KNOCKED UP sss
Judd Apatow is a man who plays well with others: he started out writing for Ben Stiller and Garry Shandling, went on to produce the two funniest Will Ferrell vehicles (Anchorman and Tallageda Nights), and is currently working on projects with Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Owen Wilson, writer-director Jake Kasdan, and the gifted Texas director David Gordon Green. But Apatow’s more personal projects–the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, his sleeper hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and now the wonderful Knocked Up–have pulled away from the boys’ club of big gags and blatant stupidity, dealing honestly with lack of understanding between the sexes. In Apatow’s comedy boys and girls tend to view relationships as the gateway to adulthood, which leads to fears and disappointments as funny as they are painful.
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A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine portrays Apatow as a careful student of comedy who audiotaped his favorite stand-ups off the television. He came of age in the late 70s and early 80s, when the comic vanguard was familial sketch-show ensembles like the brilliant SCTV crew and the first cast of Saturday Night Live, and he’s carried that dynamic into his own work, assembling a troupe of eccentric performers he’s called upon since he produced Freaks and Geeks in 1999. The Times piece, by Stephen Rodrick, details the impact his parents’ divorce had on him as a teenager and uncovers the tension in Apatow’s adult life between his real family (actress Leslie Mann and their two daughters, Maude and Iris) and the masculine camaraderie he enjoys with his collaborators. The creative partnerships come off as a kind of eternal youth, perpetually bumping up against his domestic responsibilities.
The friction between men and women is even more pronounced in Knocked Up, the story of Ben, an unemployed slob (the superbly sarcastic Seth Rogen, who’s been working with Apatow since Freaks and Geeks), and Alison, a beautiful E! TV host (Katherine Heigl of Grey’s Anatomy), who share a drunken one-night stand and then struggle with Alison’s resulting pregnancy. Like Andy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Ben is living an abnormally prolonged childhood, paying his bills out of an accident settlement, blowing bongs all day, and scheming with his four rowdy roommates (Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel of Undeclared, and Jason Segel and Martin Starr of Freaks and Geeks) to create a lucrative Web site that tracks nude scenes in movies. He and Alison are profoundly mismatched, yet they resolve to raise the baby together, which forces Ben to grow up as Alison’s belly grows out.
