Seth Rogen is only 25, but he already has more than a decade of comedic experience under his belt. Raised in Vancouver, Rogen began doing stand-up at the tender age of 13; eventually, he made his way to Los Angeles, where his work caught the attention of Judd Apatow, who cast Rogen in his short-lived but beloved NBC show Freaks And Geeks and his short-lived but beloved Fox sitcom Undeclared. Though Rogen has had a few other television adventures, including an appearance on Dawson's Creek and a job writing for Da Ali G Show in its second season, his career has remained tethered to Apatow's, and the two have been on a hot streak lately. After a standout supporting turn in the surprise hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Rogen steps into the lead for the first time in Apatow's Knocked Up, a similarly raunchy, disarmingly sweet-natured comedy about the terrifying prospect of parenthood. Rogen recently spoke to The A.V. Club.
The A.V. Club: What led to you getting into stand-up comedy so early?
Seth Rogen: Um… I don't know. Hatred of myself? [Laughs.] I knew I just loved comedy, and I think it was my parents who initially brought up the notion of me trying to do stand-up. I think I actually tried writing jokes just at home, just kind of sitting around. But it seemed like a very real way to step into the world of comedy. I felt I could do it, so why not?
AVC: Well, it's fairly precocious to do it that young. Are there venues that let you perform? You were pretty far from the drinking age.
SR: Yeah, I'd perform at all the places anyone else would. I was in Canada, but we had Yuk Yuk's there, a chain of comedy clubs, so I'd perform there. Just like anywhere else, there were bars and restaurants that had comedy nights, and they'd let me in to perform and make me leave when I was done, usually.
AVC: Did it take you a while to feel confident on the stage?
SR: When I first started, there was a real novelty element to it, I'm sure: "Look, there's a 13-year-old kid doing comedy." And I'm sure that bought me a lot of slack. So I was probably more confident than I should have been, if anything. [Laughs.] I think was humbled as I got a little older doing it.
AVC: What kind of material did you do at that age? I mean, what do you know about life at that point?
SR: That's exactly what I was thinking, too, so I just tried to speak from my experiences. When I was 13 and 14, there were a lot of jokes about my bar mitzvah and my grandparents, and then when I got older, it became more about touching boobs and trying to get liquor, you know? [Laughs.] I kind of ran the gamut of infantile behavior.
AVC: So that's been kind of the bedrock throughout?
SR: Exactly. And I haven't moved one step forward since. [Laughs.]
AVC: Have you ever had to perform in a hostile or unpromising environment?
SR: Yeah, definitely a bunch of times. I did four months in this bar in Whistler [British Columbia]. And it was just terrible. Oh my God, it was just so brutal. But I didn't really care sometimes. Sometimes, you just get in this mentality of "Fuck you, this is funny. If you don't think so, you're the asshole." I remember my first time ever doing stand-up in L.A., I went up at the Improv. All I remember is that I could hear the buzzing noise the speakers were making, the power coming through the speakers. I remember thinking as I was doing the jokes, "If I can hear that very clearly, I'm not hearing laughter." It just became deafening, this buzzing noise. I mean, it was brutal. It was really terrible. Then I remember thinking, "At least nobody important, or anyone who I really respect, saw that." And then literally right when I went off the stage, Jerry Seinfeld got up and went on. [Laughs.] So I was like, "Oh great. Seinfeld saw me bomb." On the other hand, I thought, "At least no one will be thinking of me anymore. They'll just be focusing on him."
AVC: Have you always been able to scrape together a living in show business? Did you skip the part where you work a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet?
SR: Yeah, I've never really had a real job. When I was young doing stand-up, I'd get 50 bucks a week here or 100 bucks a week there. You know, sometimes for headlining one of the rooms, or MC-ing, or something like that. So yeah, I've never had like a normal job.
AVC: Do you still have an interest in television after your experience with Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared?
SR: Yeah, I'm not put off it altogether. I did some work on Da Ali G Show after those shows, and that was a great experience. And a couple of my friends [Danny McBride and Jody Hill] are making an HBO pilot [tentatively titled P.E.] right now, and I'm doing a small part on the pilot. If it went to series, I would probably be somewhat involved with it. I feel like TV's still good. It didn't die with Undeclared. I would definitely lean more toward working with HBO or something like that. I feel like what amuses me is dirty and R-rated, generally speaking. And that was always a big battle on Undeclared, you know, "How do we get across what we think is funny, and still write something that you can broadcast?" And that's not something I really want to have to think about again.
AVC: When you're working on a show that's critically acclaimed, has a passionate following, yet isn't doing well in the ratings, does that shake your faith in what you're doing?
SR: Um, no. Luckily, due to my own ego, probably, I'm always quicker to blame other people. [Laughs.] It was more like, "What's wrong with the world?" It never seemed like that much of a mystery why those shows failed. When you're doing a show called Freaks And Geeks about young people in high school, and it's on Saturday nights at 8 and there's no promotion for it, it's not really hard to guess why no one's watching it. And when you're doing a college goofball comedy that premières three weeks after Sept. 11, it's not that hard to piece together why that's not the most important thing on the radar.
AVC: At the end of the day, would you rather be like a King Of Queens and mildly entertain a lot of people for many seasons, or be part of a show that's beloved by fewer people and on for one season?
SR: Definitely the latter. I'm very happy with my experiences with Undeclared and Freaks And Geeks. You know, it's funny. To me, that was the perfect amount of time to work on a TV show. When I'm doing movies now, around the end of the movie, I start to think, "I'm done with this. I don't really need to wear these clothes any more or make jokes about holding babies any more. That's pretty much all I've got on that subject." There's a part of me that… I wouldn't say is grateful those shows were cancelled, but I've really learned to view the bright side of the coin in that I'm not now 25 years old, trying to think of reasons to justify why I'm still in high school.
AVC: You're saying with a second season, you wouldn't have been as funny in those shows?
SR: Maybe not. There's something you can get away with when you know you're only going to be on one season. There's no sense of, "We should save that." It's just like, "Use that! Get it out there now. They could shut us down any second!"
AVC: Was Undeclared your first experience writing for television?
SR: Yes.
AVC: Writing for a network like Fox, was there a lot involved in getting a script through?
SR: Not too much. There was always the dance about "How much can you really imply they're getting drunk?" or something. You couldn't show them smoking weed, you couldn't show them swearing, and you couldn't show a blowjob. Once you accepted that, it wasn't that hard to get what you were trying to do out there.
AVC: Since you wrote, or co-wrote, several of the scripts for Undeclared, were you also involved in mapping season two, or was that Judd Apatow's department?
SR: No, all the writers were involved in mapping out the season, I would say. Undeclared was different in that it was fully staffed with writers before the pilot was written. So we started with like a seven-episode commitment, so before there was a pilot, we knew we were going to be shooting at least seven episodes. That gave all the writers an opportunity to help shape the show and kind of give their two cents as to its direction.
AVC: And did you seize upon certain ideas? If you proposed something for a particular episode, would you claim the script as yours to write?
SR: Yeah. How I worked with Judd is actually different from how I think most shows work, in that you'd go to him with your ideas. You'd say, like, "I have these five ideas for an episode," and he'd says something like, "Well, I like these two. Maybe flesh them out a little more." When we knew Adam Sandler was going to do the show, maybe that was a little different, because it was like, "Okay, we need a Sandler episode." But generally speaking, it was the writers' own ideas and whatever they wanted to write about.
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