Paul Feig, the director of Bridesmaids, was a Chippewa Valley forensics kid

Paul Feig has spent four decades making people laugh for a living. He created Freaks and Geeks. He directed Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, Ghostbusters and A Simple Favor. His latest film, the thriller The Housemaid, opened in December 2025, has taken in roughly $400 million worldwide on a $35 million budget, and is getting a sequel with Feig back in the director’s chair.

Before any of that, he was a kid from Mount Clemens who did Humorous Interpretation.

In the spring of 1979 Feig was a 16-year-old junior at Chippewa Valley High School, and he was one of just 23 students in Michigan to make the Humorous Interpretation field at the MIFA State Finals. He advanced to the semifinal round. There were no class divisions in individual events that year, so the big schools and the small ones shared one bracket, and a State semifinalist was one of the dozen best in the entire state. We are delighted to claim him.

A magic act and his father’s jokes

None of this will surprise anyone who knows his story. Feig grew up an only child. His father, Sanford, owned the Ark Surplus store on Gratiot Avenue, wore a jacket and tie to move boxes around the warehouse, and kept a catalog of jokes he had copied down in nightclubs. His mother, Elaine, was a telephone operator who loved slapstick and the movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Feig has said his comedy is a cross between the two of them, the wordy and the silly.

He got his first laugh at five, in an elf costume. In ninth grade he entered the school talent show with a magic act, and his father looked it over and decided it needed jokes. The ones he supplied were off-color club material. Feig remembers about two seconds of dead silence after the first one, then the room coming apart. He won. According to the Detroit News, he went on to sign up for every talent show and play Chippewa Valley offered. He tried out his act at nursing homes and hospitals, and by 14 he was shooting commercials for the surplus store.

He once told Terry Gross how he dealt with the kids who picked on him. First he tried to make them laugh. If that failed, he ran. Humorous Interpretation is the first half of that strategy with a judge in the room.

We have not yet found an interview where he talks about forensics itself, and we would love to hear the story. Mr. Feig, if you are reading: what was the piece?

Chippewa, Michigan

He graduated in 1980, spent a year at Wayne State studying mass communications and theater, and left for Los Angeles in 1981. He worked as a tour guide at Universal Studios, got into film school at USC and graduated in 1984. A $29,000 win on The $25,000 Pyramid paid for a run at stand-up, where he came up alongside Judd Apatow. He acted for years, mostly on series that did not last, before landing the part of the science teacher Mr. Pool on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

Then he wrote what he knew. Freaks and Geeks, which he created and Apatow produced, takes place during the 1980-81 school year in a fictional Detroit suburb called Chippewa, Michigan. He named the town for his high school. He told Hour Detroit in 2024 that he was tired of seeing Midwesterners played in two dimensions and wanted to put the people he grew up with on screen as they were. His own crowd, he said, had been the nerds, who made friends with the burnouts because everybody involved was an outsider.

NBC canceled the show after a single season of 18 episodes. It earned Feig two Emmy nominations for writing and introduced Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, James Franco, Linda Cardellini and Busy Philipps. Time later put it on its list of the 100 best television shows ever made.

After the geeks

As a director he won a Directors Guild award for The Office and worked on Arrested Development, Mad Men and 30 Rock. Bridesmaids came in 2011. It grossed about $290 million and earned two Oscar nominations. His four films with Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters, have taken in more than $1 billion between them. The Housemaid has now passed every one of them at the box office.

Michigan keeps turning up in the work. The heroine of his 2024 action comedy Jackpot! is an aspiring actor from Michigan who moves to Los Angeles, which he has said mirrors his own trip west. His gin, Artingstall’s, carries his mother’s maiden name. He still talks about being proud of where he is from.

Feig has said that what frightens him most is not being allowed to work anymore, and that all he wants anyone to say about him in the end is that he made people feel good. He has been at it since at least the spring of 1979, when he was doing it for a judge with a ballot.