“Funny People” topped the box office this past weekend. In a review by Roger Ebert in the Sun Times, he kicks off with the following:

Stand-up comics feel compelled to make you laugh. They’re like an obnoxious uncle, with better material. The competition is so fierce these days that most of them are pretty good. I laugh a lot. But unlike my feelings for Catherine Keener, for example, I don’t find myself wishing they were my friends. I suspect they’re laughing on the outside but gnashing their teeth on the inside.

We find this odd, considering that Ebert has written an entire book, entitled, “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary: A Compendium of Movie Cliches, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas, Shopworn Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes”, yet he manages to peddle one of the most tired clichés in all of popular culture in his review of a movie of that, while it was about standup comics, managed to avoid the vast majority of clichés about standup comics. Let’s get real: There were no squirting flowers, joy buzzers, rubber chickens, lockers in the green room for the comics, etc. that seem to plague any script about comedians. This films could have been an wince-inducing embarassment. Instead, comedians were portrayed about as realistically as one could hope.

In an April 11, 2009 Roger Ebert’s Journal, He says the following:

I wanted to perform stand-up. I idolized Henny Youngman, and later Rodney Dangerfield. They practiced the humor of paradox, based in ancient Jewish tradition. The world conceals its traps from us. In a crazy situation, strict logic must be applied. Things are the opposite of what they seem. This world view was distilled into jokes by generations of Catskills comics, who reached an eerie perfection. Irony is a weapon against the inevitable, but don’t depend on it. You’ll probably lose anyway, but not in the way you think you will. Audiences had already heard half of the jokes, but the humor was in the delivery.

We only point this out because we suspect that, as much as Ebert seems to appreciate the art of standup, he also seems to have some sort of unresolved “issues” (as the armchair psychiatrists like to say).

Aside from that, though, Ebert gives the film respect:

The thing about “Funny People” is that it’s a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances — and it’s about something. It could have easily been a formula film, and the trailer shamelessly tries to misrepresent it as one, but George Simmons learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize.

The film presents a new Seth Rogen, much thinner, dialed down, with more dimensions. Rogen was showing signs of forever playing the same buddy-movie co-star, but here we find that he, too, has another actor inside. So does Jason Schwartzman, who often plays vulnerable but here presents his character as the kind of successful rival you love to hate.

And he ends the review with, “Of (Apatow) it can be said: He is a real director. He’s still only 41. So here we go.”

(For the record, Roger, Leslie Mann’s Australian accent was nowhere near “spot-on!” At times, she veered into an Irish accent… it was a mess!)