CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. — Towering in his little chair and playing with straw wrappers, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” writer and star Jason Segel was cracking a joke at every chance he could get. The actor boldly said that he was “born without a sense of shame.” For anyone who has been paying attention to the recent surge in the success of Judd Apatow comedies, Jason Segel’s lack of shame is certainly paying off.
It all started in high school when Segel won a basketball state championship, and as he is 6 foot 4, this isn’t the biggest surprise. Yet, due to excessive boredom in his art history class, Jason spent his time reading plays, which interested him so much that he asked to perform Edgar Ablee’s “The Zoo Story.” After performing a 20-minute monologue, he was discovered, and he started to work on the television show “Freaks and Geeks,” where he met Judd Apatow.
After a career of ups and even more downs, Segel has finally been given the chance to write and star in his first feature film, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” “I’ve been trying to be the star in a movie since my career started,” Segel said. “You get slapped in the face at some point because it’s not as easy as expected. I got very lucky very young, I met Judd Apatow when I was 18. I walked out of that thinking I was going to be a huge star.”
Obviously, this wasn’t the case, as Segel spent years nearly jobless. In response to this, Segel said “I needed to adjust my sense of time. I got the job on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ because they loved ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ That was eight years after the show ended.” Now, Segel has made “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” an “everyday Joe” type of comedy; his face (and some body organs) will soon be familiar when the film is released nationwide on Friday.
The film’s tagline is true to form; it is “the ultimate romantic disaster movie.” The film begins with television star Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) breaking up with her boyfriend, Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), for another man. In this scene, Peter is naked … completely naked. Segel’s nudity adds an unusual comedic element to a film that is actually really funny. This part in the script was inspired by Segel’s own experience. “I was once dumped while naked, and I thought it was hilarious while it was happening. I couldn’t indicate it because I was really upset, but the whole time I was thinking, ‘you’re giving me comedy gold.’”
This scene represents only a thin slice of Segel’s sense of humor. “I tend to think life is funny … I think humiliation is funny.” Segel’s sense of humor works, because the scene generated many a laugh at the screening of the film. Segel finds it successful because “being lonely and desperate is a very universal feeling; everyone’s been dumped at one point. When you clue into an area that everyone is familiar with, it’s a good area for comedy because the audience is with you. People are on your side as the person being dumped, so you have a lot of leeway to be desperate and creepy. It’s sort of a trick.”
This style of humor is what also got Segel noticed. “Judd and I are like-minded comedically. He appreciated people who remove their sense of shame and go for it. We formed this collaboration, and he tried to put me in everything he made. He came up to me a couple years ago after he made The “40-Year-Old Virgin” and told me he could now get movies made, and he asked me if I was writing anything. I told him I was writing ‘Sarah Marshall.’” In Hollywood, friendships pay off, especially if that friend is Judd Apatow.
Segel’s script works perfectly as an Apatow comedy. “These films are dramas with comedy layered on top. In order to do comedy right, you have to have drama,” he said. The plot lines are dramatic: The “40-Year-Old Virgin” is about a desperate man keeping a secret, “Knocked Up” is about an unplanned pregnancy, and “Superbad” is about childhood friends coping with embarking on different college paths. A film about meeting your recent celebrity ex-girlfriend in Hawaii is no exception, as it is about a depressed man. These comedies aren’t happy and jolly, but sad, which is why they’re so hilarious.
Segel claims that despite all the depression, people see these films thinking, “This could happen to me.”
The movie also needed to be realistic. “Sarah Marshall could not just be the bitchy ex-girlfriend … This character has to be likeable and charming,” he said. “It’s not a diatribe about a cheating girlfriend; relationships are complicated and that’s what’s going on here.” The film becomes more real and believable, which makes it better and funnier.
After these dramatic plot lines are constructed, the comedy gets inserted through dialogue and other action. “I picture people in my life playing the part, not the actors,” Segel said. “Brian (Bill Hader) is the name of my best friend, and I was writing as if he were playing the part. I got a sense of how Kristen Bell acted and spoke, and then I added her into the script.” The actors also tend to improve many lines, and the best go into the script. Because studios hate when scripts are over 120 pages, Segel’s comedic screenplay had addendum pages, which was a book of 300 pages with possible lines.
Since these films made stars out of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and many others, Segel seems to be the next to stardom. Entertainment Weekly did a full article on him, and he has more projects coming up. “I can’t get a big head about it,” Segel said. “If I can’t get hurt when I’m told about bad stuff, I cannot get a big head either. It’s two sides of the same coin … I feel incredibly grateful and lucky. Be sure you print that.”