Verwandte Artikel zu Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy - Softcover

Apatow, Judd

 
9780812987287: Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812987284 ISBN 13: 9780812987287
Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE A.V. CLUB • Includes new interviews!

From the writer and director of Knocked Up and the producer of Freaks and Geeks comes a collection of intimate, hilarious conversations with the biggest names in comedy from the past thirty years—including Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman, Harold Ramis, Seth Rogen, Chris Rock, and Lena Dunham.

Before becoming one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood, Judd Apatow was the original comedy nerd. At fifteen, he took a job washing dishes in a local comedy club—just so he could watch endless stand-up for free. At sixteen, he was hosting a show for his local high school radio station in Syosset, Long Island—a show that consisted of Q&As with his comedy heroes, from Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld. They talked about their careers, the science of a good joke, and their dreams of future glory (turns out, Shandling was interested in having his own TV show one day and Steve Allen had already invented everything).

Thirty years later, Apatow is still that same comedy nerd—and he’s still interviewing funny people about why they do what they do.

Sick in the Head gathers Apatow’s most memorable and revealing conversations into one hilarious, wide-ranging, and incredibly candid collection that spans not only his career but his entire adult life. Here are the comedy legends who inspired and shaped him, from Mel Brooks to Steve Martin. Here are the contemporaries he grew up with in Hollywood, from Spike Jonze to Sarah Silverman. And here, finally, are the brightest stars in comedy today, many of whom Apatow has been fortunate to work with, from Seth Rogen to Amy Schumer. And along the way, something kind of magical happens: What started as a lifetime’s worth of conversations about comedy becomes something else entirely. It becomes an exploration of creativity, ambition, neediness, generosity, spirituality, and the joy that comes from making people laugh.

Loaded with the kind of back-of-the-club stories that comics tell one another when no one else is watching, this fascinating, personal (and borderline-obsessive) book is Judd Apatow’s gift to comedy nerds everywhere.

Praise for Sick in the Head

“I can’t stop reading it. . . . I don’t want this book to end.”—Jimmy Fallon

“An essential for any comedy geek.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Fascinating . . . a collection of interviews with many of the great figures of comedy in the latter half of the twentieth century.”—The Washington Post

“Open this book anywhere, and you’re bound to find some interesting nugget from someone who has had you in stitches many, many times.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“An amazing read, full of insights and connections both creative and interpersonal.”—The New Yorker

“Fascinating and revelatory.”—Chicago Tribune

“Anyone even remotely interested in comedy or humanity should own this book.”—Will Ferrell

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judd Apatow is one of the most important comic minds of his generation. He wrote and directed the films The 40-Year-Old Virgin (co-written with Steve Carell), Knocked Up, Funny People, and This Is 40, and his producing credits include Superbad, Bridesmaids, and Anchorman. Apatow is the executive producer of HBO’s Girls. He was also the executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, created Undeclared, and co-created the Emmy Award–winning television program The Ben Stiller Show. His latest film is Trainwreck. He was also the editor of the collection I Found This Funny. Judd Apatow lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters, Maude and Iris.

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David Sedaris
(2016)

David Sedaris is a writer. For the past twenty years, he has been publishing hilarious, poignant collections of personal essays—Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim—and doing epic radio pieces for This American Life that are ideal versions of the form. His material is his life—his family, his walks around the neighborhood, his French lessons—and the most amazing thing about him is that he never fails to make it fresh or meaningful. I can think of very few -writers—in comedy or elsewhere—with better timing or sense of the absurd. When he’s not writing or doing pieces for public radio, David is on tour—massive forty-city tours, thousand--seat venues—and his act consists of walking out onstage, standing at a podium . . . and reading for ninety minutes. He absolutely kills. I’ve never seen anybody do this before.

David doesn’t consider himself a stand-up comedian, because he stands at a podium and reads off of a piece of paper. I didn’t want to say this to him during our interview, but he is a stand--up comedian. That doesn’t mean his essays aren’t brilliant and insightful, and it doesn’t mean he’s not one of my favorite writers. But you take that podium away and force him to memorize his material, and he’s one of the great comedians of our time, or any time.

Judd Apatow: How do you define what you do? Do you think of yourself as a performer or a writer?
David Sedaris: I would never call myself a comedian. I don’t think I’ve ever done stand--up. If I had to try, I really don’t even know what I would do. If you said to me, “You have one month to come up with ten minutes of material,” I honestly don’t think I would be able to do that. I read out loud and I enjoy that. And when I go on tour, there’s usually a question-and-answer session at the end of the reading and I don’t have any papers in front of me, I’m just answering questions. Sometimes at the end of the evening, I’ll think, Oh God, that didn’t go well at all. Those were really bad questions. Then I realize: It’s not the questions, it’s me.

Judd: Yeah.

David: If you’re in the right mood, you can do anything with any question—even if you’ve been asked that question a thousand times. If you’re in the right mood, and you’re feeling comfortable in front of the audience and not too self-conscious, then you go anywhere you want. But I don’t know much about comedy. Every now and then I’ll look at it on YouTube, but I don’t go to comedy clubs. I don’t have anything against laughter or anything. I just think everything I know about comedy I learned from listening to Marc Maron’s podcast.

Judd: When you’re reading in front of an audience, are you reading things that haven’t been published yet? Is this a way to work on them?

David: Yes.

Judd: Your goal, I would assume, is: How funny can I make this? It seems like, in some ways, the process of writing and stand-up is the same, except what you do are more specifically stories. But that’s what most comedians are doing every night, just going onstage and trying to figure out how to make it tighter and funnier.

David: I’m about to start a week’s worth of shows at the Cadogan Hall in London. It’s maybe eight hundred seats. I have eight shows. So I have these stories I’m working on, and I’ll go in and I’ll read them and then I’ll go back at night and I’ll rewrite them. And then the next day—usually, when I’m on tour, I’m taking two planes and then I’m in a car for a couple of hours, and this way, I have all day to work before I go to the next theater in the evening. And that’s what I want. I mean, I made myself laugh today while I was sitting at my desk, and that doesn’t happen too often. I always think that if you make yourself laugh, then it might make the audience laugh. But I’d say, nine times out of ten? No, it’s 
just me.

Judd: Does that hurt?

David: It makes me laugh.

Judd: But do you enjoy getting a laugh?

David: It means everything to me. When I’ve gone to other people’s readings and—I’ll go see a poet or I’ll go to a bookstore because a friend’s novel is out. And I hear them get up there and read something serious, and I think, Oh, how can you do that? How do you know people are listening if they’re not laughing? You can feel people drifting away from you when you’re reading a story, or telling a story. But nothing’s better than hearing them laugh. Nothing’s better than that.
Judd: Sometimes when we’re doing a movie that has more drama in it than usual and we’re testing it—showing it to audiences to get their reaction—I always find myself wishing there was a noise people made that let me know a dramatic scene is working. There’s no equivalent to the laugh, as far as knowing if a scene is effective. I have no idea. What’s the noise for that?

David: There is a kind of a wistful sigh that people make when they’re touched. Sometimes at the end of a story, I hear that little noise and I think, Ah, that feels as good to me as a laugh. It’s just a feeling of—I don’t know, if I say it’s a feeling of people being touched, that makes it sound like I make greeting cards. But it’s a little sound that people make, just some air escapes their mouth. It’s very quiet, but if you have a couple thousand people doing that, you can hear it. But just barely.

Judd: What about when you’re writing something that is less comedic? You have stories where you talk about people passing and doing very personal things. Sad things. What is it like to read those aloud?

David: Usually what I do is I have, in advance, an image in my mind that I’m going to think about when I read. So I don’t become emotional. Because that would be the worst. It has happened to me twice—my voice cracked onstage when I was reading something, and, oh my God, I was just so embarrassed. I would have been less embarrassed if I’d shit my pants.

Judd: (Laughs) Why is that? I always found it touching when, you know, Johnny Carson’s voice cracked when he said goodbye at the end of the run of his show.

David: Maybe if it were somebody else, I would find it charming or moving or something. But I don’t know. My dad was in the audience one night and I read something that was about him—it was sort of about him dying but, you know, he’s not dead. He’s in his nineties and he’s still alive. It was about how I hoped to remember him after he was dead. And because he was in the audience and I don’t—we don’t talk in my family. We don’t say things like, “Oh, I love you.” We don’t say stuff like that. So reading this would really be the closest I would ever come. And the word love is not in the entire story. But . . . and he was in the audience and . . . ugh. There was a story I wrote in 2004 that really kind of tore me up when I would read it. And so my boyfriend, Hugh, and I were looking for an apartment at the time in London, and as I was reading the story, I would just wonder what the front door of that apartment would look like. At the very last paragraph, I would just think of that. So I wouldn’t really be there, you know. I mean, of course I would be there reading it, but emotionally I wouldn’t be there. I guess it’s about not wanting to lose control....

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Verlag
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812987284
ISBN 13 
9780812987287
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
576
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

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