The king of the summer box office arrives unaccompanied and draws no crowd as he settles into a booth in a West Hollywood coffee shop. Unlike many past holders of his title, he's not swooningly handsome, blue-eyed or flaxen-haired. He's about 180cm tall, big and burly, with red, slightly frizzy hair, big glasses and a very infectious, dirty gurgle of a laugh, which will be heard often over the next hour or so, along with a blizzard of profanity and one-liners.
Hard to believe, but Seth Rogen starred in two hugely successful comedies this summer that may have shifted the center of gravity of American comedy: Knocked Up (on general release in Taiwan) and Superbad (due for release in Taiwan on Nov. 2 and still roosting at number three in the US charts). Rogen, his childhood friend and writing partner Evan Goldberg, and their director/friend/mentor Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin) have book-ended the summer season with two marvelously fresh and foul-mouthed, yet surprisingly wise and sweet-natured comedies about losers, sex, marriage, the Darwinian principles of high school, losing one's virginity, shooting up cop cars and snagging beer with fake IDs. Somewhere in the upper echelons of the Hollywood comedy scene, an older generation is nervously looking far below itself and seeing its own replacements.
Rogen is just back from a European press tour on which he and his friends were treated like rock stars, thanks to the two movies' near simultaneous release in overseas markets. He also encountered one of his American comedy forebears.
"I saw Woody Allen in Paris last week, being followed by like, two dozen paparazzi. And it's weird seeing a really old man being followed by paparazzi. You always expect to see Lindsay Lohan, but this was like your grandpa walking down the street. He looks like a little old man - one gust could do him in. He's frail as frail can be!" Allen is shuffling off the stage just as Rogen moves front and center. Although we roll our eyes at the stale and repetitive nature of most of Allen's recent work, we also marvel at the notion of the 15-year-old Allen as a boy-genius lead joke writer on Sid Caeser's Your Show of Shows back in 1950. Rogen got almost as early a start in comedy as Allen, having been spotted in 1998 - aged 16 and as beefy as Allen is weedy - at an open casting call in his native Vancouver, and soon after finding himself cast by producer Judd Apatow in the fondly-remembered TV high school drama series Freaks and Geeks. It was cruelly canceled after a single season but introduced him, and us, to the informal family of misshapen jokesters, comedians, writers and friends who are currently set to assume the mantle of the coming generation in Hollywood comedy.
He subsisted on the usual acting gruel of low-rank comedy figures until Knocked Up shot him into the stratosphere four months ago and Superbad sealed the deal. He's also an accomplished writer - as the Superbad script attests - and he did a stint as a joke-writer for HBO's Da Ali G Show. (Of working with Sacha Baron Cohen, he says: "We'd just write or dream up these 30 or 40 awful questions for him to ask and he'd take off to film it, leaving us horrified and thinking, 'You're actually gonna fucking do that?' People think he's a lot more heady than he is, he's just a guy who wants to make funny shit. I find him oddly easy to hang out with.")
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