Seth Rogen’s Apology Tour

E verybody with a sense of humor knows that political correctness, or the more virulent and lethally boring mutation now known as wokeness, is an enemy of comedy. We’ve heard variations of this complaint from Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and, most recently, Billy Crystal. This month Crystal — one of the last living links to prehistoric Vegas-style comedy and about as close to the bleeding edge of his profession as Tony Bennett is to hip-hop — suggested in his typically mild way that maybe we should all be a little less sensitive. The most cutting comment he could muster on the state of the industry was, “It’s becoming a minefield. . . . It’s a totally different world [now] and it doesn’t mean you have to like it.” For this he was promptly savaged by social-media twerps like so many demented terriers with a squirrel-scented throw pillow. Crystal’s remark inspired this dry martini of a rejoinder:

Yet there’s one very notable exception to the dissident-comedy movement, one leading figure who loudly and repeatedly swears total loyalty to the new regime like a Cambodian peasant in 1975, who bows daily to the framed poster of Pol Pot he lovingly keeps on the wall of his hut. Others may fall under the scythe of the Comedy Khmer Rouge, but Seth Rogen is determined to survive.

“I’m not one of these comedians who’s, like, ‘People are too PC and it’s ruining comedy,’” Rogen offered in an interview with the Sunday Times of London that recalled one of those Cold War thrillers in which the hapless interrogee sweats under a hot lamp in a cement room as he sincerely strives to cleanse his brain of regime-displeasing thought.

In interviews, the Knocked Up star is taking a strategy of engaging in ritual apology and denunciation of his accused associates for as long as it takes to stay alive. Whatever reeducation courses may be deemed necessary to correct his erroneous thinking, he will attend; whatever feats of mental hygiene may be required to wipe the slate clean of his unhealthy comic thoughts will be dutifully performed.

By aligning himself with the Comedy Khmers, positioning himself as a kind of Pol Potbelly or Pol Potsmoker, Rogen is returning to his roots. “Where I come from, communism is not a terrible word,” he once said, suggesting that he didn’t come from planet Earth. (He’s from Vancouver.) But credit where it’s due: Rogen is honoring his parents. His folks are avowed socialists and avowed social workers. Rogen has fully imbibed the leftist slate of moronic thoughts, all the way to likening American Sniper to Nazi propaganda and saying that the Jewish state of Israel “doesn’t make sense to me.”

As recent as 2018, Rogen, explained the transgressive nature of comedy in an interview with New York Magazine: “Audiences get nervous when they don’t trust that the filmmakers fully understand what they’re doing; you want to know that the people making the offensive jokes understand what’s offensive about them,” he said. Though Rogen also said he now considered the 1978 humor of Animal House “appalling.”

In the last couple of years, social media has morphed into an ideas police force, empowering citizen snitchers with the full authority to destroy careers and reputations. Rogen agrees with their premises and throws his past work on the ideological bonfire, pleading that it was a “different time” back in, you know, the first two decades of the 21st century. Rogen has now apologized for jokes he made in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and seems to be preparing his regrets for a line in his new book, published last week.

Rogen told the Sunday Times, “I do look back at a joke I made on Saturday Night Live in 2014 and I very much regret making that joke. It was a terrible joke, honestly.” (The joke was about his friend James Franco hitting on a 17-year-old fan via Instagram, for which he apologized, although the pair never did have an assignation and had met in New York, where the age of consent is 17. Rogen says he is done working with Franco, at least “right now.”)

Asked to explain himself by the Sunday Times writer, Rogen offered regrets for a joke about hitting on drunk women in bars in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin (“Not something that we would be making comedy about, by any stretch of the imagination, any more.”) This added to his previous apology for using the word “faggot” in a jokey way in the 2007 comedy Superbad, which was about Rogen’s teen years in the 1990s, when the word was indeed commonly used in a jokey way by high-school boys. Speaking to the Guardian in 2016, Rogen declared the jokes from nine years earlier “bordering on blatantly homophobic at times” and though “they’re all in the voice of high-school kids, who do speak like that,” that was no defense because the script was “glamorizing that type of language.” When you’re dealing with the Thought Stasi, you have to pretend that your cinematic alter ego — a chubby, sweaty, frantic high-school virgin played by Jonah Hill — is guilty of perpetrating glamour in the first degree. Rogen has also apologized for the “You know how I know you’re gay?” bit he did in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

The Sunday Times piece placed Rogen in the joke dock for recalling in his new memoir Yearbook how he once viewed a porn video that was filmed on what is now his own property, easily identifiable by the natural waterfall on the grounds. Rogen joked that this must have meant that he had now seen all of the porn on the Internet. In the Sunday Times, his inquisitor declared porn “not funny,” but instead of pointing out that something can be both bad and funny, Rogen appeared to agree, suggesting that jokes he made in a book published way back in the first half of May 2021 might no longer be allowable: “Certainly we’re reshaping our thinking on a lot of things, thank God, so I don’t know if porn will ultimately become one of those things. But yeah, no, it’s something — yeah. I just don’t know.”

A decade ago, Rogen was just about the leading comedy star in Hollywood, but these days his comedy career is looking more like the world’s longest promotional video to launch his new weed business. On screen he appears rarely, such as in cringing attempts at ingratiation like 2019’s Long Shot, a cinematic condolence card to Hillary Clinton that suggested a fantasy hookup between Rogen and Mrs. Cankles. Only in this rethink Hillary was fun and cool and a lot younger and looked like Charlize Theron. Two and a half years after Hillary’s presidential aspirations ended in Hindenburgian fashion, this fumbling attempt to locate Democratic ticket buyers’ erogenous zones did not work, despite the strenuous efforts to please made in the last act in which the Hillary figure gets elected president, Rogen’s character changes his surname to hers and he accepts the title “First Mister.” Does this kind of sweaty pandering ever work?? “Exactly the kind of sexist male fantasy that killed rom-coms,” groused a critic on NBC News.

The reason most comics don’t play the woke game is that they understand intuitively that no matter how woke you go, you will be out-woked. Rogen can never whip himself with enough cat-o’-nine-tails, because someone will always point out that the instrument is a product of patriarchal culture on the high seas, where preteen sailors were treated abusively and people might well have made gay jokes. The lesson here is pretty obvious: If you’re a comedian, be funny, and write off the few dozen people on the Internet who keep saying “that’s not funny.” And at all costs, don’t become one of them.