Seth Rogen Told A Cool Story About James Franco On The Set Of 'Pineapple Express'

IW- So Franco comes on board the movie and we re-connect and it’s beautiful and wonderful and all I could ever have hoped for. We start filming, and there’s a scene where me and James are smelling a big bag of weed (fucking shocker, I know) and the director cuts. Between takes, I kind of laugh to myself, and Franco’s like “What?” and I’m like, “I just thought of a joke, but I don’t think I can say it in the movie because it’s probably too ridiculous. But I thought I would be funny if when I smelled the weed, I said it smelled like ‘God’s vagina.’ But I don’t think I can say that.” Franco smiles and then the next take starts. We smell the bag of weed and Franco goes, “It smells like God’s vagina!” The director cuts and everyone laughs heartily and showers Franco with praise.

So, again, the moral of the story isn’t that I came up with a joke and Franco stole it, although it feels good to get that info out there. The lesson that I learned was that the ideas that you think are personally great, especially the ones where your instinct is like, “I shouldn’t do that. Nobody wants to hear that. That could make me look bad. That could be too crazy.” Those are probably the best ideas.

I love stories like this. It helps that ‘Pineapple Express’ is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s one of those movies that I watch every single time it’s on. So this story about how the God’s vagina joke came to be is right up my alley. And yes, it kinda sorta sounds like James Franco stole an awesome joke from Seth Rogen but Rogen says repeatedly in the article that that’s not the point of the story. I’d actually heard this story once before. Rogen told it on Pete Holmes’ You Made It Weird podcast. Rogen says over and over that he wasn’t gonna say the joke because he thought people would be offended by it. He wasn’t gonna say it. Franco thinks he has to say joke for the same reason. The moral of the story is that Franco is fearless. He hears the joke Rogen came up with and thinks to himself, “Well we gotta do that shit cause it’s hilarious. It doesn’t matter what people think. We think it’s funny and that’s enough.” And thank God’s vagina that he did. It’s one of the more memorable lines in the whole movie.