Fun­ny People

If you showed the first 10 min­utes of Fun­ny Peo­ple to an unknow­ing audi­ence they’d prob­a­bly guess instant­ly that this is a Judd Apa­tow film. That may seem odd con­sid­er­ing that this is only his third time as direc­tor but it isn’t that shock­ing when you reel off the ridicu­lous amount of projects that he’s put his name to.

Since he’s become so ubiq­ui­tous and has some­what pre­ma­ture­ly been hailed as the new king of com­e­dy, Fun­ny Peo­ple takes a more seri­ous turn than pre­vi­ous works but his trade­mark style remains intact.

Adam San­dler is basi­cal­ly play­ing him­self as George Sim­mons, a mar­gin­al­ly tal­ent­ed stand up com­ic who made his name and mil­lions with rub­bish, twee come­dies which has made him more than hap­py to live a lone­ly yet lux­u­ri­ous celebri­ty lifestyle until he dis­cov­ers he’s suf­fer­ing from a rare form of Leukaemia.

Faced with his own mor­tal­i­ty Sim­mons begins to reflect on his life and after hav­ing a mini break­down on stage dis­cov­ers he has no-one to turn to but young, up and com­er Ira (Seth Rogen) who hap­pi­ly quits his job in a local deli to write jokes for his idol.

From then on it feels like two dif­fer­ent films have merged into one as Sim­mons tries to get back with the one that got away (Leslie Mann) who’s now mar­ried with chil­dren to mad Aussie Clarke (Eric Bana, one knife away from being Croc­o­dile Dundee). On the oth­er hand we have Ira, who lives with anoth­er young com­ic Leo (Jon­ah Hill) and a two bit but suc­cess­ful sit­com actor (Jason Schwartz­man), being unwit­ting­ly dragged into all of Sim­mons problems.

Although it isn’t entire­ly orig­i­nal, kudos to Apa­tow for tack­ling a some­what intrigu­ing premise of what a per­son would do when star­ing death in the face. Prob­lem is, Sim­mons is a mod­ern celebri­ty and there­fore, a com­plete douchebag which makes it impos­si­ble to root for him even though he’s dying and the Aussie is the only alternative.

Rogen on the oth­er hand is com­plete­ly adorable as the needy assistant/​writer/​friend will­ing to do what it takes to get ahead (not like that) and leaves his trade­mark filth shtick to Hill, who is great but obvi­ous­ly unchallenged.

The prob­lems with the film all stem from Apatow’s suc­cess and over-sat­u­ra­tion. The actors are the same and the style is the same which begs the ques­tion if he can actu­al­ly cre­ate some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. On top of that, no-one seems to have told him that an arse-numb­ing two-and-a-half hours run­ning time is unnec­es­sary for most films let alone a comedy.

But more annoy­ing than that is despite it being too long, not entire­ly con­vinc­ing and being dis­gust­ing­ly but accu­rate­ly described as a dra-medy, it’s still fun­ny as hell. When it works it real­ly works and with every­one pulling their weight (includ­ing San­dler, seri­ous­ly), you’ll be quot­ing the lines all the way home. Tal­ent­ed peo­ple? Some­what. Fun­ny peo­ple? Most definitely.