Judd Apatow, the enterprising teen who conned famous comedians into interviews for his high school radio station, longed to be a stand-up comedian. “I never told any of the people I interviewed that this was my dream, even though it was painfully obvious,” he writes in his new memoir, Comedy Nerd.
But despite some early success — Apatow was chosen for HBO’s Young Comedians Show — he pulled the plug on his stand-up career just as it was getting started. One of the people to blame? Sesame Street creator Jim Henson.
It all started when aspiring comic Apatow shared a small apartment with Adam Sandler in the Valley. “Adam would be on MTV every once in a while,” Apatow said this week on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast. “There was this audition to be on a pilot where a couple of comedians would travel across the country, and they were going to give the comedians their own video cameras, right at the beginning of when that seemed exciting. Like, ‘We’ll give them a camera and they’ll shoot it themselves!’”
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The auditioning comedians would make their videos and submit them to MTV and producer Jim Henson. “And so, me and Sandler went down to the beach with my grandmother and made some weird… I don’t know what we did,” Apatow sort of remembered. “And then I had a list of ideas, things you could maybe do on the show.”
What happened next was a good news/bad news situation for Apatow. The bad news: He didn’t get the gig as a traveling comedian. The good news: Henson loved Apatow’s show ideas and wanted to buy the whole list. That should have been enough to cement an early win for the aspiring comedian, but the show’s representative wanted Apatow to know what Henson thought of his audition: “He didn’t want you because he thought you lacked warmth.”
Oof!
“Why tell you?” laughed an incredulous O’Brien. “‘Oh, and one more thing before you hang up…’”
“And I just thought, this guy, as Kermit, taught me to read!” said Apatow. “Like this is the warmest man! It’s like Kermit telling you to fuck off!”
But after the initial Muppet rejection wore off, Apatow realized Henson was probably right. His stand-up persona was self-conscious and introverted. “I could feel it when I was around Sandler, Jim Carrey, as a kid. They are just way looser than me and charismatic, and I’m just in my head.”
The feedback hurt, Apatow said, “because I’m like, ‘He got me.’”
But Henson also opened a door. “When writing opportunities came up, I thought, ‘Well, Jim Henson thought I should be a writer,’” Apatow said. “I would just take the writing opportunities and do less of the performing things.”
It was just like Kermit telling Apatow, “You got this, kid.”
