Seth Rogen is an actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He starred in and co-produced The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and also starred in the film Neighbors. He and Evan Goldberg have co-written Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This is the End. The Interview, a movie co-written, directed, and produced by Rogen and Goldberg, will be released on December 25, 2014.
Lizz Winstead, a comedian and humor writer, was co-creator and head writer of The Daily Show. Her work currently focuses on advocacy for reproductive rights.
Harvard Political Review: Do you believe that humor has ability to effect meaningful political change?
Seth Rogen: I think humor can have that ability. Comedy can make people think about shit they wouldn’t otherwise want to think about. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. We first realized this when we made the movie 50/50, which was about cancer. The film wasn’t about politics, but humor enabled us to explore an idea that viewers would never want to dwell on normally. And humor normalizes things. When Modern Family portrays a gay couple in a very normal way, when they show that homosexuality is not transgressive to society, that does affect people’s opinions. Though I don’t think I’ve ever accomplished that. (Laughs)
HPR: What do you see as the distinction between political humor and traditional humor? Is such a distinction even meaningful?
Evan Goldberg: I think the only difference is that political-leaning humor plays into the real world. People find stuff funnier when it connects to reality. In This Is The End, we had actors play themselves, and that let people into the film. In The Interview, the movie is about a real country, North Korea, and this element of reality gives viewers something they understand already; it gives them a starting point.
HPR: How have your approaches to your comedic process changed overtime? In particular, have current events or political shifts affected what you’ve wanted to make comedy about?
EG: We do what we like; we do what makes our friends laugh. Once we have created the product, we rely on the audience’s laughs to tell us where to go. We edit our movies to make the audience happy, not to fulfill that vision.
SR: Our movies are personal, not politically motivated. As we get older, we’re more aware of the world, and we’ve started to question: should we inject more relevant themes into our work, or do we stick with more dick jokes? And the answer is both!
Lizz Winstead: The answer is always both! Especially when the personal is political—I’ve made this shift into covering reproductive rights with my comedy—and what’s been missing from that movement is the “having sex” part. No one talks about it, and that’s something that we can be funny about. People write about what hits their gut and makes them run with it. For some people, that’s politics. And for some, that’s life, or some combination of the two.
EG: Our topics of humor come very logically from our age. Our first movie was about how we couldn’t get laid. The next few were about how we were stoned and couldn’t do anything with our lives—
LW:—and still couldn’t get laid—
EG:—and still couldn’t get laid!
SR: It’s always been directly related to what we’re experiencing. Part of The Interview is about how the characters in the movie are wondering if their shitty tabloid show should have more political relevance. That’s actually a conversation that we’ve been having in real life, as movie writers.
EG: Once you know that people are listening to what you’re writing, you can’t help but think, Maybe I should say something.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Image credit: Harvard Institute of Politics