Apatow Inspired Me to Confront My Fear of the Mob As I Plotted How I Could Get the Mob to Go After Him
“I don’t think anything is without humor. Whenever there’s a movie that has no jokes in it at all, I always think, well that’s not even possible. In any situation somebody is making a heinous joke. At funeral or massacres, someone’s making a joke. Someone at a massacre is going, can you believe this is happening to us right now?”Judd Apatow, 2014
“This hacky, unfunny, shallow routine is just a symptom of how people are afraid to feel empathy. It’s much easier to laugh at our most vulnerable than to look at their pain directly & show them love and concern. Louis CK is all fear and bitterness now. He can’t look inward.”Judd Apatow, 2018
“very Judd tweet reveals his terror that the woke mob will drag him next.”Jon Gabriel
“‘Please don’t come after me, I’m still one of the good ones,” gasped the comedian.’”Jim Treacher
“Scout is so involved and active. She is on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth person. By way of comparison, the earliest I’ve ever been aware of anything was that time I was the ten-million-two-hundred-and-sixth person to see that thing. There’s evidently a considerable gulf between Scout and me. But that’s why I am always so appreciative of her coming by and giving me news. Now, according to Scout, the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present. I invited her to pull up a stool at my mid-century-modern breakfast bar and unpack that a little for me.”“Now More Than Ever” By Zadie Smith
“Comedians, from a fellow comedian, please stop attacking other comedians. What are we doing? We need to circle the wagons here. Jesus fucking Christ.”Bill Burr, 2019
I always think of that classic David Letterman moment in 2007 when Paris Hilton came on the late-night show to promote her new fragrance line or something. He kept returning to questions about her jail stay. She didn’t want to talk about it, and he responded: “See now this is where you and I are different. Because this is all I want to talk about.”
The spectrum of human depravity and heroics and redemption and failure and shame, and especially, oh especially the lies we tell ourselves to explain away why we are in fact immune from the checkered history of the human spirit while everyone else is not–see, that is all I want to talk about. There’s energizing, inspiring, soul-revitalizing honesty in discomfort and clash. I love to explore the Roshomon-like rubric of our millions of splintered and conflicting realities. I truly believe it is only through such uncensored exploration of the collectivity of endless dark truths in this world that we can ever reach something approaching light.
Over the course of the last seven years, as our culture has changed, as the social media Mob—or as it has been called of late, the “woke Stasi”—has evolved into a fearsome, vengeance-seeking beast in preemptively censoring the nature of public discourse. As it has, I’ve slowly released my will to fight. If you need the metaphor, here it is: I have been dutifully, zombie-eyed asking Paris Hilton any number of in-depth questions about what the very favorite part of launching her new fragrance line really was. So to speak.
Like most journalists, I am an angry, petty, vicious, two-faced individual. The reason I hope that you will now trust me is that I am telling you that I am an angry, petty, vicious, two-faced individual.
Sadly, it is par for the course if you work in the media-entertainment industrial complex. Over time, you gain a keen understanding that one minute the person who is smiling to your face at a dinner party asking for a favor might the very next be placing a nasty item sabotaging you under the guise of anonymity and gossip. You really can’t take such fecklessness personally, I’ve learned. Hell, if I wrote off all the people who’ve done this to me over the years, I’d have missed out on the many riches of wit, wisdom and brilliance such folks have otherwise enriched my life on a personal level.
We’re all flawed. We’re all shit-heels. Mother Teresa herself would not have survived the “cancel culture” we are currently living in. The best among us try to be as little this way as possible and offer some light and truth and kindness when we can. But if you work in trades that involve the cultivation of transactional relationships, this is the swampy business of shady favor trading and alliances. And the more you believe the lies and the justification you tell yourself about why you may do any number of unseemly things that you do (those moments when your conscience starts to kick up questions of uncertainty and perspective and doubt and nuance), well, the more unimpeachable success you will have in climbing and climbing and climbing.
The most political animals among us do so without remorse, self-reflection or impunity. Loyalty and integrity become as anachronistic as the telegram itself.
And yet, it doesn’t stop the practice from being as slimy and soul-deadening and joy-corrosive as it sounds.
Young people with dreams of access journalism have no idea the reality of the viper’s pit and backstabbing that exists once you enter (as Graydon Carter once explained to Toby Young in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) the successive rooms of power you are granted if you start abiding by the rules of how the game is played: Attach yourself to the right players.
If the winds shift ever so slightly, jump ship and glom on to the next up-and-comer. Backstab without remorse if it helps you. Loyalty is for suckers. Regurgitate the agendas and talking points of your most viable alliances. Whatever you do, don’t think independently. Please your masters. Sure, this will engender personal bitterness when you disagree with the opinions of the tribal alpha setting the hivemind of who’s in and who’s out, but suck that up. Because that’s what placing nasty stories are for. Leaks and tips provide you with a sanity-balancing outlet to release the bile and whisper campaign, to out the players you may see wounded (and of no use to you anymore) and boost up those who may be able to shine up your status.
This is what I wanted to do to Judd Apatow. Tip off another reporter braver than I am that this guy’s hypocrisy is just begging to be exposed.
The most hilarious part about a takedown piece that ran about me years ago was the reliance throughout on anonymous quotes talking trash when I could have easily given a dozen people who would eagerly go on record to spew the same. It’s the coward’s way out. It always has been.
And recently, until a few minutes ago, I was a coward of the greatest proportions.
Up until recently, I’ve been playing it extremely safe. Well, not safe, so much as petrified.
In this brave new world of ex post facto authoritarianism, I’ve observed, almost outside of myself, this slowly boiling over disgust and distaste for a culture that now caters to victim privilege above all else.
And now comes the part where I give my bona fides as a respectable victim myself. I was raped when I was 15 by a distant family member. My dad is a blind PTSD-ridden combat vet with severe rage issues. My mom suffered from crippling OCD most of my life growing up. I was such an anxious fuck amongst all this dysfunction and terror and fear that I wet my bed almost every night until I was 15.
But do you know what the one thing that my family had–that I had–that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world? The one thing that would always bring us a shot of transcendent joy like absolutely nothing else in the world?
Dark, mean, fucked-up, utterly wrong comedy.
After a fight one time, I don’t think I’ve ever made my dad laugh as from-the-soul deeply as when he asked me who I was taking to prom, and I said it was going to be the sniper from ‘Nam.
Do young people even know about this anymore?
That making the sickest, wrongest, most fucked-up jokes can be one of the greatest catharsis you will ever know in life? I mean please don’t take this advice if you’re a bona fide psychopath. If you’re a psychopath, please just turn yourself in because I don’t want you wearing my skin like a hat, dancing around your refrigerated lair of corpses quoting from this article. I would be super mortified.
Over the years, I’ve heard comedians wish everything from AIDS to murder on an audience member. Like everyone else in the audience, I came to experience the thrill of the taboo. It reminds me of a YouTube comment I once read. Yeah, I know how stupid that sounds. Which is exactly why I’m saying it.
So I don’t know if this is a played-out street joke or just the brilliant concept of a lone YouTube commenter who will never realize the gold he has on his hands, but the guy (or girl! Or girl!) theorized that some day, “There will be ‘Speak Freelys.’”
Have you ever heard something so apt to this cultural moment?
Speak freelies. I wish I could go to one. I wish our world still was one.
I learned a valuable lesson about this new systematic cultural dishonesty in 2012.
It was mid-summer when I went from the gallows-humor-rich halls of the New York Post to the ultra-liberal intersectional couches of doomed Internet feminist startup xoJane. One night after attending the comedy roast of Anthony Bourdain, I ran into the ever-offensive comedian Gilbert Gottfried on the red carpet not long after his very public firing after he made some jokes on Twitter about tsunami victims. So I asked him for an interview.
You see, that right there was my first mistake. It turned out, my job was not to ask. It was to coach.
My editors needed to do a special review of my piece for potential offense. Kind of like a pre-trigger-warning trigger-warning. In the future, I was told, it was probably best to get controversial celebs greenlit first to figure out the right angle.
“If it was [Daniel] Tosh, for example,” the email read, “we’d have to get him to talk about the rape joke thing in a meaningful way if we were going to post a sympathetic interview.”
When I got that email, I cackled insanely.
Sure.
Just one of those super-chill Daniel Tosh interview/healing seshes about the pain he has inflicted through his purposefully offensive—and often super-cathartic—jokes.
No arrogance or delusion on the part of the woke media there at all. No inherent belief that social engineering is simply part of the job. No terrifying credo that “If they think wrong, it is our job to teach them to think right.”
Who, what, when, where, why and woke: The Six W’s of any acceptable modern journalism piece.
It was November 9, 2017, when the Mexican-American comic and TV auteur born as Louis Szekely released his one-time press statement apologizing for asking multiple women if he could masturbate in front of them. In that time, the movie producer Apatow has steadfastly remained one of his most loyal, outspoken defenders of the comedian’s controversial jokes and of the need for unencumbered speech in comedy in general.
Just kidding. He threw Louie under the bus faster than you can say, “Hey Judd, have you ever thought about casting your kids?”
When the New York Times reporters on the Louis “beat” came out with their cri de cour against C.K., Apatow’s sweaty fingers cranked out this solemn masterpiece on social media, “This to me was one of the saddest parts of the Louis CK story in the @nytimes. When you disrespect and sexually harass young, vulnerable people you become a dream killer.”
This felt especially rich from a guy who once told Stephen Galloway on the show Hollywood Masters in 2014: “Is it a Golden Age of comedy? I think it is a Golden Age of comedy generally….Everything’s better in retrospect, but it’s amazing what’s happening in comedy now. Louis’ show, if that was all there was it would be a Golden Age of comedy.”
Then again, it was also that same year that he wrote of Louis in his genuinely terrific book Sick in the Head, “Louis C.K. is one of those people who are so brilliant and funny and uncompromising that sometimes I need to avoid their work. When I was writing This Is 40, I made a point to never watch his TV show because I was aware that it was, on one level, about a middle-aged guy with two daughters, and if I watched it, and loved it, I would probably feel like there was no need for me to make my movie.”
Shit, Judd. If I had a time machine, forget baby Hitler. I’d just sit next to you and queue up your Netflix.
Apatow also went on in that same lavish (and slavish) introduction, “I also make a point of not watching too much of his stand-up, because he’s so prolific and covers so much ground. Watching him makes me feel like there’s nothing left to talk about, and that everything has already been done, as well as it can be done, by Louis.”
Well at least we know he’s coming from a pure place in his current bile toward the comedian. An incredibly pure one: Pure resentment.
If you’ve never had the misfortune of working in the current dumpster fire that is modern media, then you may not be aware of just how insanely the model has changed. I mention this because I’d like to talk about how artfully done Apatow’s moralizing to generate headlines has been.
In 2014, the Washington Post film critic Anne Hornaday wrote a thoughtful piece looking at the entitlement sentimentality she saw running like a virus through male culture. Did some of it come from the entertainment they consumed, the films and TV that kept portraying a recycled kind of tale, where the loser guy wins the hot girl? Maybe?
“For generations, mass entertainment has been overwhelmingly controlled by white men, whose escapist fantasies so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfillment (often, if not always, featuring a steady through-line of casual misogyny). Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike. How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like ‘Neighbors’ and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?
Hornaday kind of nailed it. The oeuvre of loser gets hottie out of his league is in some ways, kind of the ultimate incel fantasy, to be honest.
Seth Rogen and Apatow predictably lost their shit in response. Anyone would.
But what I noticed in particular from looking at Apatow’s tweets to Hornaday was how precisely he pinned down the way a news cycle works.
You’ve got to piggyback, to frame, to jump on a bandwagon of virality.
And well, Louis C.K. He’s the perfect cocktail.
Because journalism nowadays is basically algorithms + controversy. If you aren’t aware of the theory of outrage porn (like the C.K. story) being humans’ super-normal stimuli or, say, ElsaGate’s utter infiltration of your child’s brain, these all go hand-in-hand with generating good clickbait.
There’s a terrific Digiday piece that unpacks the Web-traffic-boosting strategy that is, tacky-ness-wise, the equivalent of doing some power networking at a funeral, when it comes to covering something like a celebrity death or a #MeToo controversy.
Did I mention how smart Apatow is? God is he smart.
In the arena of stand-up comedy, the contract between audience member and performer has always been that you are there to hear the performer riff on all that awful, terrible everything-ness that you can’t say in polite society in a way that releases all of the tension and stress surrounding these awful, terrible things and ultimately makes you laugh. That’s the comedian’s job. That’s it.
The reason this social contract was safe for so long was because (a) no cell phones and (b) no social media. But now, we have inadvertently created our own little East German informer citizenry. Snitches don’t get stitches. They get, like, 20,000 likes and maybe even a $300 freelance piece about their viral tweet condemning a word that was used wrong, and damn it, you were there to catch it.
The reason it also worked is because we used to come from a place of grounded, collectively shared reality. We understood that outrageous words and ideas are simply outrageous words and ideas and have no bearing on actions or outcome.
It reminds me of one of my favorite TV episodes in all of eternity: Black Mirror’s “Nosedive.”
I rewatched it before putting this together, which gave me the courage to write the piece in spite of realizing the influx of “your brains are made of shit” and Ellen Barkin-style “you deserve to be raped” responses I will likely receive.
In a world not too far off from where we are today, in “Nosedive,” every person is constantly ranking and liking each other’s social portfolios, and status and equity are determined accordingly. There is actually a scene where one of the office workers whispers to the protagonist, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is wincing at the desperation of someone who is trying to curry points and raise his score by offering her a smoothie: “We’re not talking to him.”
We’re not talking to him. It is the same kind of de-person-ing that happens to you in the fifth grade by the bullies. Like the emergent nerd-bullies of the past few decades (whose anger at the jocks have transformed them into a kind of super-mega-book-learnin’-filled bully), the bullied-bullies employ the same techniques that mean girls used to torment me with growing up.
Later in the episode, Howard is en route to the worst trip of her life to try to get to a wedding to increase her social stature when she gets picked up by a female trucker whose ranking instantly shows that she has fallen far and fast from the acceptance of the reigning hive-mind. The trucker says she used to be a 4.6, but now she’s a 1.4. Keep in mind: This is a world where the only acceptable tone is one of utter smiling zombie blankness and laughter when nothing funny has ever been said.
The trucker reveals she stopped giving a fuck when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and despite all the ratings and false-approval-rankings from a world of smiling acquaintances surrounding her, the cancer did not care. It just kept spreading. Then her husband was kept out of a treatment facility because his score was one-tenth a point too low. That was her breaking point. At this, Howard says she is so sorry.
“You don’t know me so you’re not really sorry,” the trucker says. “You’re mainly awkward because I’ve sprung some cancer talk on you.”
When her husband died, she thought “fuck it.”
“I started saying what I wanted when I wanted,” she says. “Just drop it out there. People don’t always like that. It is incredible how fast you slip off the ladder when you start doing that. It turned out a lot of my friends didn’t care for honesty. Treated me like I had taken a shit at their breakfast table.”
“But Jesus Christ,” she says, “it felt good, shedding those fuckers. It was like taking off tight shoes. Maybe you should try it.”
Having subsisted on the trifurcated portions of a book advance paid out in three installments, I have written and killed various pieces, composed and deleted way too many tweet drafts to count over the last few months, all in fear of the mob going after my remaining advance payment.
This week, several disheveled cartons of my memoir arrived on my doorstep via courier, and the check finally landed in my bank account. Then again, perhaps the mob can find a way to actually convince my bank, USAA, to drop me as a client and take away the money. Maybe they can cancel the bank. That would be cool.
But I’m not going to let them take what has kept me alive and sane throughout my life: Comedy. And not just any kind of comedy. Really, really fucked-up mean-spirited comedy that uses the tragedy of life as material. That’s how I heal.
