Judd Apatow and Netflix team up for a comedy end-game

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For the past decade and a half, there has been no bigger force in modern comedy than Judd Apatow. Everything the writer-director-producer-occasional flasher (that was his lower half in Popstar's infamous limo scene) touches turns to box-office gold, or at least think piece-worthy silver. But now, there's a new influencer challenging Apatow's dominance: Netflix.

Over the past year, the streaming giant has made huge investments in the comedy world, commissioning or acquiring content from the industry's biggest players: $40-million (U.S.) for two Chris Rock specials; $60-million for three Dave Chappelle sets; $100-million for two new Jerry Seinfeld specials, plus rights to his series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. And then there are Netflix deals for Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Louis C.K., Trevor Noah, Ali Wong, Tracy Morgan and just about any other funny person you could imagine. The goal for 2017: to produce one new standup special a week. HBO and Comedy Central can hardly hope to compete.

This summer, though, the two comedy behemoths of Netflix and Apatow are teaming up for what seems like the ideal industry end-game: a Judd Apatow Netflix special. After decades away from the stage, the creative mind behind everything from Anchorman to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Trainwreck to Girls will headline four shows at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival, which will be used for his first Netflix special. One game-changer, then, meets another.

"I'm just happy that Netflix loves comedy so much, they value it, and as a result the comedians are working incredibly hard to create new sets. It's made everyone write that much more," 49-year-old Apatow says over the phone from Los Angeles, a few weeks ahead of his Montreal gig. "When I started in the eighties, people were doing the same act for 10 years. Most people never got a televised special, so the material got stale. Now, people are really writing, and thinking deeply and challenging themselves. At the very least, it's been great for comedy."

It was once common wisdom that only monk-like craftsmen such as C.K. would kill themselves to write new material every year, others merely pulling out well-honed material for different audiences at clubs and theatres across North America. But as the standup material becomes more widely available – you're not just waiting for someone such as Seinfeld to come to town once every few years, you're able to watch him work a room in whichever of 190 countries Netflix is available – so, too, does the pressure to deliver fresh content.

"People are making comedy specials now the way musicians make albums: Every few years, you update the world on where you're at. And different comedians do it at different paces. But I think it's necessary to challenge yourself," Apatow says. "In the old days, it was just George Carlin and Robert Klein who did a special every year or two. Nobody else. That's changed, and it's led to great work. Daring and innovative, like what Maria Bamford has done. It's fostered a new environment of creativity."

What the Netflix boom has also done, though, is quash what appeared to be the most exciting innovation in the comedy scene in decades. In 2011, C.K. made headlines when he released his self-produced special Live at the Beacon Theatre directly through his own website, for the cost of $5. The experiment was so successful – C.K. claimed that he covered the $250,000 production costs within 12 hours of release, eventually collecting at least $1-million – that fellow comics Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari picked up the model.

But with Netflix around, complete with a huge war chest – the company has pledged to spend $6-billion on original content in 2017 – and a massive, worldwide distribution network, why would comedians bother to work outside the system? Gaffigan has a new Netflix special, and Ansari has partnered with the company for his acclaimed Master of None series.

"Everyone's figuring out how to get their special seen by the most people, ultimately," Apatow says. "You need a partner paying for your years of work. I don't know exactly how it works with [C.K.'s] specials, in terms of selling them, but a lot of these cable channels and streaming services are now in competition to get the best standup, so that's going to be good for everybody."

For Apatow, though, the opportunity is ultimately less about burnishing Netflix's brand than simply honing his own skills, which he admits have rusted since he was last a regular on the stand-up circuit.

"I was getting a little tired of spending most of my life in editing rooms with sweaty men trying to fix movies. I felt isolated," he says. "I was doing standup from the ages of 17 to 24, but then I got so busy writing and producing, I wasn't able to keep doing it. But when we were shooting Trainwreck, I decided that every night after production wrapped, I would hop in to the Comedy Cellar [in New York] to do a set. By the end of the summer, I was hooked again."

Taping at the Comedy Cellar is one thing, though. Performing at JFL, easily the premier comedy event of the year, and then having that work cobbled together for a special to be seen by Netflix's 93 million subscribers, is quite another.

"In the beginning, I just told a lot of stories I had already told on talk shows, since I knew those worked very well. I had a buffer," says Apatow, who is not completely stepping away from the film and TV world, having produced this summer's buzzy movie The Big Sick and prepping a documentary on his old Larry Sanders Show boss, the late Garry Shandling. "Now, it's taken months to even understand how standup jokes are constructed again. And that's been the most fun thing about the process, because it's so difficult to do well. There's so many comedians right now who are brilliant, and doing innovative things, that it does give you something to work toward. It's exciting to make the act worthy enough to be on the same stage as these people I admire."

No kidding.

Judd Apatow performs at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal July 28 and 29 (hahaha.com).