Seth Rogen - Yearbook

I wanted to try stand-up comedy. I imagine if most twelve-year-olds told their parents something like that, theyd be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Fuck, if a thirty-year-old told me they wanted to try stand-up comedy, Id 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 Crystals stand-up; Ghostbusters; Ferris Buellers 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: Youd spend a day learning the basic concept of stand-up joke writing, write a few jokes, and then, that night, youd 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 kidthe first of about a thousand rooms that I would walk into over the next decade where that was the case. Ive been the youngest person in the room a lot of my life. Theres something nice about having aged into my job. But still, I miss those days, because when youre young, the bar for accomplishment is so low, no matter what you do, its pretty impressive. If youre young enough, just walking is considered a huge deal. My friends are thrilled when their kids dont 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 Waynes World, took the stage.

Mark : Nobody wants to hear about what you like. Theres nothing less funny than hearing about the stuff you have fun doing. Fun isnt funny. Comedy is pain. Its struggle. So, when thinking of what to write about, dont ask yourself, Whats 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 didnt 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 friends house, and telling him that my mothers 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 didnt 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 didnt really bug me that much, because I didnt love spending time with them.

Me and my better sister, Danya.

They were simultaneously tough and eccentric. My grandmother was born while her family was in a caravan fleeing Poland as World War I was breaking out. She got to pick her own birthday when she was a little girl because her parents didnt know her real one, which is some real Depression-era shit. How rough was Poland for Jews at that time? So rough that when they arrived in Winnipeg, a city in Manitoba that has swarms of mosquitos throughout the summer and debilitating ice storms throughout the winter, they thought, This place is fucking great! Lets stay here. My grandfather was born in Winnipeg. One of three brothers (the others named Curly and Pinky), he played professional football in the CFL and lied about his age to go to war. When I was about six, we were on a family vacation in Palm Springs and I cracked my toenail when I stubbed it in the pool. My grandfather said he would fix it, and then ripped off the entire nail. We had to go to the hospital.

I didnt really start spending a lot of time alone with my grandparents until I was ten and my sister was thirteen and getting ready for her Bat Mitzvah. She had to attend services every Friday, and I did not want to do that, so my parents would drop me off at my grandparents apartment to hang out for a few hours while they went to synagogue with my sister so she could pretend to pray.