Don't let anyone tell you that Judd Apatow's third film, his first venture into real-world storytelling after the high-concept yukfests "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," is a drama. See it in a crowded theater, and there's no denying that its laugh-per-minute ratio equals those of the previous films. The movie deploys enough surgically honed jokes to fuel a budding stand-up career for a year or two.
The fact that "Funny People" deals with the sadder aspects of showbiz life as well, and so often rings true, is just evidence that Apatow is an artist as well as the hitmaker of the moment.
 Courtesy photo: Universal Pictures Adam Sandler, left, and Seth Rogen appear in the film.
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Its success in producing poignancy as well as belly laughs is also due to Adam Sandler, who has had too few opportunities to show the depth of feeling that helped make "Punch Drunk Love" a knockout. Sandler's performance will be more affecting for some fans, who will hope for his sake the premise doesn't hit as close to home as it appears to (an impression furthered by the inclusion of videos drawn from Sandler's early days and the fact that the director was his pre-stardom roommate). Sandler plays George Simmons, a onetime stand-up comedian who found fame and fortune with lowest-common-denominator movies and has no offscreen relationships to show for it.
If lonely stardom isn't the worst fate imaginable, the movie makes things worse quickly. Simmons is told he has a rare form of leukemia, that he is beyond the reach of normal therapies, and that the experimental treatment doctors advise only keeps 8 percent of patients out of the grave.
The news sends George into an introspective funk, and he winds up in a comedy club where his surprise performance turns into a public meltdown of Lenny Bruce proportions. The aspiring comic unfortunate enough to go on after him, Seth Rogen's Ira Wright, has little choice but to exploit George's state for cheap laughs.
Painful mockery or no, the star winds up hiring Ira as a joke-writer and personal assistant — a job that proves to involve so much emotional hand-holding that Ira soon appears to be George's best friend as well as his partner in a back-to-basics stand-up campaign.
Rogen fills this role well, perhaps because it wasn't so long ago that he himself was an obscure performer faced with an unlikely opportunity. Rogen dials down his own comedic presence, becoming a wide-eyed newcomer who balances hope for his own career with concern over his idol's illness and disillusionment at the reality of fame.
The way the two men interact, each viewing the other with envy on one level and pity on another, contributes to the film's convincing depiction of the life cycle of fame. So do the moments, given just enough emphasis to register without being melodramatic, in which seemingly good-hearted characters behave with a self-interest reminding us that they are in Los Angeles to get ahead — like the scene in which Ira, faced with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, casually betrays his best friend (scene-stealer Jonah Hill).
"Funny People" is more than two hours long, and some viewers will fault it for a detour in its second half, where George attempts to reconnect with an old girlfriend (played by Leslie Mann, Apatow's wife) who has moved on and started a family (her two adorable children are played, as in "Knocked Up," by Mann's and Apatow's daughters). It's true that the course of this subplot interrupts the film's until-now lively pace: Had Apatow not made studios so much money in the last few years, chances are good he would have been forced to strip everything but the basic plot mechanics out of this section.
But the movie's exploration of the mixed emotions and awkward realities here turn out to be key in keeping "Funny People" from being a pat, faux-deep film in which personal tragedy leads inevitably toward spiritual growth. "Funny People" is too honest for that, and Apatow respects the struggles of showbiz people — just as he respected, say, the earnest man who lived 40 lonely years before ever having sex — too much to use them that way.
