The Invention of Judd Apatow

How a kid from Long Island willed his way to the top of American comedy

- By Adrienne LaFrance

In the fall of 1983, Judd Apatow made his way down to a musty room in the basement of Syosset High School and stumbled upon his secret weapon—he just didn't know it yet.

Apatow was 15 years old, deep into an infatuation with comedy, but had nowhere to channel it. Boyhood on Long Island was something like a John Hughes movie: idyllic on the outside and tormented on the inside. “A lot of what formed some aspects of my personality was that there was an enormous amount of sports happening and I wasn’t good—I would always choke and panic,” Apatow told me recently.

This happened, he emphasized, all the time: in gym class, at pickup games during lunch, after school. “Imagine not being very good,” he said, “and having to be picked close to last multiple times a day,” and then being given a position “so far out in right field that I was almost in the middle of Jericho Turnpike.”

The jocks may have been the kings of high school, but Apatow came to understand that theirs was a fleeting achievement. “I remember as a kid thinking, It doesn’t matter if you’re good at this,” he said. “You become suspicious of how everything works—power structures; whatever the caste systems are—and then you’re drawn to comedians who are always calling out the different parts in life that are bullshit.”

He worshipped Lenny Bruce, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Gilda Radner, George Carlin, Martin Short. He wanted a friend to talk about Saturday Night Live with every week, but couldn’t find one. Comedy wasn’t cool—at least not among the teenagers he knew. “People weren’t interested in it,” he said.