We have Amy Schumer to thank for the filmmaker Judd Apatow’s return to standup. Apatow directed Schumer’s movie Trainwreck, and found himself envious when, after a day’s shoot, Schumer kept stealing off to perform live comedy. Twenty-five years previously, his younger self quit standup, convinced of his inferiority to his peers, such as Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler. “Looking back,” he said in a recent interview, “I’m surprised how bad I was.” Fellow comic – and co-producer of Apatow’s new Netflix special The Return – Wayne Federman is more upbeat about his friend’s standup skills. But only slightly. “Judd,” he says, “was not that bad at all.”
Which just about covers this much-heralded new Netflix release, filmed at Just for Laughs in Montreal in July. Apatow, now 50, has been gigging regularly for the last 18 months; he’s rediscovered his love of live standup and – as The Return proves – he can definitely do it. It’s just not particularly exciting to watch him do so.
Part of the problem is, it’s all so gilded. Of course, Apatow isn’t alone in being a very rich and successful man doing standup. But his moneyed celebrity is an awfully conspicuous part of this hour-long set. Yes, he starts the show by being self-deprecating (about his middling level of fame), and tries to sustain throughout the show the idea that – megabucks and adulation aside – he’s the same hapless schlemiel he’s ever been. But it’s hard to take his self-deprecation seriously when you’re watching what becomes, in effect, a slideshow of Apatow schmoozing with the president, hobnobbing with Paul McCartney, and throwing the first pitch in front of 40,000 people at the New York Mets.
It’s about tone – and Apatow doesn’t find the right one to dispel the ivory-tower aura that arises from this material. It’s also about the quality of the jokes, and here, that’s seldom above so-so. There’s some decent material about being father to two Gen-Z daughters: slaves to Instagram, forever being “triggered, Dad!” The generation gap yawns. There’s a cheap gag about Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and odd bits when Apatow shows us a photo of him vomiting, or recites a poem he wrote as a teenager about his parents’ divorce.
The latter conspicuously lacks a punchline – but there is a revealing moment, when someone in the crowd “aaaws” in sympathy, and Apatow retorts: “Don’t be sad – I’m rich. I’m very rich!” That he should snub sympathy, and do so by confusing emotional and financial wellbeing, is symptomatic of what doesn’t quite work about Apatow’s standup return. In the words of Muppets man Jim Henson, who once turned down the young comic for work: he lacks warmth. It’s a hard thing to fake, and – judging by that Henson anecdote – it may be something he’s always struggled against as a comic. He just doesn’t connect emotionally. “I’m very bad at sex,” he says at one point – but it doesn’t register as a confession, just a set-up for a routine. He worries whether the Mets crowd will like him, he tells us – but he’s never able to make us worry on his behalf.
That’s not fatal. He can obviously do comedy: it’s proficient. Some of the jokes are neat (one about men having sex; one about there being no caricaturists at bar mitzvahs). Others work well on paper; he’s a writer, after all. But not a gifted performer, and in his hands, this all feels a bit mechanical – a problem confounded because this is a very American set, flitting magpie-like between subjects, with no arguments developed, no narrative, and nothing terrifically compelling to say.
Judd Apatow: The Return is on Netflix now
