Funny People — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Plot

George Simmons is a middle-aged retired stand-up comedian turned movie star. Despite his wealth, he is disillusioned and depressed as most of his recent film work is low-brow and poorly received. Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, he is offered an experimental treatment that has only an 8% success rate. Believing he is about to die, he returns to his roots of stand-up comedy.

Ira Wright is an aspiring stand-up comedian in his 20s, sharing an apartment with his two best friends, Mark and Leo. Mark successfully leads his own TV comedy series. Leo is a rising comedy star and recurring guest star on Mark's TV show.

George meets Ira at a small comedy club, first hiring him as his assistant; Ira becomes one of his only close relationships. Later he becomes his joke writer, opening for him in big comedy clubs, often meeting with real-life comedians who talk about the business.

George reconnects with his ex-fiancée, Laura, currently married to Clarke. Once his physician tells him the leukemia is in remission, he decides he wants her back. Laura invites George and Ira to her house in Marin County while her husband is away on business. They spend quality time with her and her two young daughters. George and Laura sneak off to have sex, Clarke returns home and there is an altercation.

Laura faces a choice between her husband Clarke, who she suspects has cheated on her (he later confirms he received a happy ending at a massage parlor), or George (who also cheated on her many times). Ira is not always on George's side in the love triangle, so when it doesn't go George's way in the end, he fires him, who then calls George out on having learned nothing from his near-death experience.

Ira returns to his old food-service job and starts dating his crush. After some time has passed, George attends Ira's stand-up act and sees that his old assistant has become a talented and competent performer. The next day, George finds Ira at work, revealing their friendship is important to him. They reconnect as friends, telling each other jokes as equals.

Production

Judd Apatow had expressed his desire to make a stand-up comedian mentor film loosely based on his own early experiences as a struggling performer. He could not come up with an interesting idea, however, since most of his mentors were kind to him. He then thought of making a film about a mentor facing a life crisis, and decided to cast his former roommate Adam Sandler after seeing him in Reign Over Me. They discussed making the film almost two years prior to production.

Apatow had cast Sandler, Seth Rogen, and Leslie Mann as the three leads in March 2008. Eric Bana, Jonah Hill, and Jason Schwartzman were cast in June 2008 when the title of the film was announced. When asked about the decision to cast Bana, Apatow said that both he and Rogen are fans of his films; Rogen additionally commented they cast him as the husband because he was someone who would be considered an intimidating presence to both Sandler and Rogen. Bana mentioned that he decided to play the character with his native Australian accent so he would be more comfortable improvising. Apatow and Mann's daughters, Maude and Iris Apatow, play the young girls in the film. Both Apatow and Mann state that this casting choice allowed for more natural dialogue for the children, but the girls have not been allowed to actually see the film.

Academy Award-winning cinematographer Janusz Kamiński handled the cinematography for the film. Apatow had Sandler, Rogen, and Hill write their own material for routines. Apatow filmed them performing their routines in front of live audiences, using six cameras to capture their performances and audience reactions. Apatow filmed their entire performances, although only five to ten minutes of stand-up footage appear in the film. Hill admitted his performance was not well-received because he had never done stand-up before. Additionally, Apatow filmed scenes from Sandler's character's fictional filmography, as well as scenes from Schwartzman's character's fictional television show Yo Teach!, for the film to add realism.

Apatow used an old video of Sandler, from when the two were roommates, in which Sandler makes prank phone calls, and features a young Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, Funny People holds an approval rating of 69% based on 236 reviews and an average rating of 6.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Funny People features the requisite humor, as well as considerable emotional depth, resulting in Judd Apatow's most mature film to date." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, gave the film a score of 60 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 3 and a half of four stars, calling it "a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances — and it's about something. It could have easily been a formula film...but George Simmons learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize." It is the highest rating Ebert ever gave an Adam Sandler film, tied with his review for Punch-Drunk Love. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone also praised the film, writing, "Apatow scores by crafting the film equivalent of a stand-up routine that encompasses the joy, pain, anger, loneliness and aching doubt that go into making an audience laugh."

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one of its mixed reviews, complaining of the film's two-and-a-half-hour running time: "Funny People is...an attempt by Apatow to reconcile the huge success he has become with the up-and-comer he once was. The results run an increasingly exasperating 2½ hours.".

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times complains the film is "irritatingly self-satisfied" and describes the film as "nice" ... "but nice can be murder on comedy and drama alike".

Gene Shalit of NBC's The Today Show stated that it's "a smirk of faithful characters that are making a vanity movie about themselves that keeps not ending for 2 1/2 unendurable hours. Director Judd Apatow wrote the script and it's vulgar, in fact, it's ineffable because without the letter F, he would have no script."

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