Seth Rogen Says Modern Comedies Should ‘Be Hard’ to Make

Seth Rogen doesn’t want to hear about how difficult it is to make comedies in the modern cultural climate.

Rogen, who cowrote and stars in upcoming Apple TV+ Hollywood spoof series “The Studio,” told Esquire that he believes making funny films and TV should be hard.

“The complaint that comedy’s harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint. Maybe it was too easy before,” Rogen said. “And why should it be? Why shouldn’t it be hard? I like that my job is hard, because I’m trying to do something that requires a huge amount of resources and people’s time and energy… What do you wish you could say? What do you feel has been taken from you?”

He added, “It’s always funny when people are like, ‘Oh, they could never make the ‘Diversity Day’ episode of “The Office” today.’ You can still watch it.”

Rogen, of course, famously auditioned to play Dwight in the NBC sitcom; Rainn Wilson was later cast. Not the point. Comedy in the last five, 10, and surely 20 years has drastically shifted amid political movements. Even Rogen’s own 2014 feature “The Interview” changed the comedy genre, and Hollywood as a whole, forever.

The Kim Jong-Un assassination spoof starred Randall Park and the now-canceled James Franco (Rogen has publicly distanced himself from Franco, formerly a regular collaborator); “The Interview” ignited North Korea terrorist threats and led to the infamous Sony email hack.

“It really re-calibrated what I think is controversial,” Rogen said in 2023. “After that I was like now I know what it’s like. Unless the president is giving news conferences about it, that’s controversy. If someone is getting mad about it on social media, that’s not controversy. Having like the U.N. have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy.”

He continued of his own career after “The Interview,” “We were able to keep making movies. What’s crazy is now it’s on television, it’s on FX at 2 p.m. It was at one point the most controversial thing in the world and now I’ll be flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon and it’s just playing. I was worried maybe it would cause some longer-lasting fallout than it did.”

And Rogen isn’t the only writer/director/producer acknowledging the cultural shift in comedy. Ben Stiller recently said during The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast that the comedic tone he became synonymous with in the early and mid 2000s has since become moot.

“You can look at 2000s comedies, and they were a specific kind of thing, a tone, and there were a lot of great things in those comedies that we don’t have now,” Stiller said. “I don’t know if you could recreate that.”