Judd Apatow on the Brilliance of Garry Shandling - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. Exactly. I know nobody has notes. Everyone has like a little like a business card with three bullet points on it. And I'm a little more of the, you know, the shandling tons and tons of paper until you're drowning and confused. Shandling. You know. That's a sad one, man. What a fun dude that was. Oh, the best. And I'm doing a documentary about him now for HBO. And so the most fun part about it is he always went to the Comedy Magic Club and did stand up. Even in eras where you didn't know he was doing it. That's where I met him. At the Comedy Magic Club? Yeah. And how was he? That was great. Yeah. He's just, I mean, it was like for me, I was a huge fan of Larry Sanders Show and Larry Sanders Show. That's where Paul Sims got his start. Yes. He was the producer of News Radio. And so when I, you know, when I saw him, I was like, it was one of those ones like, oh, wow. That's actually Gary Shandling right there. Right there with Judd Apatow. It's right there. It's a weird one. And he, and you know, the Comedy Magic Club, they tape every show. Since the 80s, they have every show taped. Yeah. And I said, can you give me the last 50 sets that Gary did at the Comedy Magic Club? And this is, you know, from the last few years. And no one's ever seen any of these jokes except the people at those shows. He didn't do them on TV. He didn't do them on talk shows. There was no special. Some of the funniest jokes you've ever heard. Just him, you know, working on the craft, fucking around, being so funny. Yeah. But he did a lot of notes. He was a, he's a disciplined guy. He was, well, in the 70s, he wrote so many jokes. I found these binders, hundreds and hundreds of jokes in every loose leaf binder. Like a guy sitting at a desk all day, just crafting like two sentence, perfect jokes. Yeah, but there's like the balance, right? There's that, there's crafting the perfect jokes, and then there's just being able to be loose. Yes. And fun and hilarious. Well, he also used to go on stage with just a setup, and he wouldn't know the punch line. And he would say the setup and hope the punch line came, which is pretty wild. He, you know, one of the great things about doing a documentary is you get to ask people for footage. So Seinfeld gave me the dailies for comedians in cars getting coffee when he interviewed Gary. And then the people who made the movie Comedian about Seinfeld gave me all the dailies of a sequence that they only used 10 seconds of in the documentary, which was Gary and Jerry going to the Comedy and Magic Club and doing sets, and also there there at night as Neelan and Chris Rock. And there's 12 tapes. It's all their performances and then their entire conversation for three hours hanging out backstage. And it is unbelievable the conversation, how funny it is. And there's a moment where Chris Rock is doing the joke about how Nelson Mandela got divorced, that even Nelson Mandela after decades of being in prison, he could survive that, but he couldn't survive getting out and being married. He gets divorced immediately. I forgot how he worded it. But there's a shot of Shandling alone in a green room watching Rock do this bit. And as he's doing it, Gary's like saying what he, he's like, he's guessing what the bit is as Rock saying it, but in awe of Chris Rock. And it's a really beautiful moment. And that's what the best part of doing this documentary is, is just finding little magical moments that no one would ever see if you didn't dig deep. What made you decide to do this? We did a memorial for Gary when he died at the Wilshire E-Bell Theater and like a thousand people showed up. And I made about five mini documentaries about Gary to show in between the speakers. And I thought, oh, this is a documentary. I should just expand this. And now it's like, now it's like the O.J. doc of Gary. It's a big, long, epic documentary. I think people don't realize how good The Larry Sanders Show was. Like people forgot. You know, if you go back and watch it again, that was a revolutionary show when it was on the air. It really was. Well, people don't go backwards. Like my kids don't go backwards digging that far. Like to them, you know, looking backwards means I'll watch all of Parks and Rec. They're not digging into the 90s. They go to 2015. And people forget that when The Larry Sanders Show came on the air, you know, the shows on HBO, it was like First in Ten or Not Necessarily the News or Dream On. You know, Gary was the first show on HBO that made HBO go, oh, this is what HBO should be. We should be the quality network with all this kind of groundbreaking television. And, you know, Gary was a guy who got offered all the talk shows. He got offered to replace Letterman. He was hosting The Tonight Show for Johnny. Him and Leno would take turns doing it. And he decided he'd rather satirize it than do it. You know, and he wanted to explore the people and not be a talk show host. He wanted a show like The World of Ego that is not just talk shows, but just show business. He was fascinated with people's need for attention, his own need for attention, his own vanity and narcissism. And he wanted to explore that and satirize how we just want to be liked so badly, like what we do to be liked, which prevents us from actually feeling love because we're so obsessed with approval.