Essential Advice For Aspiring Comedians From Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head

Judd Apatow’s new book, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, is a collection of in-depth interviews with some of the funniest folks on the planet. From Seinfeld, Silverman, Stiller, and Schumer, to Leno, Lena Dunham, and Louis C.K., this laugh-out-loud and insightful tome presents the transcripts of more than 30 hilarious heart-to-hearts between Apatow and well-known comedians. Apatow, who got his start in the industry by washing dishes at comedy clubs just so he could watch free stand-up, is now one of comedy’s kings, having written, directed, or produced such gems as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, HBO’s Girls, Bridesmaids, Anchorman, Knocked Up, and more. This book is a priceless read for humor buffs, aspiring comics, or anyone just plain interested in riveting back-of-the-comedy-club stories that are both funny and surprisingly astute. Here are 15 (out of hundreds!) pieces of sharp comedic wisdom from the book.
“If it doesn’t get laughs, you’re not gonna get work, and you’re not gonna be a comedian. So the audience ultimately decides. It’s a very democratic system.”
–Jerry Seinfeld on whether certain topics should be off limits
“It’s a horrible waste of time for the writer of it, for the reader of it.”
–Albert Brooks on Twitter
“I’m taking this responsibility seriously. I’m looking at it as an opportunity. What do I want to say? What have I really learned? Where am I, really? I’m not interested in saying something for shock value anymore. I do feel more of a weight about the message that I’m sending because I know what it’s like to be on the other end of that and I don’t want to be in denial about what success means—and like how many people I’m reaching now. I want to make people feel better.”
–Amy Schumer on realizing people are paying attention to what she’s saying
“…There’s definitely a part of you that goes like, Okay, there’s a lot of police brutality going on. I got to look over this and figure out what my take is because people want to hear about it. I’m going to have to find a real, original take on it—not just, you know, ‘Hey, stay away from football players!’ I’m going to have to dig deep, regardless of what else I want to talk about. You have no choice. You’ve got an obligation because people are paying to hear that.”
–Chris Rock on tackling current events in his act
“When you’re first starting, it’s just important to be on the stage. It doesn’t matter if people respond, because you just have to get over your stage fright.”
–Garry Shandling on beginning a career in comedy
“As my first job out of college, I worked in a mental institution for seven months. I learned how to deflect insanity, or how to deal with it, and how to speak to schizophrenics, catatonics, paranoids, and suicidal people. It sounds funny, but it really expanded my tolerance for the extremes of human behavior, which turns out to be great training for working with actors.”
–Harold Ramis on handling the ups and downs of filmmaking
“The real trick is to listen to [your act] and throw out everything that’s not funny…I’m always amazed when I go to clubs and I see new comedians, and night after night they do the same jokes that don’t work. If a joke doesn’t work, you just get rid of it and do something else. Better you do eight minutes of really funny stuff than sixteen minutes of hit-and-miss, you know.”
–Jay Leno on how to construct a successful act
“When you start to realize that peace and calm are not actually gonna help you in the business—that they’ll actually be bad for you—that’s when the real divide happens. When you go, Oh, I could work towards peace, I could find bliss, but I won’t have a career. It’s all about abandonment, it’s all about need, it’s all about worthlessness. If I remain worthless in my own mind, I will be the king of show business.”
–Jim Carrey on whether success brings peace or pain
“Pain and humor go together.”
–Ben Stiller
“I always wanted to please everybody. I always wanted to make everyone proud of me and happy.”
–Jimmy Fallon
“No matter where you end up, no matter what you achieve, on some level, you feel like you belong in a basement underneath a Middle Eastern restaurant telling jokes. That’s never out of you.”
–Jon Stewart on the humbling nature of a comedy career
“I know how this bit works, I know how this bit works…How do they cluster together? I thought about these things scientifically, like this documentary I saw, when you snap your Achilles’ tendon they put like a fiber on there and your body starts to coat it with tendon material…because something’s there, when there’s nothing there. So I thought, How does that apply to my act? How do I build an hour when there’s nothing there? And so I would go onstage with five minutes of improv, ten minutes, now I’ve got a really strong twenty. So stop doing it and start at five again and build another twenty, and I’ve got forty minutes now…And try to turn that forty—it’s like the way they make yogurt, they take a lump and put it in milk and it fills it up, fills it up. Go onstage with not enough time and with the pressure of headlining, and forty minutes turns into an hour just out of necessity. I’ve got an hour now. I can do an hour. Make it great. And then decide that that hour is sh*t and I need twice the material. Do a second hour, fold it in. I worked so hard on that stuff. I don’t know if I have the balls to do it that way anymore.”
–Louis C.K. on building a long stand-up routine
“There are always people telling you that your experience doesn’t matter, that it’s navel gazing or unnecessary. ‘We don’t need to hear about twenty something girls who feel like they’re ten pounds overweight. We don’t need to hear about forty-year-olds getting divorced.’ But we do need to hear it, because that’s who so many people are! I mean, it can be the difference between someone feeling like they have a place in the world and someone feeling like they don’t.”
–Lena Dunham on the reason she makes things
“Comedy is like alcoholism. You’re surrounded by people who are getting high all day, f*cking around, and just being comics—and time passes, you know.”
–Sarah Silverman
“My father and two of my brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest in age to me, died in a plane crash. I was ten years old, and my mother, who had always been a very religious person—not overtly related to their death—would say to me—if anything was wrong with my life, if anything was going wrong—she would say, ‘Look at this in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity?’ In other words, don’t worry about this little thing.”
–Stephen Colbert on learning how to have confidence and not worry