Finding comedy in cancer

In the Ritz-Carlton Hotel meeting room in Georgetown, Will, a cancer survivor, and
his friend Seth are talking to a reporter:

WILL: It’s been six years, cancer-free.

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 Sixteen years ago, Lucas received a breast cancer diagnosis. The 44-year-old author of “Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy” is among Gen X survivors helping to de-stigmatize the disease.

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• Review: ‘50/50’
• Watch the ‘50/50’ trailer

SETH: He’s still in remission, though.

WILL: Still in remission.

SETH: Remission never ends, apparently.

WILL: I don’t actually know when it ends.

SETH: We don’t know the definition of remission. We keep joking about it. We have no idea. Are you constantly in remission?

WILL: I just remember the doctor said, yeah, you’re in remission.

SETH: You’re just still in remission?

REPORTER: At what point do you get out of it?

SETH: When you die. Of old age.

This is the way Will Reiser and Seth Rogen actually talk about cancer. It’s also the way Adam (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kyle (portrayed by Rogen) talk about cancer in the movie “50/50.” That’s not a coincidence.

Reiser, 31, wrote the screenplay for the film, opening nationwide Friday, after surviving his own cancer scare in 2005. After a massive, malignant tumor was discovered in his spine when he was 25, the then-aspiring scribe looked to close friends like Rogen — the writer and actor best known for the sarcastic-yet-sympathetic burnouts he played in “Knocked Up” and “The Pineapple Express” — for support.

Their relationship, as well as Reiser’s recovery — which involved surgery and a painful rehabilitation that still requires him to do physical therapy — laid the foundation for what would become “50/50,” an emotional and often surprisingly funny film that allows Rogen, 29, to take on the role that he once assumed for Reiser: the wise-cracking buddy who buoys his sick friend’s spirits . . . in his own, semi-misguided way.

Actual exchange from “50/50”:

ADAM: You really think that a girl’s going to go for me just because I have cancer?

KYLE: For the millionth time, yes!

“Because we were so young . . . we were not very good at expressing our emotions,” says Reiser of the way he and Rogen handled his diagnosis. “We’re comedy writers, so we would just joke about it. That was our way of coping with it.”

“As opposed to now,” adds Rogen with his signature staccato chuckle, a laugh that somehow manages to channel both Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone at the same time.

The two first met while working in an environment where the ability to generate a joke was particularly valued: “Da Ali G Show,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s absurdist HBO series in which political and cultural figures were interviewed by Cohen while he assumed the guises of white rapper Ali G or clueless Kazakh reporter Borat. Rogen was a writer and Reiser was an associate producer responsible for booking guests without revealing that they’d be participating in a comedic sneak attack instead of a real talk show.

“It was this giant ruse,” Reiser says now. “I was always under high levels of stress.”

Rogen says his friend often looked rundown, which he and others assumed was a natural byproduct of attempting to deceive unsuspecting VIPs every day. Seven months after their work on “Ali G” finished, Reiser found out he had cancer.