SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E15
book world
BY DONALD LIEBENSONW
ith “Sicker in the
Head,” Judd Apatow
has written his first
sequel, and as sequels
go, this second collection of inter-
views with creative artists, featur-
ing a diverse lineup and wide-
ranging conversations about life
and comedy, is more “The Godfa-
ther Part II” than “Jaws: The
Revenge.”
In 2015’s “Sick in the Head,”
Apatow shared interviews with
comedians that he conducted for
his high school radio station
when he was 15 years old. He was
a self-described “comedy freak,”
and his questions to such up-and-
comers as Jerry Seinfeld includ-
ed, “I’d like to talk about your
type of comedy that you do.”
He now goes at these conversa-
tions as a peer and one of com-
edy’s most prodigious hyphen-
ates. He is a writer, director,
producer and mentor. Five years
ago, after abandoning perform-
ing for 25 years, he became a
relapsed stand-up comedian. He
is still fascinated by the artist’s
process.
“Sicker in the Head” offers a
more inclusive mix of subjects
than the first book. In addition to
icons, such as Mort Sahl, David
Letterman and the late John Can-
dy (from a 1984 interview), Apa-
tow reached out to newer, distinc-
tive voices — Amber Ruffin, Bow-
en Yang, Hannah Gadsby, Ramy
Youssef and Mindy Kaling (whose
big-screen debut was Apatow’s
“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”) — and
to modern masters of stand-up,
including Gary Gulman, Kevin
Hart and John Mulaney, whose
2018 conversation predates his
divorce, rehab and parenthood.
Apatow also talks to director
Cameron Crowe, legendary rock-
er Roger Daltrey, actor and play-
wright (among other things) Lin-Manuel Miranda and celebrated
talent manager George Shapiro,
who nurtured the careers of Sein-
feld and Andy Kaufman, among
others.
The interviews in “Sicker in the
Head” go well beyond origin sto-
ries to fruitful discussions about
the mysterious creative process.
Lulu Wang, director of “The Fare-
well” (who incidentally tells Apa-
tow that she was fired from the
set of “Pineapple Express” be-
cause she was “a terrible assis-
tant”), remarks: “One of the best
questions that I’ve ever been
asked was just, ‘Why is this im-
portant to you?’ My editor and I
work this way, where he’ll makeme defend scenes. ... It’s worth-
while to dig and find out why it’s
there.”
The pandemic looms over this
collection. Of the 30 conversa-
tions in “Sicker in the Head,” 19
took place since the beginning of- If, like me, you consider
comedians to be essential work-
ers, it was one of the ironies of the
health crisis that creative artists
were prevented from entertain-
ing at a time when they were
needed most.
“Many of these conversations
became way more personal and
honest than they otherwise might
have been, because we were in
this vulnerable, raw space togeth-
er,” Apatow writes. “It’s hard to
hold back in an interview when
you have been pondering your life
(and death).”
But not to worry, fellow com-
edy freaks. There are also won-
derful and funny stories, such as
Will Ferrell’s account of how he
came to portray one of his iconic
“Saturday Night Live” characters:
“One of the NBC pages at the
show said, ‘Bill Murray’s on the
phone for you. ... And [Murray]
goes, ‘Hey, how ya doing?’ I think
we’d only talked two other times
prior to that, and he was like, ‘You
know who you should play? That
host of Inside the Actors Studio.
You should play James Lipton.’ Igo, “That’s so weird to say. I was
literally thinking that myself,’ and
he’s like, ‘Yeah right. Take it easy.’
Click. So, I was like, Oh, I have to
write the sketch because Bill Mur-
ray told me I’ve got to write it.”
The artists with whom Apatow
converses are not “on” in the
comedic sense, but they are fully
engaged, which makes for more
stimulating dialogue. The con-
versation with John Cleese re-
volves around the legendary co-
median’s recent book about cre-
ativity. Come for recollections
about “Fawlty Towers” and “Mon-
ty Python’s Flying Circus,” but
stay for insights Cleese gleaned
from psychiatrist Iain McGil-
christ’s book, “The Master and
His Emissary.”
“We need ideas, and the hard
thing is getting out of the left
brain,” Cleese says. “These days,
we have phones calling all the
time, and interruptions, which is
exactly what keeps us stuck in the
left brain. It stops us from being
creative.”
In “Sicker in the Head,” Apatow
wrestles with the value of creat-
ing comedy. “When the pandemic
was at full force,” he writes, “I
grabbed my family and made a
really silly movie [“The Bubble”].
I didn’t know what else to do.”
Apatow is self-deprecating to a
fault. At one point, he dismisses
his films as “ridiculous,” but they
are not. His characters may act
ridiculous, but the films them-
selves tackle the weightiest of
issues — love, family, how to
become a mensch — with a Har-
old Ramis-like empathy. Apa-
tow’s movies are funny, and in
times as dark and divided as
these, funny is never ridiculous.Donald Liebenson is an
entertainment writer. His work has
been published by the Chicago
Tribune, Los Angeles Times and New
York Magazine’s Vulture website.Judd Apatow goes back for more in ‘Sicker in the Head’
MARK SELIGER
Judd Apatow w as in high school when he did the interviews with famous comedians that appeared in
“Sick in the Head” (2015). The sequel presents peer-to-peer conversations with comedic l uminaries.BY BECKY MELOANO
n Amazon’s award-win-
ning series “Transpar-
ent,” Alexandra Billings
played Davinia, best
friend to Jeffrey Tam-
bor’s transitioning Maura. As an
openly transgender actress play-
ing a transgender role on televi-
sion, Billings was part of the
infancy of Hollywood’s trans rev-
olution. Hers wasn’t an easy path.
Her frank memoir, “This Time for
Me,” shines light both on a re-
markable personal journey and a
painful time in transgender his-
tory. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
owns The Washington Post.)
It shouldn’t be so hard to sim-
ply exist. But in suburban Chica-
go in the 1960s, a 6-year-old boy
who found joy in wearing sparkly
dresses was not accepted. “Every
time I had on a new outfit,” she
writes, “something somewhere
would light up in me.” When
Billings’s mother, the person she
most loved in the world, told her
that what she was wearing was
not for boys, the foundational
lesson she learned was that to
exist, she needed to lie about the
person she really was.
The following years were tu-
multuous, filled with self-hatred
and suicidal ideations com-
pounded by relentless bullying in
plain sight of adults who never
helped. Discovering theater in
high school was her salvation.
Onstage, singing and performing,
was the place she felt happiest.
Having no better language to ex-
press who she was, she came out
to her mother as gay, although
that label felt “incomplete, un-
true.” When she was 17, while
swallowing the contents of a bot-
tle of Tylenol in a serious but
unsuccessful attempt to end her
pain, an episode of “The Phil
Donahue Show” caught her atten-
tion. It featured three sparkly,
beautiful “women [who] were not
women, and yet they were,” and
for the first time, she saw herself
in someone else.
Recognition was progress, but
navigating a life in the queer
community of the 1980s was still
fraught. Billings spent the next
decade making a name for herself
in Chicago as a drag performer
called Shanté. It was a time when
violent hate crimes against queer
people were rampant, same-sex
encounters were illegal, and men
could be jailed for wearing “fe-
male attire without the presence
of two articles of male clothing.”
She spent four years as a sex
worker to make a living (one of
her clients was a United Statessenator, she writes) and started a
long dance with drug addiction to
escape her pain and rage.
The person from her early life
with whom she stayed in regular
contact was her best friend from
high school, fellow thespian Chri-
sanne, who eventually became
her wife. Billings found kinship
with fellow performers, who shel-
tered, instructed and encouraged
her, acting as her surrogate fam-
ily. The devastation from the
AIDS epidemic was immense.
While her friends were dying, she
recounts, she asked her mother
whether she could go home if she
got sick. “I don’t think so,” was her
mother’s reply. They never spoke
again.
It took rehab, then a slow proc-
ess of understanding and accept-
ing herself to realize that she
wasn’t a gay man dressing in
drag; she was a woman. She
stopped performing as Shanté
and began a new journey as Alex-
andra, learning how to become an
actress in mainstream theater.
Her journey took her from the
1990s world of Chicago theater —
most reviews, she writes, “fo-
cused on my ability to portray a
female rather than addressing my
acting” — to Hollywood and
Broadway, where she recently
starred as Madame Morrible in
“Wicked.”
When “Transparent” first ap-
peared on television, the ground
was beginning to shift in Holly-
wood’s representation of the LG-
BTQIA community. While the
popular show was lauded with
awards, Tambor faced allegations
of workplace sexual misconduct.
Billings weighs in here on Tam-
bor’s behavior, detailing episodes
of “harassment and rage-filled
outbursts,” and she is also brutal-
ly honest about her own failings.
After witnessing unwanted ver-
bal and physical encounters be-
tween Tambor and others on the
set, including herself, she needed
to believe that everything was
fine, so she “stood by and did
absolutely nothing.”
Such blunt truthfulness is a
hallmark of her writing, despite
the first sentence in Chapter One:
“I lie.” Her sense of humor radi-
ates from the pages. Though she
has been mistreated by society
over most of her lifetime, her
memoir is a model of grace and
compassion, showing the world
what it means to be misunder-
stood, and how we can do better
to welcome humans of every
stripe.Becky Meloan writes a monthly
column about new and notable
books.Actress Alexandra Billings’s remarkable personal journey
JOAN MARCUS
Alexandra Billings as Madame Morrible in “Wicked.” T he transgender actress, w ho is known for her
work in the award-winning series “Transparent,” describes a l ong. h arrowing journey in her memoir.THIS TIME
FOR ME
A Memoir
By Alexandra
Billings
Topple Books &
Little A. 446 pp.
$24.95SICKER IN THE
HEAD
More
Conversations
About Life and
Comedy
By Judd Apatow
Random House.
480 pp. $28.99Discovering
theater in high
school was her
salvation. Onstage,
singing and
performing, was
the place she felt
happiest.
The pandemic
looms over this
collection. Of the
30 conversations
in “Sicker in the
Head,” 19 took
place since the
beginning of 2020.