“Rogen’s candid collection of sidesplitting essays... thrives at both explaining and encapsulating a generational comedic voice.” —The Washington Post. A collection of funny personal essays from one of the writers of Superbad and Pineapple Express and one of the producers of The Disaster Artist, Neighbors, and The Boys. (All of these words have been added to help this book show up in people’s searches using the wonders of algorithmic technology. Thanks for bearing with us!) Hi! I’m Seth! I was asked to describe my book, Yearbook, for the inside flap (which is a gross phrase) and for websites and shit like that, so… here it goes!!! Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately...
Publisher: Crown (11 may 2021) Pages: 272 pages ISBN-10: 1984825402 ISBN-13: 978-1984825407 ASIN: B07Q185KRF
Click on the image to read the book
Seth Rogen is an actor, writer, producer, director, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who, alongside longtime collaborators Evan Goldberg and James Weaver, produces film and television projects through their production company, Point Grey Pictures. Rogen can next be seen in Hulu’s series Pam & Tommy, which has been spearheaded by Point Grey. Currently, Rogen stars in Brandon Trost’s film An American Pickle, in which he plays both lead characters. Rogen and Goldberg also launched Houseplant, a Canada-based cannabis company. In 2012, Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller-Rogen, founded HFC, a national nonprofit organization which funds research and provides care for families coping with Alzheimer’s.
Book excerpt
BUBBY AND ZAIDY
I wanted to try stand-up comedy. I imagine if most twelve-year-olds told their parents something like that, they’d be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Fuck, if a thirty-year-old told me they wanted to try stand-up comedy, I’d probably do my best to talk them out of it.
Which makes it even more incredible that not only did my parents not scoff at the notion of it, they looked in the local paper and found a stand-up comedy workshop to enroll me in. I loved comedy growing up, I think, because my parents loved comedy. They would watch SCTV; Billy Crystal’s stand-up; Ghostbusters; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Uncle Buck; Home Alone; Coming to America; Big; Who Framed Roger Rabbit; Back to the Future; The Breakfast Club; When Harry Met Sally; What About Bob?; and they would just laugh their fucking asses off, and I would laugh my fucking ass off, and if people were doing this for a living, then I was gonna try to be one of those people.
The workshop was simple enough: You’d spend a day learning the basic concept of stand-up joke writing, write a few jokes, and then, that night, you’d go to the Lotus Club, a local lesbian bar with what in retrospect was a very vaginal flower painted on its awning, and perform your jokes for the lesbians. My mother dropped me off outside; I walked into the class and, not surprisingly, was the only kid—the first of about a thousand rooms that I would walk into over the next decade where that was the case. I’ve been the youngest person in the room a lot of my life. There’s something nice about having aged into my job. But still, I miss those days, because when you’re young, the bar for accomplishment is so low, no matter what you do, it’s pretty impressive. If you’re young enough, just walking is considered a huge deal. My friends are thrilled when their kids don’t shit all over their floors. As an adult, I get little to no praise for doing the same.
The teacher, a working stand-up comic named Mark Pooley, who looked exactly like Garth from Wayne’s World, took the stage.
Mark : Nobody wants to hear about what you like. There’s nothing less funny than hearing about the stuff you have fun doing. Fun isn’t funny. Comedy is pain. It’s struggle. So, when thinking of what to write about, don’t ask yourself, “What’s funny to me?” Ask yourself, “What bothers me? What frustrates me? What do I wish I could change? What can I just not fucking stand?!”
One answer popped into my head. At that point in my life, there was really only one answer: my grandparents.
I didn’t get along great with them back then. Their real names were Faye and Kelly, but I knew them as Bubby and Zaidy. Their last name was Belogus, which is by all means a hilarious last name. I remember being thirteen, hanging out at a friend’s house, and telling him that my mother’s maiden name was Belogus. His nine-year-old brother cackled loudly from the other room. “Sounds like ‘Blow Us’!”
It sure does, I thought. It sure does.
When I was younger, Bubby and Zaidy just didn’t seem that into me. I got the impression they liked my older sister, Danya, more than me, mostly because their words and actions made it wildly clear that they did. They were just nicer to her, which didn’t really bug me that much, because I didn’t love spending time with them.