Vanity Fair January 2013

There is much to recommend in this special issue on comedy, edited by Judd Apatow, he of Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, and, coming out just before Christmas, This Is 40. It can reasonably be said that the comedy industry is booming these days, in movies, on television, and onstage. And who better to oversee an entire issue on the subject than one of the great impresarios of the business? Judd is only the third person to guest-edit an issue of Vanity Fair, and on this count, he is in good company: Tom Ford co-edited our Hollywood Issue in March 2006 and Bono handled the duties for a special issue on Africa in July 2007. Like his predecessors, Judd was a terrific collaborator, brimming with suggestions and infectious energy—precisely…

This month, Vanity Fair presents its first-ever Comedy Issue, which was guest-edited by Hollywood titan Judd Apatow. Working with Apatow—who wrote and directed Knocked Up, Funny People, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (co-written with Steve Carell), and produced Bridesmaids, Superbad, Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and many more—was a big deal. After all, his films have grossed a combined $2 billion at the box office, and his unofficial troupe is made up of some of the best and most recognizable names in comedy. His latest film, This Is 40, which stars Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Megan Fox, Melissa McCarthy, Jason Segel, John Lithgow, and Albert Brooks—Mann, McCarthy, Rudd, and Fox appear together on one of our three historic covers this month—hits theaters on December 21. Apatow collaborated on the issue with…

When I asked Jimmy Fallon for the time and place that would suit him best for lunch, he replied, “Eight P.M., Gramercy Tavern.” And so it was that, in the surreal world of late-night talk-show hosts, our four-hour dinner after he had taped Late Night with Jimmy Fallon turned out to be the most fun lunch I’ve ever had. For one enjoyable thing, I got to break bread not only with the very likable Mr. Fallon but with everyone he impersonated. His uncanny impressions come so naturally to him that during our wide-ranging conversation I also met Robert De Niro, Mitt Romney, Saddam Hussein, Van Morrison, Jay Leno, Jim Carrey, Michael Caine, and Roger Federer. “Can you remember the first time you made anyone laugh?” I asked. “There’s an audiotape…

GIRLS’ GIRL Allison Williams at the Surrey hotel, in New York City. Williams plays beautiful bossypants Marnie on Girls, the HBO series that returns for its second season next month. Is it a challenge getting the audience to sympathize with Marnie? “I actually think the moments where she teeters into unsympathetic territory are, ironically, the moments that make her feel much more human,” says Williams. WILLIAMS WEARS A CARDIGAN BY MAGASCHONI; SKIRT BY SPORTMAX; BRA BY JENNA LEIGH; RING BY ANITA KO. Setting the Bar A mid today’s craft-beer explosion, Shaun E. Hill, at 33, is already considered one of the finest brewers in the world. Although he started brewing at the age of 15, he didn’t get paid to do so until 2005. Just five years later he opened…

ART SCENE Tout le monde turned out to celebrate LACMA’s second annual Art & Film Gala, honoring Ed Ruscha and Stanley Kubrick, and co-hosted by Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio. The evening was presented by Gucci and featured a performance by Florence and the Machine. MASTER OF ALL THINGS Mike Nichols, Barry Diller, and Graydon Carter hosted the New York premiere of American Masters: Inventing David Geffen, directed by Susan Lacy. Friends celebrated Geffen afterward at an intimate dinner at La Grenouille.…

Did British and American comedy enjoy mile-high sex over the mid-Atlantic during the Clinton era and dissolve most of their differences? That’s my Einstein theory, and I would hazily pinpoint the blessed moment of consummation as having occurred in April of 1998, when NBC’s top sitcom, Friends, taped a special two-parter in London, and fans and media went sedately mad with Ross-and-Rachel hysteria: Beatlemania in reverse. Frosty British taste, which had resisted the vanity-plate, Manhattancentric ironies of Seinfeld, completely threw itself at Friends’ quippy sextet, narrowing the comedy gap between our two great, declining nations. Stateside, British television comedy had established a far deeper beachhead years earlier, courtesy of PBS, bless its tote bags. It was between pledge drives that we commoners got our first fixes of mother-country surrealism and…