The Exchange: Judd Apatow on Comedy, Kids’ Books, and Why He’ll Never Finish “Moby-Dick”

I’m a big admirer of Dave Eggers—his writing and his charity work. I see myself as a much weaker Dave Eggers: I am not as good a writer and I don’t care as much about charity, but I try in both areas. Years ago, I put together this benefit that was a parody of benefits, a fundraiser that raised $140,000 for 826LA. But the premise was we did the benefit before “Knocked Up” came out—before Seth Rogen became popular—and the evening was a tribute to Seth Rogen for the charity work he has not done yet. So we had everyone in show business show up for this charity event to honor someone that no one knew. We had tribute videos with Brad Pitt and Robert Evans telling him to please do charity in the future. So, you know, I always try to think of something that would help raise money for him, and one day we were on the phone and I said, “Maybe I could help put together one of those books, maybe I could pick some of my favorite humorous pieces of writing.” I thought we could call it “I Found This Funny,” and the next one we could call “I Found This Depressing.” See, I’m thinking of sequels already.

How did you select the pieces for the book? I worked with Lisa Yadavaia in my office and Chris Monks, who runs the McSweeney’s site. I could be wrong about that. Always assume that there’s a small chance that I am wrong about everything. We worked on searching for pieces for almost a year. And it was really fun to have an excuse to be forced to read way more than I normally would, and to ask people for recommendations. If someone agreed to be in the book, I’d say, “Well, who else should be in the book?” And I would ask people like James Franco, and James Franco would send me a long list of people he likes. And he asked his professor for stories that he likes, and then slowly we whittled it down.

James Franco has really become Hollywood’s man of letters, hasn’t he? Oh, I love it. I love James Franco. I remember when he was on the set of “Freaks and Geeks” and in between takes he’d be reading Freud and I would think, “Is he actually reading Freud, or is he trying to impress people? Is he actually processing this information?” And he proved that he was not kidding.

So when you decide what to read next, it’s mostly a word-of-mouth thing?

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