Famous Teens
Seth Rogen: King of Teen Comedy
Crude, juvenile and oh-so funny, Vancouver’s Seth Rogen makes the kind of flicks he loved as a kid
By Jim Slotek
Would it surprise you to learn that Seth Rogen’s early life unfolded like a screwball teen comedy? Case in point: his first gig as a 13-year-old standup in Vancouver turned out to be at a lesbian bar.
“It was a place called The Lotus. I thought it was ‘Ladies Night.’ I didn’t really get what was happening,” Rogen, now 26, says, laughing at the memory of his cluelessness.
Off stage, he knew what he liked in a teen movie, and he knew what kind of teen movie he wanted to make some day.
“Porky’s! The highest-grossing Canadian film of all time!” exclaims Rogen (Knocked Up, Superbad, and the voice of Master Mantis in this this month’s animated comedy Kung Fu Panda), recalling the 1982 film about ’50s high schoolers desperately trying to lose their virginity. “I would tape the nude scenes and compile them. So I’ve seen the nine minutes of Porky’s where people are naked a thousand times.”
Next on his list of influences, an early Tom Hanks movie called Bachelor Party. “It’s pretty dirty for a Tom Hanks movie. There’s bestiality jokes and stuff like that. And Kevin Smith (Clerks) was an inspiration language-wise, I would say. His movies were the first movies that I saw where people just cursed up a storm and that was very amusing to me,” he says, bursting into a belly laugh. “So I think we took a nod from that when it comes to sexual language.”
“We” is Rogen and his high school buddy Evan Goldberg, who first collaborated at 14 to write the high school sex comedy that became Superbad. “It was born out of a very pure desire to just see kids acting like we acted on film, and speaking how we spoke. And it just happened to be really dirty [because] that’s what made us laugh...unfortunately, really filthy jokes are what amuse us.”
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Seth Rogen (left) and James Franco in
Pineapple Express
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He qualifies that statement, adding “I think almost any guy is
redeemable. Our movies have a very simple message which is try to be a
good guy or girl, just do the right thing, as Spike Lee says. You can
kind of have people say all the filthy, despicable things you want and
have them do stupid things, but as long as that character’s trying to
be a good person, that’s kind of all I need to latch onto.”
Of course, Superbad — the adventures of three redeemable horny kids named Seth, Evan and McLovin — is now the Porky’s of a new generation. And Rogen and Goldberg are still writing to amuse themselves. Their next film, Pineapple Express, hits theatres in August and reunites Rogen and James Franco, a buddy from his big acting break, the cult fave TV series Freaks and Geeks.
Revolving around high school politics, the show was created by Judd Apatow, the director of Knocked Up, who would become Rogen’s mentor.
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In Pineapple Express, Rogen plays Dale, a murder witness who, it turns out, can be tracked down by the bad guys because he left a rare strain of pot at the scene — a “bud” called Pineapple Express, sold to him by his dealer Saul (Franco). So they both hit the road, a step ahead of the killers.
“Pineapple Express is not nearly as dirty as Superbad. It’s more of a marijuana-themed buddy comedy,” says Rogen. “Action-wise, it’s pretty jam-packed. We’ve got car chases and shootouts and explosions.”
The reunion with Franco brought back memories of Freaks and Geeks, a show that was bursting with future stars, including ER’s Linda Cardellini, Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma).
“It’s funny, I look back at Freaks and Geeks and it never dawned on me at the time that this was a great show and all these actors were amazing,” Rogen says. “It was amazing to work with [James Franco] again. We kept looking at each other saying, ‘If you’d told us eight years ago that someone would allow us to be in a movie that we’re stars of, I would never have believed it.’”
Jim Slotek lives in Toronto where he writes about movies for the Toronto Sun.
Seth Rogen’s own teen years
• Age 13: Makes his stand-up debut at a Vancouver lesbian bar called The Lotus.
• Age 13: Uses his budding stand-up skills to entertain fellow campers at Camp Miriam, a Jewish sleepover camp on Gabriola Island, near Nanaimo, B.C.
• Age 14: Joins forces with his Point Grey High School classmate Evan Goldberg to write the script for a raunchy comedy based on their own lives. That script eventually becomes Superbad.
• Age 16: Places second in the Vancouver Amateur Comedy Contest.
• Age 17: After just two auditions, nabs the role of Ken Miller, a cynical “freak,” on TV’s Freaks and Geeks. Moves, with his parents, to L.A. to work on the show and gets to know series creator Judd Apatow.
• Age 18: Plays bully Ricky Danforth in the indie film Donnie Darko, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a troubled teen plagued by visions of a giant bunny rabbit.
• Age 18: Apatow asks him to join the writing team for his new TV series Undeclared. After accepting the writing gig, he’s also given the role of beer-loving business major Ron Garner.
• Age 19: Rogen and Goldberg write Pineappple Express, about a couple of pot-addled twentysomethings on the run from a drug lord and a crooked cop. It finally comes out this August with Rogen and his Freaks and Geeks co-star James Franco in the starring roles.
—Marni Weisz