Does Judd Apatow Deserve to Be Cancelled?
This is a video I have made about Judd Apatow and comedy and cancel culture.
In this video, I have used the long-heralded journalistic “gotcha” technique of spending hundreds of hours looking through Apatow’s work in order to find some footage that portrays his hypocrisy in positioning himself as a moral arbiter of the comedy world. Everyone should be aware of this technique. No one should trust journalists. And I say that as one.
To that end, I have spent the last few weeks doing what all tabloid-bred shit-heels do, which is dig through the corners of the internet, researching Judd Apatow: the man, the myth, the hypocrite.
I will always admire Apatow for cowriting The 40-Year Old Virgin in the early aughts. It gave me life when I saw it in the theater all alone, right around the same time I saw The Aristocrats. (I mean, talk about a movie where they “punch down,” am I right?) But as a slightly autistic comedy obsessive, I’ve grown increasingly consumed with rage watching this guy use some of the most reliable intellectual dishonesty techniques known to man, all to escape being eaten alive by the mob with which he now aligns himself.
Because I am so weak and cowardly myself, I have a knack for spotting it in others. Never before have I witnessed such an utterly thrilling display of wormish personal disloyalty, argumentative cherry-picking, playing dumb as a decoy, and through-and-through historical revisionism in both his press appearances and his social media presence.
This guy is good.
To calmly attempt to transition from the man who made his millions off of faggot-and-tranny jokes in his always wildly sexist (in a hilarious way—sorry, guys, but sexism is hilarious, as is misandry) movies to his recent reinvention as Mr. Woke Stasi, El Capitan, is pretty badass. It actually reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the brilliant, groundbreaking FX show Louie (have you ever seen it? Well, sorry fuckos, it’s gone forever now!) where Louie (Louis C.K.) has a shot at replacing Letterman. As he’s fully flop-sweating it out for the guy who’s auditioning him, Louie goes to a deep, deep place of desperation and fart-poop-fuck-boobies juvenilia to get the job. Because he’s fucking terrified. And it is so goddamned authentic that it makes your heart sing, and you feel like you’re not the only one who’s been both so low and so high at the same time. That maybe you’ll recover.
Anyway, I kept waiting for the Apatow takedown to come. And it never did. As I read about behavioral contract agreements emerging in comedy clubs and saw a club owner who put Louis C.K. up for a spot get threats of fire-bombing and hurting his children, I realized that this takedown quest was part of my own weasel-y little Hero’s Journey.
I’ve written a separate piece about the increasing despair I’ve felt these past few years, sussing out the growing hysteria around comedy and free speech and media manipulation (and how Apatow uses it), but this is just a video description. So here it is. A description of the video I made with the hashtag #TimesUp. Because his time is up. Get it?
I did the usual journalistic tricks (search “name” + “accuser,” search “name” + “controversy,” search “name” + “dragged”) and came up with a few things that surprised me.
On a scale of 1 to James O’Keefe, this video is a 3 in terms of deceptive editing and applying a scary-music copyright-free YouTube track to ancient stand-up where Apatow jokes about wanting to fuck his stepfamily, saying he’s a sexist not a racist, making a joke about going on a shooting spree (I’m so with you on that one, Judd, one of my favorite gallows humor go-to’s), and all manner of material that is not fit for pristine 2019 ears.
There were some things that really did surprise me in this Apatow Vision Quest I’ve undergone this past month.
I realize it was a joke when he said to Jon Stewart that he enjoyed getting actors to show their dicks. (I almost wrote “young actors” and realized I’d be given a pants-on-fire rating by the Washington Post for that! “It’s more complicated…”).
But I also did uncover what is clearly a preoccupation with dicks.
Talking to other actors about showing theirs, showing his own on film for an agonizing ten seconds (there’s nothing revolting about Apatow’s penis, but I don’t want strangers masturbating in front of me, either… it’s annoying and gross), and in one riveting scene, propositioning the gorgeous and wicked Andrew Rannells (who I believe is one of the funniest actors alive) to do a nude scene on Girls after discussing something completely different on a Paley Center panel.
It’s odd. It’s like the friend who you’re going on to about something for an hour and a half, and then she busts out with, ‘So I really think the fact that he used four i’s in this ‘Hi’ text means that he wants to have a relationship.’” She was never listening. She had something else on her mind the whole damned time.
I don’t really think Judd Apatow should be “cancel culture”-d by any means, but I’ll tell you one thing. By Apatow’s standards, he surely does.
