Judd Apatow gets lost again

The King of Staten Island is yet another muddled slog from the comedy hitmaker

Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, Universal, iStock)

The history of film directors pivoting from comedy to drama is a long and checkered one. Woody Allen famously followed the Oscar-winning Annie Hall with the bleak Interiors, which was dismissed by critics as a pretentious embarrassment. Jay Roach, of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises, now directs political dramas, as does Adam McKay, who moved from Will Ferrell silliness to The Big Short and Vice. Todd Phillips, of Old School and the Hangover trilogy, wrote and directed Joker, during the promotion of which he declared comedy largely dead. "Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture," he Abe Simpsoned to Vanity Fair. "You just can't do it, right? So you just go, 'I'm out.'" Dubious rationale notwithstanding, the clown who longs to be taken seriously — from Charlie Chaplin to Robin Williams to Jim Carrey — has become a familiar cultural trope.

Unlike some of his former peers, the writer, director, and producer Judd Apatow isn't seen as having moved on from comedy; indeed, he's synonymous with it. Since 1999, when he executive-produced NBC's funny-sad Freaks and Geeks, much of the comedy landscape has been remade into a sprawling Apatowian exurb. In the mid-2000s, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, both of which he wrote and directed, were huge hits, and his unofficial troupe — in part made up of Freaks and Geeks alumni like James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel — seemed to be everywhere. In recent years, he's maintained relevance as a producer and writer for HBO's Girls and Netflix's Love — female-centered shows which smartly departed from his bromance-heavy résumé.

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Jacob Lambert

Jacob Lambert is the art director of TheWeek.com. He was previously an editor at MAD magazine, and has written and illustrated for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, and The Millions.