Judd Apatow’s third film, Funny People, is slow, disjointed, and riddled with long breaks between laughs. It is also something close to an American comedy masterpiece. I don’t mean that this is the funniest American film of all time, far from it. Funny People is decidedly a film about people, but the “funny” in the title is less apparent. Sure, the film is full of laughs, but few of the characters are just plain ol’ silly. This calls into question our preconceived definitions of comedy. What makes someone a comedian? What makes the rest of us laugh?

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a comedy megastar who tries to get back to his stand up roots after learning he has a terminal illness. Hours after learning of his impending doom, he bombs on open mic night. This spells disaster for the young Ira Wright, played by Seth Rogen, who must follow the dismal act. Ira is forced to face the cooled off crowd with his pile of low-rent jokes, but a couple of cracks at George’s expense gets him noticed by the celebrity, eventually landing him a gig as his personal assistant. Overnight Ira goes from the least successful guy is his apartment of young talents to the right hand man of their childhood hero. Read on…

Guest poster Sunrise Tippeconnie is a filmmaker currently living in Oklahoma City. He is an old friend of the candler blog who also dabbles in film criticism and history. You can read more of his work in Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies. We hope to see more of Sunrise on the candler blog in the future.

There are three questions that immediately come up about this picture. 1. Is it a “passing of the torch” film? 2. Is it film a masterpiece? 3. Is it funny?

Let’s answer the last question first. Funny People is exactly what the title suggests, it is about people, and not about being funny. To be direct, the film is funny but it is definitely not a [traditional] comedy. In fact the concept of the film being a comedy (specifically a crossbreed of two subgenres: the Adam Sandler and the Judd Apatow comedy) is a complex idea that reaches into anthropologic study in the vein of the Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sandler’s character George Simmons finds out in one of the first (and almost rushed) scenes at blank range that he has cancer. Comedy and death immediately call up another analysis of a comedic master: Chaplin in Monsiuer Verdoux (and we all know how the audience loved that film, despite it’s ranking as a masterpiece). Read on…