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      Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan, Our Most Underappreciated Comic

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      As he turns 80, don’t be fooled by his serious music. From the start, his work has been filled with a cockeyed humor that can range from corny jokes to dark wit.At the end of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen brothers movie set in the Greenwich Village music scene of 1961, the title character, a gifted but struggling folk singer on the verge of giving up, leaves the stage of the fabled Gaslight Café as a newcomer fills his spot. What’s clear after the first note is that it’s Bob Dylan at the start of one of the greatest careers in pop music More

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      Paul Mooney, Trailblazing Comedian, Dies at 79

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      A comic writer and performer, he was known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism and social justice and for his work with Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.Paul Mooney, the boundary-pushing comedian and comedy writer who made his views on race, racism and social justice abundantly clear as Richard Pryor’s longtime behind-the-scenes partner, a contributor to “In Living Color” and a performer and writer on “Chappelle’s Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 79.The cause was a heart attack, said Cassandra Williams, his publicist. Mr. Mooney was found to have prostate cancer in 2014.If you knew Mr. Pryor’s work, you probably knew Mr. Mooney’s words. The two worked together on the short-lived 1977 variety series “The Richard Pryor Show”; “Pryor’s Place” (1984), Mr. Pryor’s unlikely attempt at a children’s show; television specials; the album and film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982); the autobiographical film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986), which Mr. Pryor starred in and directed; and Mr. Pryor’s 1975 appearance as host on “Saturday Night Live.” That episode included a now-famous escalating-racial-insults job-interview sketch with Chevy Chase, written by Mr. Mooney.In an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Pryor’s death in 2005 at 65, Mr. Mooney described himself as Mr. Pryor’s “Black writer.”As a writer on “In Living Color,” Keenen Ivory Wayans’s hit sketch comedy show that had its premiere on Fox in 1990 with a predominantly Black cast, Mr. Mooney was the inspiration for and co-creator of Homey D. Clown, a less than jovial circus-costumed character who was forced to interact with children (part of his parole agreement) and usually ended up frightening them.As a writer and performer on “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future (Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political prospects, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage), appeared as the expert in “Ask a Black Dude” and reviewed movies alongside white female critics. Discussing “Gone With the Wind,” he revealed that Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved character known as Mammy, had been reincarnated as Oprah Winfrey — for the money.Mr. Mooney’s film roles included the singer Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) and Junebug, an old-school stand-up comedian with equal amounts of dignity, integrity and genius, in “Bamboozled” (2000), Spike Lee’s dark farce about a television network bringing back the minstrel-show genre.On “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future.Comedy CentralPaul Mooney was born Paul Gladney on Aug. 4, 1941, in Shreveport, La., to George Gladney and LaVoya Ealy, who were both teenagers. When Paul was 7, he moved with his mother and her parents to Oakland, where he was largely raised by his grandmother, Aimay Ealy.Although some reports said he had taken his stage surname from the Hollywood actor Paul Muni, he corrected that in his 2007 memoir, “White Is the New Black.” His family loved nicknames, he wrote, and his grandmother just started calling him Mooney when he was a child.Paul was 14 when he and his mother moved to nearby Berkeley. There, at a local movie theater, he won his first “hambone” contest, performing an African-American stomping dance that involves slapping and patting the body like a drum. It was then that he realized that he loved applause — and prize money.He had his first taste of fame when he became a teenage regular on a local dance-party television show. After the Army (he was drafted and served in Germany), he came home to all kinds of sales jobs and, even more, to a future in entertainment. He did his first stand-up comedy (alongside friends who were folk singers), created a Black improvisational group called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs, and joined the noted improv group the Second City. He also took a job for a while as ringmaster of the traveling Gatti-Charles Circus, which, he said, just called for looking good and telling jokes.Mr. Mooney and Richard Pryor (seated) attended the premiere of Spike Lee’s concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy” in Los Angeles in 2000. With them were, from left, Walter Latham, one of the film’s producers, along with Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Mr. Lee and D.L. Hughley.Fred Prouser/ReutersHe met Mr. Pryor in the late 1960s at a party, and they soon discovered that their personal lives were antithetical. “Pryor was a self-loathing, drug-addicted genius, Mooney an industrious teetotaler, but they bonded over laughs and a distrust of the white Hollywood power structure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2010.Mr. Mooney continued his comedy career after Mr. Pryor’s death, preserving his routines in documentaries and DVDs like “The Godfather of Comedy” (2012) and “Jesus Is Black — So Was Cleopatra — Know Your History” (2007).In “Jesus Is Black,” his three sons — Shane (whose mother was Yvonne Carothers, whom Mr. Pryor married in 1973) and Daryl and Dwayne (twin sons from an earlier relationship) — appeared as themselves. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Mooney had strong opinions, even about himself.“Whatever that thing is that white people like in Blacks, I don’t have it,” he wrote in his memoir. “Maybe it’s my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don’t have it.”Marie Fazio contributed reporting. More

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      That ‘Ziwe’ Look

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      On her new Showtime series, Ziwe Fumudoh’s feminine-with-a-wink style enables her sharp comedy.In the first episode of her new variety series on Showtime, the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh asks the writer Fran Lebowitz: “What bothers you more: slow walkers or racism?”“This character is hyperbolic,” Ms. Fumudoh said a few days before the premiere of “Ziwe.” “It’s only hyperbole that somebody would ask that question. And you see that reflected in how I dress.”Ms. Fumudoh was explaining how the wardrobe for the series came together: a tornado of pink that has sucked up a few feather boas, a mountain of crystal embellishments and an assortment of fuzzy hats, plastic visors, tiny sunglasses and opera gloves. When the costume designer Pamela Shepard-Hill would add a ring to an outfit, Ms. Fumudoh would ask for six more, “and then let’s do a cuff that’s entirely made of diamonds,” she said.On “Ziwe,” whether during a confrontational interview or parody music video, Ms. Fumudoh plays an audacious, quick-witted consumerist, whose attitude and armor is inspired by an unholy marriage of Dionne from “Clueless” and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life,” along with a few other ultrafeminine pop culture figures of the 1990s and aughts. (In a sketch about plastic surgery, she wears matching pink sweatpants and a sleeveless crop top, wordlessly making a reference to Amy Poehler’s desperate mom from “Mean Girls.”)As a comedian who became famous for making people uncomfortable with questions about race and class, Ms. Fumudoh, 29, uses fashion like a weapon, creating an air of innocence with her Delia’s catalog looks, then slicing through it with the sharp heel of a Barbie stiletto.She is also an exceptionally physical performer, writhing and jumping through her musical numbers, whether channeling a jazzy “Chicago” siren or a girl-group member, circa 1999. Extensive legs-in-the-air choreography had to be taken into consideration when planning her ensembles, Ms. Shepard-Hill said.Ms. Fumudoh, in a LaQuan Smith catsuit, rose to prominence on Instagram Live, wearing equally bold outfits and makeup.Greg Endries/Showtime“We would have fittings, and I would be like, ‘OK, do your choreography,’” she said. “Then instantly: ‘That’s inappropriate. Take that off. That’s actually not OK for Showtime.”For the music videos in particular, hyperbolic Ziwe borrows from the real Ziwe’s closet. In a song called “Stop Being Poor” (a joke, in Episode 3, about people who believe being poor is a choice), Ms. Fumudoh wears a skintight all-crystal minidress by Aidan Euan of Akna.“How absurd is it to have a dress that luxurious in a time like this?” she said. “It so encapsulates the idea of ‘Stop Being Poor’ that I got it for ‘Stop Being Poor’ before we even wrote the song ‘Stop Being Poor,’ when I just knew that it was something I wanted to do.”In the 1920s-inspired number “Lisa Called the Cops on Black People,” she wears her own off-the-shoulder black velvet-and-mesh catsuit by LaQuan Smith.When putting together a mood board for the show, Ms. Shepard-Hill included iconic — a favorite “Ziwe” adjective — models like Donyale Luna and Naomi Campbell, as well as rappers like Rico Nasty and Saweetie. She included Josephine Baker, the music-hall star and World War II spy, too.“It was a real range of women that span time but are all iconic in their visuals, iconic in their style and sensibility,” said Ms. Shepard Hill, 37, who is also a stylist and instructor at Parsons School of Design.But in creating her wardrobe, Ms. Fumudoh was also thinking about the white comedians who dominate late-night TV and how to portray herself as the opposite of the suit-wearing men she calls “Jimmy, Jimmy, John, John,” whose wood-heavy sets are “really, really masculine — all blues and blacks and sharp images.”Ms. Fumudoh credits “Legally Blonde,” Rihanna and Lindsay Lohan (among others) as influences on her character’s style.Greg Endries/Showtime“If all of late night is painted with masculinity, my show is hyper-feminine,” she said. “I wear a lot of sparkles. You would never have seen John Oliver in a choker.“When I was growing up, and especially when I first started in media, the idea was to downplay your femininity. If a woman wants to be taken seriously, she wears glasses and pants and she talks with a lower voice like she works for Theranos.”On the wall of the set where Ms. Fumudoh conducts her interviews, there’s a large photo of a young Oprah Winfrey, who deeply influenced “Ziwe,” Ms. Fumudoh said. The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry interview was broadcast the night before the team began cutting the show, and the drama of it “really shaped the way we framed every episode.” It’s not a stretch to imagine Ziwe delivering the same scene-stealing “silent or silenced” line.There’s something else about the plastered photo of Ms. Winfrey that feels tied to “Ziwe”: In it, she’s wearing pink and pearls. Early in her career, Ms. Winfrey found a way to ask tough questions while communicating her femininity.In the first episode of “Ziwe,” when Ms. Fumudoh sits across from Ms. Lebowitz, Ms. Fumudoh wears a short black blazer dress with electric pink lapels, and her own thigh-high chunky-heel leather boots. It’s not a designer piece; it’s available at AD Los Angeles for $149.Despite the opulent aesthetic of “Ziwe,” the costume budget was somewhat limited, in part because it’s a new show, Ms. Shepard-Hill said. The dream, if there’s a second season? “A whole in-house team, where everything could be custom-built from head to toe,” she said.The blazer dress outfit was originally intended for a sketch in which Ziwe, channeling a billionaire Marilyn Monroe acolyte, announces her candidacy for New York City mayor. (“Gone are the days of old white men abusing the office of the mayor to do crooked favors for their ugly friends. Because I don’t have any friends, and I only do favors for myself.”)But Ms. Fumudoh felt strongly about wearing it for the first episode instead, using it to set that subversive anti-late-night host tone for the series.“That pink lapel is such a splash accent that it really captures what the show is,” she said. “All the outfits are telling a story in, like, 19 different ways, beyond the actual text that we write and say.” More

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      Hannah Einbinder: Portrait of a Young Comic on the Cusp

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      As the daughter of Laraine Newman, she has an understanding of the ups and downs of early success. Will those lessons be helpful for her first series, “Hacks”?Right before the shutdown last year, the comic Hannah Einbinder became, at 23, the youngest (and as of now last) stand-up to perform a set on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” making a splash in her network television debut. More

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      Patti Harrison Wants to See What She Can Do

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      Known for scene-stealing side characters, the comedian and actress is pushing past her limits with her starring role in “Together Together.”Patti Harrison, the actress and comedian, has taken one acting class in her life, an introductory course at Ohio University. “It was taught by a grad student and was very loose,” she said. “We mostly just did yoga.”One assignment was to perform an interpretive dance based on a poem. Harrison searched online for “dumb emo poems” and found one called “A Darkness Inside Me.” “Looking back on it now, I think it was about someone who’s an active shooter,” she said. “I did it as a joke, but no one took it as one.”Not many of Harrison’s jokes have fallen flat since. “Scene stealing” is one of the adjectives most applied to Harrison, who has appeared in alt-comedies like “Shrill,” “Search Party” and “Made for Love.” The downside of stealing scenes, of course, is that you generally don’t steal them on your own show. “I haven’t been in a million things,” she said. “And most of them have been really small, or guest parts.”This week, Harrison, 30, moves from one-offs and recurring parts to her first starring role in a feature film, in “Together Together,” one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The dramedy stars Harrison as a 26-year-old barista named Anna who is hired as a gestational surrogate by Matt, a single 40-something app designer (Ed Helms) who really, really wants a baby — as well as some sort of connection with the woman who’s having it.Ed Helms and Patti Harrison in “Together Together.”Tiffany Roohani/Bleecker StreetHarrison has already earned rave reviews, with critics describing her performance as “groundbreaking” and “revelatory”; The New York Times called the movie “sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful,” praising Harrison’s portrayal of Anna and her rapport with co-star Helms.“Patti was the actress for the part,” said the director Nikole Beckwith. “And to get her in her first leading role, I just feel like the luckiest person on Earth.”In a recent video interview, Harrison was in her home in Los Angeles talking about her childhood interests (there were many), the questionable roles she’s been offered as a transgender actress — “the first thing producers see in me is like, I’m trans” — and how “Together Together” came to be.The stories come fast and looping. Ask Harrison what she was into as a kid, and you get the full menu, in chronological order, from age 4 through high school: sharks; dinosaurs; insects/arachnids; Pokémon (“I was super, super into Pokémon”); video games; karate (“I was like, if I ever have to beat up 20 people at one time for absolutely no reason at all, I want to be able to do that”); guns; cars.“Together Together” came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison, whose mother is Vietnamese, grew up the youngest of seven siblings in a rural, conservative town in Ohio called, of all things, Orient. “I looked at the census when I was in high school, and it said there were zero Asian people in Orient,” she said.In college, Harrison joined an improv group at the prompting of a friend. She felt an immediate connection — the tightrope feel of it, the magic moments springing seemingly out of nowhere. “It still triggers a lot of anxiety in me,” she said. “But when it goes well, it’s amazing. You can make up stuff, and things can seem brilliant on accident. People will imbue intention into everything that you do.”In 2015, Harrison moved to New York and began doing standup comedy. There, she found fellow funny people like Julio Torres (“Los Espookys”), Jo Firestone (“Shrill”), and Ziwe Fumudoh, who recently filmed the music video “Stop Being Poor” with Harrison for her self-titled Showtime variety series. “Patti’s comedy comes from such a pure creative place, where she never does exactly the same thing twice,” Fumudoh said. “She’s phenomenally creative and original.”In 2017, Harrison was recording a commercial when she got a call from “The Tonight Show” to do a bit for the show that night about her reaction to Trump’s just-announced ban on transgender people in the military. (“I was shocked,” she said in the bit, “because I assumed he already did that.”) After the appearance, things exploded for Harrison. “My agent was like, there’s all these people who want to meet with you now,” she said.“But at the same time,” she continued, “there were a lot of people I felt that had pigeonholed me into this idea of what they thought I was. They were calling me an activist without any prior knowledge of me other than this piece, because I’m a transgender person who had spoken on something.”So while the appearance got her noticed, it was a very specific sort of notice, at least at first. In those early meetings with production companies, Harrison was brimming with pitches like, say, the one for a show about a dog and its dysfunctional, codependent relationship with the little bird that lives in his rectum. (“I gave them my gold ideas,” she said.) But all they were interested in were “stories about trans girls coming out and getting rejected by their families,” she said, or having her come on shows to talk about the difference between being gay and trans.All of which made “Together Together” that much more special. Here was a story about a clearly cisgender woman — the plot revolves around her character’s pregnancy, after all — in which the relationship between the younger woman and the older man is much more nuanced than one sees in a lot of rom-coms. Not as much will-they-or-won’t-they, and more: Where does all this lead, if anywhere?“It really takes a lot of humility to engage in a story like this, and Patti is very humble, and always authentic,” Helms said. “But then she’s also one of the funniest human beings on Earth.”The film came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. “I didn’t know if I was going to go into acting more, or kind of lean into TV writing or comedy,” she said. “And I was processing a lot of feelings about my self-esteem, and body dysmorphia. But then I got the script, and it was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Beckwith, the director, had spotted Harrison performing on a late night show and realized she had found her Anna. Harrison had an “amazing, salty, a little spiky, humor and way about her,” Beckwith said, that went hand in hand with her vision of Anna as “warm, like Patti, but not a totally open book.”“Together Together” was shot in just 19 days in the fall of 2019, with limited chances for retakes. “The scene where her water breaks — that was our version of a stunt,” said Beckwith. “And we only had two pairs of pants, so we could only do it twice.”Playing the lead “was very scary,” Harrison admitted. “But if I had known how much work it was going to be, I would have been way more scared. I think I was shielded a bit by being stupid about it.”The script for “Together Together,” Harrison said, “was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison is getting fewer pitches for trans-centric roles nowadays, and she is busier than ever. In addition to “Together Together,” she is appearing in the final season of “Shrill” and singing, dancing and acting in “Ziwe,” and recently she joined the cast of the feature film “The Lost City of D,” alongside Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.Still, that doesn’t mean her days of being typecast are over. “Now I’m seeing a trend where people want me to read for stuff where I play a social media-obsessed millennial, this vapid turd person. So I’m moving away from offers where, ‘you’re a de-transitioning sex worker who finds that he likes his old lifestyle a little better than she thought,’ to ‘you’re one of the stupidest people on Earth. You only like social media and likes.’”The confidence Harrison gained from going “so far out of my comfort zone” has only fed her desire to move even farther out of it. What she’d really love to do is some sort of science fiction movie, the more action the better, she said, where she might indulge her childhood love of karate and get to say stuff like “zorbon crystals.” “I think there will always be a part of me that kind of fanboys out about action sci-fi,” she said, “just to see if I could do it.” More

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      Ziwe Endorses Box Braids and ‘Real Housewives’

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      The 29-year-old comedian brings her Instagram and YouTube antics to a prime time Showtime series, “Ziwe,” which premieres May 9.Ziwe, the mononymic master of the viral “gotcha!” moment, swears she isn’t out to get anyone.Sure, the 29-year-old Nigerian-American comedian’s largely white guests on her YouTube and Instagram Live show, “Baited With Ziwe,” have a proclivity to make cringe-worthy comments when it comes to race. (The Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway couldn’t correctly identify the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, and the cookbook author Alison Roman was nearly stumped when asked to name five Asian people.)But Ziwe doesn’t set out to embarrass her guests. “The goal is not to hurt anyone or get them canceled,” explained the Northwestern University graduate, who cut her teeth working on “The Colbert Report.” “The goal is to have a really thoughtful, productive conversation.”The confrontational questions — often about race — and uncomfortable pauses are, she said, intended to be a learning experience. “They’re all willing,” she said of her guests, though even she isn’t exactly sure why they agree to come on the show. “They’re open to looking silly for a greater discourse beyond both of us.”Ziwe, who uses only her first name professionally — her last name, Fumudoh, proved too tricky for comedy club hosts to announce — will bring her punch lines to a bigger screen when her new late-night sketch comedy series, “Ziwe,” which rhymes with “freeway,” premieres on Showtime on May 9.With six episodes, the series will feature guest interviews, musical numbers and field pieces, and will draw from her go-to brand of humor, which she describes as “highly satirical” and “bombastic.” (Her dream guest? Kim Kardashian. “I’d love to get her perspective on race in America as one of the most famous women in world history,” she said.)In a phone conversation from her Brooklyn apartment, Ziwe shared her cultural essentials, including how watching “The Real Housewives” counts as homework (hear her out), the benefits of box braids and why fuzzy rugs are bringing her all kinds of joy amid her claustrophobic work-from-home existence.1. “The Real Housewives”At first, I looked down at “Real Housewives.” I was like, “I never watch reality TV, I read books.” And then, in college, I started watching “Beverly Hills,” which is like this horrid, dark underbelly of reality TV — I’d never seen this type of storytelling before. Like, on “Orange County,” pretending to have cancer on national television for attention — who does that? As a writer and performer I’m constantly engaging with different characters and I’ll rewatch episodes trying to figure them out. I’ve watched full seasons in a day, from eyes open to eyes shut.2. Emma Brewin HatsThese faux fur, fuzzy bucket hats are my emotional support animals. Rihanna wore a green one in 2017, and I always was thinking about it, but never took the dive to purchase one. But then the pandemic happened and I just needed something to make me feel anything, so I bought a blue hat, and then a green one and an orange one and a black one and a wide-brimmed dark red one … I wear them every day, in a different color to fit my mood. They’re also great for Zoom calls when I don’t want to do my hair. I’m wearing one right now, actually!3. Nicholas Britell SoundtracksI’m writing a book and can’t listen to songs with lyrics when I write, and so I often turn to Nicholas Britell soundtracks, whether it’s “Succession” or “If Beale Street Could Talk” or “The King,” with Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson. I love the way he uses strings and piano chords. “Moonlight” was his breakout moment for me, but he’s a really good composer with a wide range of work. I’ve listened to his entire catalog.4. DocumentariesI like to learn passively, and documentaries are a perfect vehicle for that. “Varsity Blues” is fantastic. The lack of impulse control to photoshop your picture as a coxswain for crew is beyond comprehension. It’s like “Real Housewives” where it’s stranger than fiction you could ever imagine. And they affect me viscerally! After watching the James Baldwin and Toni Morrison documentaries, I go to my computer and start writing furiously because it’s like, “These are great American authors, OMG, I want to be just like them.”5. Blood Orange San PellegrinoI ordered San Pellegrino at the beginning of the pandemic thinking it was seltzer, but I was surprised — and delighted — to learn it was actually juice. I had to cut myself off at one point, though, because I was drinking a lot of these. My friend was like, “You know there’s sugar in that, right?” I was like, “Oh no, it’s just juice, it’s cool,” and then I checked the can and there was sugar. But it’s so delicious. I have one San Pellegrino blood orange left in my fridge — if it’s just a really bad day, I get to drink that.6. CandlesI think every woman hits a certain age and you’ve got to buy a couple of candles. Frères Branchiaux ones, which are made by three young brothers of color who also do sprays for your linens, are really nice, and the profits go to homeless shelters. There’s a candle for every occasion — lavender for the winter, citrus for the summer, or a smoggy oak wood for fall. I have three on my coffee table, multiple in my room and a drawer full of them.7. “Clueless”I would argue my entire personality is based on this film, which was written and directed by Amy Heckerling and should have been nominated for an Oscar. It’s one of the best American satires of the 21st century. I’m so influenced by the schoolgirl outfits, the matching plaid sets, the mixing patterns and textures, the box braids. The fur cuffs — I love a fur cuff. Mona May was the costume designer for “Clueless,” and she was so forward-thinking setting trends for this definitive ’90s girl style.8. Box BraidsWhen I was a kid, my mom made me get box braids, and I’d be like, “Oh, God” — what kid wants to sit for eight hours to get their hair braided? And then I saw Dionne, a character in “Clueless” who had box braids, and I was like, “OK wow, this wasn’t just my parents forcing their culture on me.” It really helped me come into myself. The nice thing about box braids is once you’ve sat down for eight hours to do them, you’re free. It’s like “I never have to brush my hair for eight weeks,” you just get to whip your hair back and forth like Willow Smith. I started wearing box braids again the past two years and every summer, I’m like, “It’s box braid season.” I get 34 inches and I’m walking around like I’m Nicki Minaj knocking things over with my braids like a whip.9. Fuzzy RugsI love to sit on the floor. Maybe it’s this infantile thing with fuzzy hats and fuzzy rugs, but I am moved by textures. On my set for my new show, I have a chair upholstered with a fuzzy rug that I do all my interviews out of. And at home, I have a white fuzzy rug. I haven’t been to a beach in years so I have to replace the idea of sand with a rug. It’s just how it feels on your toes.10. “Oceans” By Jay-Z Ft. Frank OceanI’m a huge fan of Jay-Z as a rapper and Frank Ocean’s musicality, so the song is a really good marriage of two things I love. The melody is really, really calming, but then it has lines like “Only Christopher we acknowledge is Wallace/I don’t even like Washingtons in my pocket.” It’s just really audacious and bold and counterculture. More

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      Seth Rogen and the Secret to Happiness

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Seth Rogen’s home sits on several wooded acres in the hills above Los Angeles, under a canopy of live oak and eucalyptus trees strung with outdoor pendants that light up around dusk, when the frogs on the grounds start croaking. I pulled up at the front gate on a recent afternoon, and Rogen’s voice rumbled through the intercom. “Hellooo!” He met me at the bottom of his driveway, which is long and steep enough that he keeps a golf cart up top “for schlepping big things up the driveway that are too heavy to walk,” he said, adding, as if bashful about coming off like the kind of guy who owns a dedicated driveway golf cart, “It doesn’t get a ton of use.”Rogen wore a beard, chinos, a cardigan from the Japanese brand Needles and Birkenstocks with marled socks — laid-back Canyon chic. He led me to a switchback trail cut into a hillside, which we climbed to a vista point. Below us was Rogen’s office; the house he shares with his wife, Lauren, and their 11-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Zelda; and the converted garage where they make pottery. I was one of the first people, it turns out, to see the place. “I haven’t had many people over,” Rogen said, “because we moved in during the pandemic.”Coyote paw prints pocked the trail. Water burbled somewhere beneath us. It was an idyllic scene disturbed only by Rogen’s phone, which was vibrating madly with messages. That morning, Houseplant, the cannabis company he co-founded in 2019 in Canada, his native country, officially started selling its own weed strains in California. Within moments of the launch there was an hourlong wait to enter the web store, and before long the whole site crashed under the weight of Rogen-loving hordes clamoring to buy what he described as his personally “hand-smoked” nugs. (The company also sells stoner home goods, like a blocky, Bauhausian table lighter designed to be impossible to lose.) “Crazy day,” he said, tapping at his screen. “I’m literally responding to people on Twitter, telling them we’re working on it — doing my own customer-service strategy, basically!”Rogen’s overwhelmingly casual demeanor — chucklingly agreeable, continually stoned — has long belied his productivity: He has been working almost constantly since he was 13, when he started doing stand-up comedy around Vancouver. But it’s still easy to mistake him for a less frenetically ambitious person. A few weeks before I visited, we scheduled a 9:30 a.m. video call, during which, right up top, I watched him light a chubby joint. “I smoke weed all day,” he said. “You’ll see that when we’re together.” He punctuated this with a warm burst of laughter familiar to anyone who has spent 10 seconds in conversation with him: a low, gravelly cackle, like Chewbacca doing his best Fran Drescher.Rogen was readying the release of “Yearbook,” a humor collection he’d spent nearly three years writing. But on social media, besides some posts about the book and about Houseplant, he’d mostly been making fun of Ted Cruz and posting pictures of his own trippy ceramic creations: undulating wide-mouth vases with speckled fluorescent finishes, nubby-glazed ashtrays with concave joint-holders affixed to their lips. And so I’d gotten it into my head that Rogen had downshifted into something of an early-retirement rhythm — the superstar comedian approaching middle age, shuffling between his memoirs and his pottery wheels, with nothing left to prove and nothing particularly urgent to do.I was wrong. “Right now I’m writing two movies with Evan,” he told me, referring to his lifelong friend and collaborator, Evan Goldberg, with whom Rogen began writing screenplays in eighth grade and with whom he founded the production company Point Grey. “One’s called ‘Escape,’ which hasn’t been announced and no one knows about, that we’ve been working on for years, which hopefully we’ll make next year. And then we’re writing this movie for Luca Guadagnino” — the “Call Me by Your Name” director — “about Scotty Bowers, this Hollywood hustler from the ’40s. And we’re producing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated movie.” On top of these projects were two others, in different media, that he asked me not to name, and then there was Houseplant. “On a given day I work on seven different things, probably, in little chunks,” he said, then puffed on the joint, shrugging. “But I don’t have kids!”At 39, Rogen himself remains admirably childlike. A quarter century since he first set foot on a comedy-club stage, he has somehow preserved the openness of that 13-year-old, never quite hardening into a settled form. “It’s something I chase — that feeling of, Oh, this thing is working. Now this thing is working,” he said. Rogen set out knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life — make people laugh, smoke weed and hang out with his friends — and somehow managed to turn those three goals into the organizing principles of his whole career.We descended the hillside, and Rogen got a call: The web store was back up. “Fantastic,” he said, swiping over to Twitter to share the news as we strolled over to his pottery workshop. “Ceramics is something else that having kids would make impossible,” he told me. When the subject of childlessness arises in interviews, Rogen likes to half-joke that he and Lauren did the math and decided they’d rather not have kids, and enjoy a life of continued freedom and risk, maybe regretting this decision for “a couple years before we die” than have kids now, dislike the life change tremendously and regret it for “the next 50 years.”The workshop smelled, unsurprisingly, dank. “There are probably some roaches sitting around,” he said. Through Houseplant, and on his own, Rogen has advocated for expunging criminal records that stem from marijuana arrests, and he is heartened by the drug’s steady creep toward legalization in the United States. He stressed that its illegality was “racist.” He went on: “It’s insane to arrest people for something that never should have been illegal in the first place. It’s just a way to put Black people in jail.”Mark Rogen, Seth’s father, told me that his son suffered from an undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder as a kid, until “the miracle of marijuana changed his life — we had him on a strict diet that helped keep him in balance, but it wasn’t 100 percent. Marijuana finally made his cells relax.” Rogen compares his own weed habit to wearing shoes: He could probably make it through a day without it, but “it’s just not how I would prefer to be feeling.” He acts stoned, he directs stoned, he does interviews stoned. Absent the cultural stigma around marijuana, Rogen said, “it’s just a tool we use to make our experience more palatable, and some people need those tools a lot more than others. For me it’s like shoes. For you it might be like sunglasses. Not everyone’s the same. If someone doesn’t need to smoke weed? Great. It’s the same as someone telling me they don’t wear glasses. ‘Mazel tov! You don’t wear glasses. I do!’”The pottery studio was cluttered but clean. There were three wheels and a kiln, and several worktables covered with test tiles for trying out new glazes, freeze-dried treats for Zelda and ceramics in various states of completion. Rogen’s pottery is good — sometimes astonishingly so — and the images he posts online routinely generate hundreds of thousands of likes. “I’ve spent years working on movies that fewer people pay attention to than a vase I spent 40 minutes on,” he said, laughing.Rogen credited Lauren, who is also an actor and filmmaker, with encouraging him to try ceramics. “She made all the stuff in our house,” he said. But it was the late L.A. artist Ken Price — best known for his gloopily biomorphic, wild-hued sculptures — who first piqued Rogen’s interest in the form. “I went to his last show at LACMA in 2012, the one Frank Gehry did the installation for,” Rogen recalled. “It’s the first time I saw ceramics and said, ‘What the [expletive] is happening here?’” It was at this moment that Rogen noticed my T-shirt, which was printed with images of Price’s ceramics. “Where did that come from?!” he asked, delighted. “That’s amazing. I need that.”Rogen has collected art for several years, with a focus on Pop and street art. In addition to a trove of vintage ashtrays he began amassing as a teenager, he showed me some painted sculptures by Barry McGee, figurines by KAWS and a large color drawing by George Condo. With ceramics, Rogen found a practice that spoke to both the left and right sides of his brain. He flipped open a notebook in which he’d written the chemical breakdowns of various glaze recipes. “This reminds me of the camera side of filmmaking, which is very scientific and technical, and which I actually understand really well,” he said. “It’s funny, whenever it’s revealed to someone that I know about cameras, they’re surprised, and it’s, like, I make movies!”Rogen held up a vase he’d glazed with a multitude of wormy Cronenbergian protuberances. “This one’s gross,” he said, not unlovingly. “But what I love about it is it makes you want to touch it.” He showed me a more immediately pleasing one, with a saucer-shaped mouth and squat body he’d glazed with psychedelic swirls of blues, greens, reds and oranges, evoking a gasoline rainbow. “Beauty was not emphasized in the filmmaking climate that I grew up in,” Rogen said. “And we were never trying to make our work beautiful. We were trying to make it feel real and accessible and grounded.” He went on: “We were always trying to serve comedy, and beauty doesn’t always serve comedy.” Recently, he said, he’d started wondering what a beautiful Seth Rogen comedy might look like.Rather than a hobby indulged in a vacuum, ceramics had become deeply enmeshed with Rogen’s sense of himself as a creative person — and had occasioned epiphanies he wanted to weave back into moviemaking. He talks about the meditative appeal of throwing clay, and about the particular pleasure, for someone who works in the increasingly dematerialized “content” industry, of a creative endeavor oriented around tactile artifacts. Beyond this, he told me, ceramics offered him an outlet for experimental impulses that were harder to chase in his day job: Making movies, he often felt that “there’s too much money involved to be truly experimental. When someone’s given you $40 million, is that really the time to be trying things you’re not sure are gonna work? But what pottery has shown me is there is actually a lot more experimenting we could be doing.” For instance, “I was watching the making of ‘Phantom Thread,’ and Paul Thomas Anderson is trying out 300 different film stocks — it’s not like Evan and I don’t want to do that, but they don’t let us do that. And we’re probably not fighting hard enough to do that.”Under quarantine, as a kind of bonding exercise, Point Grey started a virtual movie club for its 13 employees. On occasion, directors and actors themselves joined video calls to discuss films they’d worked on: Amy Heckerling (who talked about making “Clueless”), James L. Brooks (“Terms of Endearment”), Keanu Reeves (“The Matrix”) and Nancy Meyers, among others. One week, Alfonso Cuarón popped in to talk about “Y Tu Mamá También,” and something he said lodged in Rogen’s head. “He talked about making that movie after he’d made some big studio films,” Rogen recalled. “And he said: ‘With this one, we wanted to make the movie we would have made before we even went to film school, as though we knew nothing. Any idea we had, we would do it, even if it seemed crazy or stupid or pretentious or whatever. We wouldn’t think about, Oh, it’s been done, or people will hate that, or that’s too weird.’“It was so cool to hear him talk about that,” Rogen went on, “because — speaking to experimentation — he’d been locked into this thing where he was making big, expensive movies very early in his career, and then he kind of went back and said, No, this is what I want to do: Reset what I’m known for and take insane swings.”Chris Buck for The New York TimesRogen built his comedic persona around the prerogatives of adolescence in real time: He started out telling summer-camp and Jewish-grandparent jokes in his stand-up act, improvising scenes on the NBC high school sitcom “Freaks and Geeks” and co-writing what would become the 2007 smash hit “Superbad.” Working on early drafts of that script in eighth grade with Goldberg, Rogen told me: “It was, like, we’re writing our favorite movie of all time, because it doesn’t exist. There are movies we like, but there’s no movie that’s us, with all the things we specifically want out of a movie: It’s about teenagers, they’re trying to buy booze, they’re trying to get laid, they’re failing, there are cops, they’re stupid. … ”This preoccupation has persisted into Rogen’s adulthood, from his 2007 star turn in Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up,” in which he played a 20-something dude jostled out of an extended adolescence by an unexpected pregnancy after a drunken hookup, to “Long Shot” (2019), in which he played a 30-something dude who shares an adolescent bond with a politician (Charlize Theron) and works to remind her of her youthful ideals even as she works to disabuse him of what she sees as his stubborn naïveté. Through Point Grey (named for the secondary school he and Goldberg attended), Rogen has put out “Good Boys” and “Blockers,” wildly profitable R-rated teen comedies. Last year, he voiced a teenager on “Big Mouth.” He has said that he envisions Point Grey’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot as “a great action-adventure movie that’s also a great teenage movie.”I asked Rogen what it was about youth he found so compelling. “That time in your life is very fertile for good stories,” he said, “in the sense of lessons learned, things that are formative to you, things where you thought one thing then thought another. … ” He mulled it over a bit more. “I think a ton about organization — that’s a word, creatively, that comes into my head a lot. People crave stories because what stories do is organize experiences in ways that make them make sense. Like, the world is very scary and chaotic-feeling,” and youth is “the time in people’s lives that feels it could use the most organizing. It’s the least-reconciled part of a lot of people’s lives: ‘What do I do with that?’”Rogen devotes much of “Yearbook,” which comes out next month, to organizing his own early life. He began writing it two and a half years ago, he said, “when Evan had his second kid and I had nothing to do for a few months.” His goal wasn’t to impart “life lessons,” he emphasized, just to be an affable raconteur: Rogen’s best movies feel like great hangs, after all, so why not make his writing feel the same way? Or as he put it: “I read Steve Martin’s book” — “Born Standing Up” — “and I was like, this is a beautiful memoir of one of the most influential people in comedy. That’s not what I’m going for!”Rogen got in touch with old classmates, some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in ages, asking for permission to use their names in the book, and for their own recollections too. “This guy Saul Moscovich, who is the guy I first smoked weed with, I haven’t talked to him since I was 17,” Rogen said, “but it was funny getting his perspective on the first time we got high in the ravine behind our school.”Rogen’s adolescence in Vancouver was, in his telling, an essentially untroubled one — he remarks in “Yearbook” that his life has been relatively low on adversity and mercifully unmarred by tragedy. When he was growing up, Rogen says, his family “did not have a ton of money.” This seems to have bothered him more than it did his parents, whom Rogen describes as resolutely anti-careerist “radical Jewish socialists.” His mother, Sandy, worked as a cashier and later as a social worker. As part of his student advocacy work at a local community college, Mark opened a game room, signing out table-tennis paddles; later he worked for nonprofits. (Rogen has an older sister, Danya, who is now a social worker, too.)A teenage Seth Rogen (left) with his father, Mark, in 1996.From Seth Rogen“Mark always said to our kids, ‘Never do anything just for the money,’” Sandy told me recently. “We were very lefty, very socialist, and tried to instill that in them: ‘You have to share.’ We always had people living in our house. Five or six people who had left their marriages and had nowhere to go, they came and lived with us and they weren’t separate from us — they were part of the family.”In addition to his childhood issues with attention, Rogen says he has a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome. “I knew when he was 4 that he would not be able to sit in school,” Sandy said, recalling Seth’s “night terrors and tantrums,” which abated after they put him on the doctor-prescribed diet. “We took him off dairy, wheat, sugar, yeast — everything good,” she said. Nonetheless, until about seventh grade, Mark said, they “spent almost as much time at his school as he did,” summoned to the vice principal’s office to discuss Seth’s behavior. Rogen would fidget incessantly, leave his seat and interrupt class, antagonizing teachers. “He was really smart and could take things teachers said and twist them against them,” Mark recalled, “making the class laugh at them and embarrassing them.” Sandy added that Seth would “make some teachers cry — but one of his favorite teachers used to tell us she had to send him out of the classroom because he was making her laugh so hard.”Seth painted, drew and enlisted Sandy’s help in fashioning costumes. “He’d say, today I have to be Batman, today I have to be a cowboy, today I have to be Abraham Lincoln,” she told me. After Seth saw “The Terminator,” Mark recalled, he made himself a stunningly elaborate “replica of the Terminator’s gun” using duct tape, electrical tape, paper-towel and toilet-paper rolls. “That gun was amazing,” Sandy said.By high school, Rogen had mellowed significantly — he played rugby, studied karate and won a provincial championship with the Point Grey improv team. (The brilliant comedian Nathan Fielder, it happens, was a teammate.) But he remained an idiosyncratic kid who dyed his hair green, wore a leather L.A. Raiders cap inspired by Ice Cube and, at 16, shared a subjectivity-obliterating 18-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms with Goldberg in a local forest known as the Endowment Lands. “We lost our minds,” he told me, adding that, in the years since, he has experienced shroom-abetted ego death “like, 25 times.”That same year, Rogen successfully auditioned for a role on “Freaks and Geeks,” the cult high school series created by Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. Mark and Sandy were each laid off from their jobs before the gig materialized, and Rogen has suggested that “if there was any kind of dark, driving force” behind his early ambitions, it was most likely his desire for “some sense of financial security.” He became the family breadwinner, but this didn’t much change the household dynamic, because his parents had long instilled in their kids an everybody-pitches-in mentality. Rogen remembers their spending a chunk of the gift money from his bar mitzvah on a washer-dryer. Sandy told me, “I feel slightly guilty that Seth felt any pressure about money” — then added, with a laugh, “Mark doesn’t.”When I asked Rogen’s parents if anything surprised them about the adult he became, Mark replied: “It surprises me that he’s such a workaholic! It’s kind of like Alex Keaton” — Michael J. Fox’s character on “Family Ties” — “this thing where the family is lefty and the son is right-wing. We were so laid back! Sandy was home with the kids for seven years, and I had low-paying jobs, and we worked because we had to, not because it was our life’s ambition. And now Seth is multitasking on 10 projects at any given moment.” Seth laughingly acknowledged to me that he “might have gone in the complete opposite direction” of his parents, but that, when it came to his career aspirations, “They never said, Hollywood is [expletive], wear bare feet and frolic the fields. They said, If this makes you happy, do it.”All artworks are tethered to the moment of their making, but that’s especially true of comedy, where the perspectives, references and rhythms that animate jokes can date them — sometimes fatally — far more readily than, say, an outmoded hairstyle. Lately, comedy’s radioactive half-life has seemed to only accelerate, as cultural attitudes surrounding sex, identity and privilege are renegotiated precipitously, and this is especially true of comedies situated as squarely as Rogen and Goldberg’s have been in the world of men.Rogen has addressed this renegotiation in interviews, acknowledging that there are jokes he made at the start of his career that he wouldn’t make today, and that he proceeds with more sensitivity now than he did in his 20s. He characterizes this not as a case of self-censorship but as a particularly high-stakes example of what any comedian fundamentally wants to do, which is exhibit control over his or her material: “I want to know when I am crossing the line, and I also want to convey to the audience, in some subtle way, that I’m aware of the lines,” Rogen told New York magazine in 2018. “Audiences get nervous when they don’t trust that the filmmakers fully understand what they’re doing; you want to know that the people making the offensive jokes understand what’s offensive about them.”Films like “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express” meet this standard — for the most part. When the pubescent protagonists of the former issue idiotic declarations about the psychologies of the girls they obsess over, the movie makes it abundantly clear they have no idea what they’re talking about. “Pineapple Express” (2008) includes a shadowy group of drug dealers referred to only as “the Asians,” in the Orientalist style of the lug-headed ’80s action movies Rogen and Goldberg are pastiching. You can read this as a meta commentary on Hollywood racism, even if you debate its ultimate success.At bottom, though, Rogen’s movies are sweet, fumbling love stories about sweet, fumbling dorks, and this has helped them age well. In “Yearbook,” we encounter a poignant encapsulation of this sensibility. When Rogen was 12, he writes, inspired by the 1993 Val Kilmer western “Tombstone,” he amassed a wardrobe of thrift-store vests that he paired with a pocket watch. Attending classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs, he describes how “a slow song would come on, boys would ask girls to dance, girls would ask boys to dance and I’d generally find myself standing on the side watching it all happen, spinning my pocket watch like some sort of 1920s mafia snitch.”One weekend, hugging the wall at a bat mitzvah, Rogen noticed “two other guys also standing on the sidelines, watching with longing as the other kids had fun.” With a sinking feeling, he recognized himself in them. But then “I noticed two OTHER guys. They weren’t standing on the side, watching with longing. They actually seemed like they wanted nothing to do with the girls or the boys or the dancing or any of that.” These boys — Evan Goldberg and Sammy Fogell (who would go on to inspire the character McLovin in “Superbad”) — were happily picking up “discarded glow sticks, cutting them open and pouring the glowing noxious goop that was inside all over their hands,” Rogen recounts. He went over and started cracking open the glow sticks, too — he’d found his people.The breakthrough: Rogen (far left) with the cast of “Superbad” (2007), from left, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Evan Goldberg, with whom Rogen started writing the script when they were in eighth grade.Columbia Pictures/Everett CollectionRogen captures something in this moment that’s both geeky and precious. Perched on the symbolic precipice of adulthood, troubled by hormonal disturbances, nascent anxieties and social pressures, three friends find safe harbor in one another’s company. It’s Rogen and Goldberg’s origin story, reverberating throughout their creative partnership. “Our brains formed around working with one another,” Rogen told me. “Your brain is not fully formed when you’re 13, and that’s when we started sitting down to write together.” Decades later, he went on, “we’ve been able to keep that childlike energy of just working on the thing that you want to be doing, the thing you want to watch, the thing that’s really just for you.”In Danny Boyle’s film “Steve Jobs,” Rogen appears opposite Michael Fassbender, who plays Jobs, as a supportive but aggrieved Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder. Even though Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, when Rogen is onscreen, you can glimpse the Point Grey version of the film: two mismatched bros — the inventor and the marketer — hanging out in a Cupertino garage, balancing shared affections and aspirations against festering resentments. In their films, Rogen and Goldberg love nothing so much as stories about friends whose abundant love for each other is tested — by power imbalances between them, by weaknesses of character, by societal forces tugging them apart. This is the emotional engine at the core of “Superbad” (2007, an impending college departure threatens a friendship); “The Green Hornet” (2011, pampered arrogance threatens a friendship); “This Is the End” (2013, Hollywood threatens a friendship); and “The Interview” (2014, diverging career goals threaten a friendship).One of my favorite Rogen comedies is a bleak exception: Jody Hill’s “Observe and Report” (2009), in which Rogen plays a reactionary mall cop with bipolar disorder, delusions of grandeur and no friends to speak of. Rogen’s greatest script with Goldberg, “Pineapple Express,” which David Gordon Green directed, also inverts the typical structure: Amid a life-threatening adventure, a friendship blossoms.In “Knocked Up,” Judd Apatow framed goofy adolescent bliss as an entertaining but ultimately stunted condition that Rogen’s protagonist had to reluctantly outgrow. The movie grossed $220 million and made Rogen an unlikely star. But in the films he has made with Goldberg, the advent of maturity is treated with more ambiguity, if not outright skepticism. In their hands, adolescence is not merely a stage of life but a state of mind, where the exploratory, joyful fumbling of childhood has yet to give way to the compromises and conformities imposed on us by a fraudulent adult world. Goldberg told me that he and Rogen share a “philosophical bent” that stems from adolescence: “We’re irked by people who say, ‘This is how it should be, and I know what’s right.’ No one knows what’s right, the entire universe is madness. So people who proclaim to know how other people’s lives should be lived irk us — and those people tend to look down on young people.”The most radical expression of this mentality comes at the end of “Sausage Party,” a 2016 animated feature about anthropomorphic supermarket foodstuffs that have been taught paradise awaits them upon being purchased, then discover the grim truth and rebel. Voiced by actors like Rogen, Kristen Wiig and Salma Hayek, the heroes question the belief system that has kept them docile and, in the finale, become violent revolutionaries, massacring their oblivious human oppressors in the supermarket aisles before enjoying a wildly uninhibited pansexual victory orgy. Writing sequences like these, Rogen told me, he and Goldberg “will look at each other and say, I bet this is partially because we did a lot of mushrooms when we were in high school.”“Whoa,” Rogen said, checking his phone in the ceramics studio. The Houseplant web store was not merely back, but it was looking as if everything was going to sell out by day’s end. “Part of me was, like, will anyone buy this [expletive]?” he admitted. “Like, our movies cost $15 to go see, most people see them for free now. Will someone pay $100” for an ashtray and a vase?For Rogen, Houseplant represented a “big swing” of the sort he liked hearing Cuarón champion. Rogen had taken to calling the cannabis company “his life’s work,” and he assured me he didn’t mean this jokingly. “It feels like something I’m more uniquely. … ” He thought for a second. “More people could make comedies than could do this,” he said.All the same, I asked if he was plotting some big cinematic swing too. “The thing with our movies is, we’re always trying to do that,” he replied. “ ‘Sausage Party’ was a big swing. As we were making ‘This Is the End’” — a movie about the Rapture, set in Hollywood, in which Rogen and a host of other celebrities like Rihanna and Jonah Hill played versions of themselves — “we were saying, this is an experiment.” He laughed. “And then I’d argue that ‘The Interview’ is an experiment that maybe went awry!”“The Interview” is the second movie Rogen and Goldberg directed, and it doesn’t feel like much of an overstatement to say it had the most turbulent rollout in the history of Hollywood. The movie is about a Ryan Seacrest-style TV host (James Franco), whom the C.I.A. enlists, along with his trusted producer (Rogen), to assassinate Kim Jong-un during an interview. Any putative stoner comedy where you find yourself rooting for C.I.A.-backed regime change deserves, at least, a hard sidelong glance, and if the film weren’t so thoroughly silly, you could argue that it is, on some level, pro-U.S. propaganda.This was the vociferously held position of North Korea, at any rate. Its state-news agency promised “stern” and “merciless” retaliation ahead of the film’s release, with the country’s United Nations ambassador calling it “an act of war” in June 2014. That November, after a historic cyberattack on Sony Pictures servers that the F.B.I. linked to North Korean hackers, thousands of internal company emails were leaked, leading to the resignation of Amy Pascal, the studio boss at the time. In a last-minute swerve, citing safety concerns, Sony yanked “The Interview” from theaters and gave it a streaming-only release (a rehearsal, it turned out, for pandemic-era upheavals in distribution).Rogen was somehow able to take all this in relative stride, even growing accustomed to the full-time security guard hired to protect him. It was easier, it turned out, to abstract himself from geopolitical strife than from bad reviews. “What’s painful,” he said, “is the joy people seemed to take in deriding it,” by which he meant “major publications who took the time to write articles that were, like, And by the way, this movie sucks. Yes, it’s the center of a major controversy, but don’t let it be lost on you that it’s also terrible.” Rogen laughed with a mixture of mirth and bitterness. The saga left him feeling “gun shy,” he said. “It was something that for sure felt like we burned our hands on the stove. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we haven’t directed a film since.”Last July, Rogen found himself at the center of a relatively more muted international controversy. During an interview with Marc Maron, Rogen articulated his conflicted thoughts about Israel — the country where his parents met, on a kibbutz, and where he traveled as a teenager. Rogen told Maron that, growing up, he was “fed a huge amount of lies” about Palestinian claims to the land: “They never tell you that, oh, by the way, there were people there,” he told Maron. “They make it seem like it was just sitting there, like, the [expletive] door’s open.” As for the basic notion of a Jewish state, he added, “You don’t keep something you’re trying to preserve all in one place,” especially not “when that place is proven to be pretty volatile, you know? I’m trying to keep all these things safe, I’m gonna put them in my blender.”Outcry followed, with some Jewish voices celebrating Rogen for speaking tough truths and other, more conservative ones denouncing him. The Maron interview, Rogen said, “put people in a funny situation where they had to say I’m anti-Jewish, which is a hard thing for me to wrap my head around.” As a kid, Rogen attended Jewish day school and Jewish summer camps. Last year, after the death of his mother-in-law from Alzheimer’s, Rogen developed a greater appreciation for what he calls Judaism’s “practical” aspects. “When you look at what Jews do after death, you go to work, you get the body together, you hang out together, you get food, you get alcohol: There’s infrastructure in place to deal with these things that are truly hard to deal with,” he said. He was especially struck by the stark finality of one ritual in particular: “You bury the body yourselves,” he said. “It’s crazy — you’re dumping dirt on the body.”Rogen conceded that his remarks on Maron’s podcast had been “flippant” and that, after the interview, Lauren told him, “You know this is a very sensitive subject for people, but you’re speaking like you don’t, and that’s where you seem stupid, and not who you are.” But he emphasized that, at root, he didn’t say anything he didn’t believe. Rogen told me: “That was in some ways the last taboo, for me as a Jewish comedian, saying that about Israel. It was the one thing, almost, I would never talk about, and probably part of this bad-​instinct O.C.D. part of my brain that’s, like, when someone says, ‘Don’t touch that one button,’ part of me says, ‘What would happen if I did?’”Chris Buck for The New York Times“Let me get my computer and show you something,” Rogen said. He closed up the garage and we made for a sunny second-story deck adjoining his office, where he rolled himself a fresh joint — a proprietary Houseplant strain known as Diablo Wind, named after a weather pattern that affects Northern California. “It’s a pretty strong sativa,” he explained. “A good work-throughout-the-day weed.”Rogen had come to accept that his and Evan’s chance “to be the biggest names in movies has come and gone,” he said. But rather than demoralizing him, this insight was freeing, and now he and Goldberg were plotting their return to filmmaking with a project unlike anything they’d done: “A big action movie,” as Rogen put it, called “Escape,” that was heavily inspired by Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan.“Escape” grew out of a challenge the duo set for themselves to try and make people laugh without using dialogue. In “Pineapple Express,” Rogen explained, “the scenes people remember are the fights, the foot through the windshield and, like, with ‘Neighbors,’ you think of the airbags” — moments, that is, of outsize physical comedy. “We were like, Why are those just the supporting things? Why are those, amidst a sea of talky jokes, these things that pop up once in a while? Why don’t we make a bunch of these jokes and not rely on verbal humor?”Youth is ‘the time in people’s lives that feels it could use the most organizing. It’s the least-reconciled part of a lot of people’s lives: “What do I do with that?” ’Rogen and Goldberg have flaunted virtuoso stoner ingenuity when it comes to crafting set pieces — even the unfairly maligned “The Green Hornet,” which they wrote and which Michel Gondry directed, is significantly redeemed by its daffily inspired action sequences alone, like the one in which a car rides an elevator, or the one in which a character shoves another character into a foosball table and “kicks” him in the face repeatedly. With “Escape,” Rogen said, “we did add talking eventually, but for a while there was almost none.”He opened his laptop, where the desktop image was the Wu-Tang logo rendered in rainbow colors so that it resembled the ‘80s-era Apple logo. Rogen clicked over to a folder marked ESCAPE, revealing hundreds of documents within. Every time he and Goldberg have an idea for a movie, Rogen explained, they start compiling lists of “ideas for anything: characters, scenes, lines, plot twists, turns — it could be as general as, like, ‘Someone locks themselves in the closet while trying to hide,’ or it could be like, ‘OK, this character’s been this way their whole life. … ’”Over time, whether they’re in the same room or emailing back and forth, as they’ve done during the pandemic, Rogen and Goldberg sculpt these lists into outlines, then sculpt those outlines into scripts: “You start to say, ‘OK, these 10 things could go together,’” Rogen said. “Or, ‘OK, that’s a chunk of a movie,’ or, ‘If we want all these ideas in the same movie, what’s a character that could support that?’”He scrolled through the folder. “These are our ‘Escape’ files — oh, Jesus — going back to January 2016,” he said. He glanced at an early list. “This totally changed,” he said, opening another. “These are gags,” he explained. Rogen and Goldberg had collected dozens of Keaton-worthy ideas, which he asked me not to reveal. He scrolled to another document, dated February 2019 and titled “Boarded Action Beats” — “These are gags we started to actually draw,” he said.Working with an illustrator, Rogen and Goldberg had completed what was in essence a digital flip book diagraming every scene in “Escape.” “We’re literally storyboarding every second of the movie,” Rogen said. One open-ended, three-word gag I’d seen in a list from May 2019 — centered delightfully on something you could buy in a hardware store — had been storyboarded into an elaborate action sequence. Rogen showed it to me frame by frame, narrating as he went. “She’s trying to go from there to there … these guys are chasing her. … ” His finger tapped the right arrow. “She grabs that guy, he’s falling, bam, whoop!”Even in flip-book form, the scene was funny. “We need to know if these jokes are working, and if the timing is right,” Rogen said, “and you can’t do a table read and see if people laugh or not, because that would be me saying, like, ‘He throws the thing, it bounces off the door, it hits him in the face.’” He laughed. “We need to be able to see that!”There’s a story Mark Rogen tells about the early days of Seth’s career: When the family first moved to L.A., for ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ Seth signed with a manager and a lawyer, and after some time, “his lawyer threatened to fire him, because Seth kept getting offered different gigs and saying, ‘I’m not doing that, that’s not a movie I’d go see and it’s not a movie I’d want my friends to see me in.’”Rogen’s self-assurance might be the most enviable thing about him: The fact that, with rare exceptions, he has only ever seemed to work on exactly what he wants to work on. Rogen once recalled his friend Jonah Hill’s approaching him for advice after being offered a part in a “Transformers” sequel. “I can see if Steven Spielberg’s calling you, asking you to do something, how that’s hard to turn down,” Rogen told an interviewer, recounting the exchange. But in this case, he told Hill: “You want to make a movie about fightin’ robots? Make your own movie about fightin’ robots. You can do that. That’s on the table now.” This story has an echo in “Yearbook,” in a chapter where Spielberg himself actually invites Rogen and Goldberg to collaborate on a project inspired by the 1984 sci-fi movie “The Last Starfighter.” The same idea had already occurred to them, and they decided they’d rather just make their own version. Rogen isn’t overly concerned in the book with flattering the powerful. There’s also a funny story about George Lucas — that, within moments of meeting Rogen and Goldberg in 2012, he expressed his certitude that the world would end later that year (Lucas, through a representative, denied this account) — and an even funnier story about Nicolas Cage pretending to be a white Bahamian for a possible role in “The Green Hornet,” bellowing improvised dialogue in a Caribbean patois.‘We were always trying to serve comedy, and beauty doesn’t always serve comedy.’With Point Grey, Rogen can exert that much more control over his career. This has turned out to be good for him not just creatively and financially, but also as a way of weathering industry tumult. Rogen’s stock in trade — the midbudget comedy — has long been on the endangered-species list in the Marvel era, during which time comedy talent has undergone a mass migration from movies to streaming television. And yet Rogen has largely bucked both of these trends: The Hollywood Reporter recently named Point Grey “masters of the midbudget comedy,” crediting its films’ success with “keeping the genre alive.”Rogen told me, “In the last few years, we released ‘Blockers’ and ‘Good Boys,’ and they both did really well, and they’re both 100 percent the exact thing people say doesn’t work anymore: $20-million comedies with no huge names that were just funny R-rated comedies — and they both made a very healthy multiple of their budget.” Of “Good Boys,” he noted, “That’s a script that was around awhile, and no one wanted to make it, because it’s about 12-year-olds, and 12-year-olds can’t see it. And we say, Everyone’s been 12! ‘South Park’ has been on for 20 years, and they’re 9! I watch movies about talking dogs — I’m not a dog!”Setting aside the myopia of financial backers, Rogen went on: “I don’t know if other filmmakers are having the conversation that we’re always having, which is, Will this work in a movie theater?” This wasn’t, he went on, “a conversation you used to have to have, but now you do” — even more so, post-pandemic — “and we’re very clear — we want this to be in a theater, so it has to do things that a movie that works in a theater does. Those movies are different. An audience paying to go out of the house and be surrounded by hundreds of people? That’s a very specific product, so you have to be honest with yourself and say, ‘Is this ticking the boxes for that product?’ I look at other movies and say, ‘Did they think this was gonna be in theaters? Did they think this was ticking those boxes?’”He contrasted “Good Boys” with another Point Grey release, “An American Pickle.” With the former, Rogen said, “The concept was super-​relatable and believable and easy” — three sixth-grade friends ditch school and are waylaid by a series of misadventures en route to a party — “and it has set pieces, so it feels like it has a scope to it.” Whereas, with “An American Pickle” — the first original feature film to stream on HBO Max, in which Rogen stars as both a Brooklynite web designer and his shtetl-hardened great-grandfather, Herschel — “we had no illusions: This is not a movie people are gonna necessarily leave their houses for, a quiet character movie with three people in it.”None of which meant that Rogen was sanguine about the state of the industry. At one point, he told me that his plan was “hypothetically” to star in “Escape” “if it gets made one day.” I expressed surprise at his uncertainty, since the film seemed well into preproduction. “I’m not convinced we’re making a movie until we’re two weeks into filming it,” he said. “That used to be a thing, where you were told, ‘You’re greenlit.’ That doesn’t happen anymore.”On top of the obvious appeal for Rogen of starting a cannabis company, then, Houseplant has the added benefit of depending in no way on Hollywood for its existence. The week after I visited him at home, I joined Rogen and Goldberg on a video call dedicated to Houseplant business.“OK, what are we doing?” Rogen asked, sitting at his desk in Los Angeles.“We’re smoking weed!” Goldberg said in Vancouver.This was not untrue, though the primary reason for the call was to write copy that would accompany two forthcoming products, something they like to do themselves: a leatherbound carrying case for loose joints and a “desk lamp with an ashtray built into it, kind of,” Rogen said, holding up a prototype so I could see.They agreed that, with the carrying case, “there should be a joke of some nature,” as Goldberg put it, but that it could “start from a more utilitarian place, because it’s genuinely solving a problem,” Rogen added. But no one had been screaming for a combination lamp-ashtray, which meant it had far more comedic potential.“I thought we could do an ‘And then there was light’ joke. … ” Goldberg said, kicking things off.Rogen sidestepped this idea and offered another: “There’s also a simple one,” he said, “like, ‘For years I stared at my desk lamp and my ashtray, sitting beside each other — two stupidly separate things. … ’” “Yeah,” Goldberg replied, building on the bit. “ ‘I kept thinking of the pencil and the eraser, before they were brought together. … ’”“Exactly,” Rogen said. “What are other disparate things that —”Goldberg started riffing: “ ‘Pepperoni used to not even know pizza! A jukebox, combined with your phone? Absurd!’”Rogen started writing down these ideas in a shared document, as Goldberg experimented with wording to encapsulate them: “ ‘Not everything that should be together, is together. … ’” Rogen laughed at this and said: “Yeah! ‘Until someone has the audacity to combine them. … ’”Warming up now, Goldberg got sillier: “ ‘The concept of a chair and wheels combined to become the bicycle, which revolutionized the way — ’” Rogen cracked up so loudly at this that I couldn’t hear the rest.“ ‘Buses and missiles combined to become airplanes. … ’” Goldberg continued.“ ‘Buses and birds ’” Rogen suggested, grinning, and Goldberg’s laughter indicated that this revision was a keeper.For the next 20 minutes, I watched their shared document take form, their names hovering above their cursors, dancing manically around the screen, unfurling jokes. Soon the copy for both the lamp and the case was done, the sun was low in the sky and the frogs at Rogen’s place were croaking. It was nearly 5 p.m., which is when he likes to head to his pottery studio — to clock off for the day and go make some more things.Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, Calif. He writes the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. Chris Buck is a photographer based in New York. His latest book is “Gentlemen’s Club: Partners of Exotic Dancers.” More