Splitsider

Auteur of underdogs–turned auteur of bromance, Judd Apatow is the fast-talking wordsmith who sits in the front row, spouting encyclopedic knowledge over the drone of a dull geography teacher. He’s also the charismatic goofball with a Ritalin prescription.

As he explains in the introduction to I Found This Funny, he always considered himself a standup comedian. Only later in life did he assume the identity of a reader. “I became a decent writer,” he admits, “because I could mimic the comics I was getting paid to write for, but my own act, had no unique perspective.” That was before he cracked the books.

I Found This Funny, published by McSweeney’s, gathers Apatow’s “favorite pieces of humor and some that may not be funny at all.” A whole bunch of circumstantial factors had to converge before he finally began the process of culling all this contemporary literature. Teaching his seven-year-old daughter how to read was maybe the most immediate impetus for the project, though Apatow lets on that his own adult reading life has not been easy, that for a long time, apart from Steve Martin, Stephen King, and an ill-fated dose of Candide, he was all but illiterate. After Freaks and Geeks and then Undeclared were canceled, his wife became pregnant with their second child, and Apatow decided to do what every person I know fantasizes about doing: taking a vacation from life and just catching the fuck up. He gave himself the ultimate gift: a reading year. But the question of where to start is obviously daunting one, and as he explains, “there are a lot of books out there if you’ve never read anything but The Stand your previous thirty years.” READ MORE