new yorker festival: denby, rogen, apatow

a few of you mentioned yesterday you didn't know who these folks were (even though i was kind enough to have linked their imdb profiles). apatow established cultish fame with freaks and geeks which is where seth got his start. since then the pair has worked together on 40 year old virgin, knocked up, superbad and next year's release pineapple express.

denby did his best to cater to these funny guys but still came off as too stuffy to really engage them. even less engaging? all the cult rogen wannabes who showed up. you know, the chubby dorky kids with big hair who think because they look like rogen that they can somehow achieve his level of success. rogen and apatow made their fair share of jokes at the expense of the new yorker which stemmed from their near disbelief that such a "highbrow" magazine and it's followers would want to talk to them. rogen, about a dozen times, referenced the new yorker just to keep putting things in perspective, to acknowledge his awe at, i think, the extent of how widespread his appeal had become.

first off, i fell in love with rogen's laugh. i NEED my husband to sound like that when he laughs. it's this dorky giggle/chuckle that i couldn't get enough of. it was thick and loud and sweet. the highlight, for me, was a 7 minute scene that did not appear in the movie knocked up. apatow knew people were going to want more abortion talk (and though the critics wanted that discussion from heigl's character) apatow filmed the guys having an abortion conversation. he prefaced it with a comment about how abortion isn't really all that funny and while he suspected this scene wouldn't make it into the movie and it didn't, i thought the clip was hilarious.

it begins with the guys talking about first how to avoid pregnancy ("i make her take a walk with me after sex so that all the bouncing up and down will make the sperm fall out" to which someone else responds, "no dude, sperm can live for like 2 months" and implies that even if you don't cum in someone, that they'll still find their way up to an egg -- a terrifying thought, actually). when the topic of abortion is breached only one of the guys (the skinny one that everyone picks on) argues that a fertilized egg is life. the counter argument to prove it is not a human being yet is to ask who remembers anything from inside the womb. in mocking the anti-abortionist in the crew, they ask him whether he saves all the socks he's cum into and whether he tries to breathe life into his sperm in an attempt to save all those precious little lives. it, of course, bordered ridiculousness but i really do believe that there are more men who believe these things to be true than i care to think about.

cute tidbits about casting...they had a hard time casting katherine heigl's role in knocked up because seth isn't a tiny guy. he said that there was so much fighting and yelling that when they read it with smaller girls, it just looked like he was beating up on them and that it bordered on abuse. when katherine auditioned seth said that she scared the crap out him. she's some 5'9" and, apparently, held her ground almost too well. in order to fill the role of mclovin in superbad the casting director sent letters to drama departments all over the country asking for, essentially, "a really dorky guy who thinks that he's really cool." a friend of christopher's showed him the letter and said, "dude, that's you!" when he came in to audition he asked seth and evan to sign his script. cute! also worth noting: rogen said that he didn't know anything about michael cera and also did not know how funny he was. that, in my opinion, is complete madness. i thought it was common knowledge that cera was brilliant. although, i suppose more people would know that had the best show on television, arrested development, not been cancelled. may it rest in peace.

a million studios told seth that superbad was "fundamentally unmakeable" which highlights the new genre that these men have created by bringing awkwardness and geekyness to the forefront and parading it around in all its glory. they made it cool to be dorky.

read more (and better) recaps here and here.