Judd Apatow on Bringing Some ‘Special’ Surprise Guests to the New York Comedy Festival

After developing and producing the cult sitcom Freaks and Geeks and directing and producing a slew of movies now considered soulful comedy classics, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40 and Funny People, among them. Judd Apatow missed standup comedy. “My first love was always standup. I didn’t go into comedy to direct movies. I wanted to perform on stage,” he says. “I got very busy working in film and television, so I took a long break. And then I thought, I’m missing out on the part of this that’s the most fun.”

For Apatow, “There’s nothing better than having ideas during the day, sharing them with people that night and finding out that they get laughs. So, I tried to figure out a way to carve that corner into my career, On Nov. 9, Apatow will scratch that itch, when he brings Judd Apatow and Friends to the Beacon Theater in Manhattan as part of the New York Comedy Festival and a benefit for Hurricane Helene relief. The comedy great — whose work always includes catchy soundtracks and surprising musician cameos — last brought the road show to the festival in 2015, and his guests then were good buddy Adam Sandler and Mike Birbiglia.

In an interview with Billboard, Apatow promises that his lineup for the upcoming show — which is never announced in advance — will be “special.” Apatow also speaks about his connection to the music business, his work with Stormy Daniels and why standup comedy is in the midst of a “golden age.”

Have you taken part in the New York Comedy Festival prior to this year?

I performed in the Comedy Festival nine years ago at Carnegie Hall. I had just started doing standup after a long break around that time. We did that event as a benefit for Everytown, for gun safety, and my secret guests that night were Adam Sandler who was just beginning to make his return to standup, and Mike Birbiglia. It was a really fun night.

How will the show be structured this time. Are you going with established talent like Sandler and Birbiglia, or up-and-coming talent?

The fun of it is you don’t know who else is on the show. It’s curated, which means I force my friends to show up and help out. They always do because it’s a benefit for hurricane relief in North Carolina, so all the money goes to the Red Cross. We always make sure to do something surprising and special, and all the money goes to a great cause. I’m excited to be back in New York. I perform at lot at the Comedy Cellar and Gotham Comedy Club in New York, but I don’t tend to do headlining concerts.

This is a rare, very special treat for me because I’m from Long Island. I was born in Queens, grew up in Syosset and Woodbury, and I started doing standup at a place in Huntington that was called the East Side Comedy Club. Back then Eddie Murphy used to come in. That’s where Rosie O’Donnell started and the great Bob Nelson. I love getting a chance to perform in New York because that was always the dream.

Were any friends or family affected by the hurricane there?

I do have a lot of friends in North Carolina. We shot Talladega Nights there, and a couple of years ago we shot the Please Don’t Destroy movie [The Treasure of Foggy Mountain]. We spent a lot of time in Ashville and it’s one of the great cities in the world. It breaks all our hearts to see what they’re going through there. It seemed like a good opportunity to try to pitch in.

You will be doing stand-up as well as your friends. How long have you been working on the set you’ll be doing?

This is the current set. It changes year to year. I did a special for Netflix about about five years ago. Since then, it’s the greatest hits of whatever I’ve been talking about lately. We’re doing two shows for charity. The first is Nov. 3 in Atlanta at the Variety Playhouse and that benefits hurricane relief in Georgia. Jeff Foxworthy and Ricky Velez are performing. That’s just a couple of days before the election. And then the other is a couple of days after so hopefully the country will be in a happy state. We pray.

Is it true that some of the most famous comics in stand-up, film and TV crashed on your couch when you were all starting out?

People didn’t crash on my couch, but right after college, I lived in the [San Fernando] Valley in California with Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and David Spade lived down the street. I was writing for Jim Carrey, and we were all trying to break through. We all used to go to the Improv in the Valley and do sets. Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey were trying to write scripts and figure out how they could star in movies. It’s really exciting to look back now and see what everybody accomplished. We had this amazing moment earlier in the year where Adam won the Mark Twain Award. We all went out to D.C., and it was mind blowing to see his incredible body of work. And it just keeps going. I was proud of everybody’s incredible energy to make people laugh and to continue to search for new ways to do it.

Was Robert Smigel part of your crew, too?

Yeah, I met Robert when Adam was on Saturday Night Live. Then Adam and Robert Smigel and I wrote You Don’t Mess with The Zohan. I never met anybody as funny as Robert Smigel. He proves he’s the king every single day if you pay attention to what he’s putting out into the world on the internet with Triumph [The Insult Comic Dog] and all the other things he does.

You have always demonstrated exceptional musical taste in your films and TV shows, both with their soundtracks and the cameos you have, such as Graham Parker in This Is 40, and E from Eels in your Netflix series, Love. Do you see a connection between comedy and music?

I’ve always loved the music aspect of it because my grandfather, Bobby Shad, owned a record company, Mainstream Records, and was a music producer. He produced the first Janis Joplin record, Big Brother & the Holding Company. He produced a lot of the early Ted Nugent and The Amboy Dukes records, but he also did Clifford Brown and Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie records. He ran Verve Records for a long time. He worked with Mercury. He was always this magical presence in our world. I wish I could have gotten into music, but I have absolutely no musical talent. So, I found ways to have music be a big part of my work. I was lucky enough to get to produce Popstar with The Lonely Island and cowrite Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And music played a big part of our movie This is 40. James Taylor and Eminem were in Funny People. If you pay attention, I’m constantly trying to bridge comedy and music whenever possible.

Is there anyone you’re listening to right now that you like?

I don’t know if you can call it new, but I was literally just listening to Willie Nelson’s version of the Beck song, “Lost Cause,” which is on the forthcoming Willie Nelson record, The Last Leaf on the Tree. His 76th album. I’ve done some music documentaries. I co-directed with Michael Bonfiglio a documentary about the Avett Brothers called Make It Last, and I just started working with my friend Chris Wilcha (Flipside) on a documentary about Billy Strings. It proves you can try to be a part of it even if you only can play five chords on the guitar.

I was totally unaware that you were the executive producer of the Stormy Daniels documentary, Stormy. How did that come about?

I’ve known Stormy Daniels for a long time. She did parts in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. She actually told everybody on set of Knocked Up that she had just slept with Donald Trump. I believe she shot it right after that happened and she told everyone. No one was that shocked, because at the time Donald Trump was just a failing businessman and the star of a game show. So, none of us really reacted — but we did remember it when it went public, because we knew it was true [since] she told us before he went into politics.

I saw on IMDb that you are involved in a project called Godspell 2025. Is that going to be a straight adaptation or a comic version?

It’s actually a documentary being made by Nick Davis, and I’m one of the producers on it. It’s about a 1972 production of Godspell in Toronto, which starred people who went on to become some of the biggest comedic acting stars for the next five decades. Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Eugene Levy and Paul Shaffer were all in this mythic production. It’s a look at what happens and then the journeys of everyone afterwards.

As a comedy multi-hyphenate, do you have a take on where the heat is now — stand-up vs. film and TV vs. social media?   

I think it has been a golden age for live comedy for a while now. I think people like it because a lot of what they’re getting in movies and television feels algorithm driven. We all get the sense that maybe AI is beginning to make some of these choices and live comedy is the one place where you get a woman or a man saying whatever the hell they want to say, and they’re putting on their own show and it’s not watered-down. You get to spend the time with an enormous, sometimes a group of people laughing together. It’s very communal. The quality of standup is really, really high right now.

Who are some comics that you find particularly talented?

I like Ricky Velez, who is working with me in Atlanta. He was also one of the stars and a coproducer of The King of Staten Island [which starred Pete Davidson]. He was on The Daily Show as a correspondent, and he’s one of my favorite comedians. We’re making a documentary about Maria Bamford, who has always been one of my favorites. There are so many people who are really strong.