The breaking of a funny bone is simultaneously a right of passage for every funny person, and a sad, horrible day I don’t wish on any of these comedians, whom I usually have deep, loving feelings for. I teared up a little watching SNL 90s (The Love Guru, Grown Ups) resort to pee and poop jokes. I was depressed for a week when Will Ferrell released Holmes & Watson. And now Judd Apatow has broken the funny bone. The amazing comedy producer (Anchorman, Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Bridesmaids among many others) and director (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, The King of Staten Island) got mired in those classic over the hill pitfalls of comedy in The Bubble, a bummer of a missed opportunity that mostly reminds you how boring 2020 was. Not great, Judd.
The Bubble in this Apatow film is in London. We’re on the set of Cliff Beasts 6, the giant movie franchise of the time. The producer Paula (Kate McKinnon) wants to get this movie out ASAP. She enlists producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) and director Darren Eigan (Fred Armisen) to rally the actors and get this project over the finish line. The Cliff Beast regulars (played by Leslie Mann, Keegan-Michael Key, Guz Khan, and David Duchovny? David Duchovny!) are happy to be back and get their paychecks. There’s new blood in the form of TikTok superstar Krystal Kris (Iris Apatow) and character actor Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), agreeing to the movie for personal reasons. And stuck in the middle is Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan), who left Cliff Beasts to fail miserably in a solo career.
So what causes truly great comedians like Judd Apatow to become unfunny? The signs in The Bubble are all there. About half the cast has some very thick accent, which most comedians become enamored with as they age. When comedians become parents, 2 things happen: you start catering your jokes only to those people close to you, or if you’re Judd, actually write jokes for your family and put them in your movie. And 2: all your jokes lose their acid tongued edge when you become a dad/mom, because you’re usually going for the lowest common denominator. The Bubble thinks its biggest laughs are for things like people throwing up during a green screen action sequence stuck on wires (which barely generates a chuckle) instead of digging into the draconian, and oft times contradictory rules about movie quarantine behavior. And finally, as you get older, you assume the jokes will come naturally from your cast, so you can focus on other parts of the direction. Judd clearly wanted to have fun making a CGI spectacle of a fake action movie, so he spent a lot of money and probably hours building sets for and editing the extensive CGI sequences of Cliff Beasts 6. That puts a lot of pressure on Pedro Pascal, Peter Serafinowicz, Iris Apatow, and Karen Gillian, not immediately known for leading comedic performances, to make the written material better with their improv and acting, which sadly does not happen.
And the maddening thing is, if Judd had a few more well thought out choices, The Bubble could have been incredible. The movie should have been the anti-Singing in the Rain: openly mocking the high browed nature of Hollywood and their ability to “help the world through film.” While the movie lightly chides covid protocols, the person in charge should have been a terrifying, semi-creepy individual constantly surveilling the cast and treating them like they are inside of a horror film. Watching Leslie Mann, Keegan-Michael Key, David Duchovny et all get more scared/paranoid due to the growing prison like claustrophobia would have led to some incredible laughs that are left on the table. Also, if Judd wanted to make a comedy, he should have switched the roles around a bit: put the comedians in the bigger parts like Key and Mann, who know how to modulate a good comedic performance and let those other actors really sell out. If Pedro Pascal were stuck in quarantine for most of this movie I would have enjoyed watching how unhinged his character became (that bit in The Bubble was one of the bigger chuckles I had).
But Alas, it was not meant to be. The Bubble feels like the beginning of the end for Judd Apatow, comedy movie director. But hey! He had an incredible run. And it’s not like he’ll go away: as a fan of comedians, he does a lot of great documentaries about comedians we should know more about that you should check out. We will know his movie directing career is over when he makes a family drama starring only his wife and kids. If you see a movie starring Leslie Mann, Maude, and Iris Apatow, get ready for the real big red flags!