Horrible. Extreme. But, like good science fiction, not all that divorced from plausible reality. Because with the admirable exceptions of Brooks, Smith and the Marxes, it’s commonplace in American comedy that the people making you laugh would really like to make you cry.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon arrives in theaters Friday, as Judd Apatow, perhaps the most successful American director, producer and writer of film comedy today, embraces sobriety: “Funny People” stars Adam Sandler (who got serious already, in “Punch-Drunk Love”), as a stand-up comedian who thinks he’s going to die — not just on stage, but from an incurable disease. Sounds about as hilarious as Sarah Silverman playing Hedda Gabler.

Still, Apatow — who in his various creative capacities can be given the credit (or blame) for “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” “Superbad,” “Pineapple Express,” “Step Brothers,” “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” — is suddenly not kidding.

What gives? Apatow told The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren A.E. Schuker that he’s “run out of topics,” and maybe that’s true: He’s made movies about adolescence, virginity, romance, pregnancy, Caribbean vacations and NASCAR racing (as a producer of “Talladega Nights”). But it’s also true that Hollywood imposes on comedians and comedic filmmakers a pronouncedly second-class citizenship. For a town that believes in a lot of the wrong things for the wrong reasons — for instance, that “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a good movie, simply because it’s made nearly $400 million — it takes itself very seriously. And seriousness, it seems, is not about making people laugh.

It certainly doesn’t win you Oscars. The last bona fide comedy to be named best picture was “Annie Hall” in 1977. Not even Charles Chaplin ever won a competitive Oscar. Will Smith may be a huge star, but he knows perfectly well he’ll never get an Academy Award doing funny stuff (which is why he makes screamingly unfunny stuff like “Seven Pounds”).

So if you live in Hollywood and have an inferiority complex, you’re probably a riot at parties. But what you want is the validation. The statuettes. A theater named after you. Things that don’t seem to happen to funny people. Rodney Dangerfield used to complain about not getting any respect. He might have been talking about the entire brotherhood (and sisterhood) of humor.