In his new book, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, Judd Apatow talks about his early exposure to comedy clubs and his obsession with talking to stand-up comedians and learning the secrets of their success.
Apatow worked at his high school’s radio station to facilitate his interaction with those comedians.
In the tenth grade, I started to work at my high school’s radio station, WKWZ 88.5 FM, in Syosset!
How did I get people to talk to me? Well, I would call their agents or PR people and say I was Judd Apatow from WKWZ radio on Long Island and I was interested in interviewing their client. I would neglect to mention that I was fifteen years old.
Since most of those representatives were based in Los Angeles, they didn’t realize that the signal to our station barely made it out of the parking lot. Then I would show up for the interview and they would realize they had been had. But they never turned me away, and every single one was gracious and generous with their time. (Except for one, who asked to see my dick. I won’t mention his name but I said no. I didn’t even realize this was probably just stage one of his plan. He told me he’d made “a bet with another comic” that he could get me to show it to him. I now realize the bet was probably a little more complicated than that.)
UPDATE!
Judd Apatow was 15 in 1982. Some of the comics that he talks about idolizing and/or interviewing at that time include Paul Provenza, Jay Leno, George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Robert Klein, Eddie Murphy, Jackie Martling, Rob Bartlett, Weird Al Yankovic, John Candy, Henny Youngman, Howard Stern, Steve Allen, Harry Anderson, Al Franken, and Rodney Dangerfield. The comic in this story may or may not be one of them.
Comedian:
Source: Blind Gossip
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