This Christian Lorentzen--I am unsure as to whether I have read him before and I am as certain as anyone with amnesia can be that we have never met, and yet I embrace him as a soul brother. From "Dicking Around" at n + 1:
America is a country of overgrown boys, stunted and warped, who, left to their own devices, are fit to do little more than play video games, stare at pornography, and crack jokes about genitals, flatulence, and defecation. The country’s womenfolk match men’s obnoxious behavior with a reflexive shrewishness. They are ever vexed by anxiety about their diminishing horizons and fading looks. The men need to be tamed, and the women gain purpose from the taming, marching the men through a program of self-improvement consisting of grooming, gainful employment, relinquishing their toys, and disavowing their fraternal bonds. The women laugh and coo as the men emerge, docile clowns consoled by a friendly gaggle of children to whom they can pass on their dick jokes. This is Judd Apatow’s vision of America, as realized in three self-help fables—from the unmediated crudity of The 40 Year Old Virgin, through the mock cryptoconservatism of Knocked Up, to the pseudosolemnity of Funny People. Over the last half-decade it has really struck a chord.
Apatow delivers a method as well as a message. He films his actors improvising many scenes—film enough dick jokes and you can weave them into a plot. The improvisatory style has taken on the proportions of legend in the press of late, as if it were a novelty, or anything other than a sign of the lassitude of contemporary screenwriting. At certain points in the Apatow oeuvre reliance on the method is obvious, as in a montage from The 40 Year Old Virgin of Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd calling each other gay (as in: “You know how I know you’re gay?”) while playing video games. In that sequence at least the pair seem like friends. On average, the method yields a scene like Rogen’s visit to the bookstore with Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up. He rattles off a series of vulgar jokes about sex, pregnancy, and parenthood as she forces a series of laughs, none of which is timed right. Their lack of chemistry belies the movie’s premise—that the sweetness beneath the Rogen character’s oafishness is enough to charm a woman with Heigl’s TV-ready good looks.
[snip]
It turns out that Funny People is the movie Apatow wanted to make all along. It takes as its subject the misery of success in Hollywood. Poor Adam Sandler basically plays Adam Sandler if Adam Sandler were a barely redeemable asshole with leukemia. The redemption he seeks is reunion with a now married ex-girlfriend on whom he cheated. That doesn’t work out, but he is redeemed through friendship with his assistant/protege Rogen, whose character, by means of a subplot, lands a redeemer, too, his in the form of a girl.
It’s unclear whether Sandler’s success is corrupting or just a force that gradually empties you out by allowing you to buy anything or fuck anyone. Clips of movies starring the fictional Sandler—one resembles Look Who’s Talking, except Sandler’s head is placed on a baby’s body; in the other he plays a merman (a woman Sandler beds screams “Fuck me like Merman! C’mon! Do Merman! Do the Merman call!” and he obliges)—imply that Hollywood movies are stupid as a rule but that Funny People itself is operating at a higher level. Yet for all its self-consciousness Funny People relies at every turn on the basest level of humor, and when the solemnity of the leukemia plotline is shaken off it descends quickly to a repertoire of plot-forwarding antics functionally no different than what we might expect from another Look Who’s Talking sequel. Apatow and his cohort, confident in their status as showbiz machers, have discovered self-consciousness but have little idea what to do with it.
Which is why they fall back on dick jokes...
And they're not even good dick jokes. I happen to be immersed inch-deep (that's not a double entendre, so just even even "go there") in the works of standup comic Jim Norton, self-described "fit-titted nothing," and his dick jokes make Judd Apatow's dick jokes look like the uninspired worms that they are. One of the most slumming aspects of Funny People, the entire movie a slumming expedition in search of laughter, tears, and critical esteem, is that none of the stand-ups who are part of the Apatow repertory buddy system here shows the least flair for timing, delivery, and material that would justify the praise they receive once they slouch off-stage ("Funny shit, man"--really, when, where?). Absolutely nothing about Rogen's standup performance would make a rich, man-boy zero like Adam Sandler's movie-star funnyman pause at the entrance and say to himself, "This kid has something--I think I'll hire him to hang around me the rest of the movie and teach me what is to care."
And the stand-ups are no funnier offstage, hanging out and trading dick-fart-pussy one-liners like baseball cards. Any episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast showcases more energy, honesty, and critical understanding of monologue craft than what you get with Apatow's slackers, who are little more than talking dicks--handheld mikes that ejaculate or at least dribble a few tadpoles,* to borrow a poetic image from Jim Norton, who can be heard with Maron here.
For me the sorriest thing about Apatow's auteurism is that the guy who gave us Freaks & Geeks has so coarsened in humor and human understanding; maybe that's what Hollywood does to you, or at least Hollywood success, topped with the accolades of bearded intellectuals.
*I'm surprised the movie wasn't titled Funny Peeholes, which is what it wants to be.
