Nicholas Stoller

Nicholas Stoller was born in London and works as an American filmmaker, and he arrived as a writer before he was a director, with screenplay credits on Fun with Dick and Jane and Yes Man. Directing began with Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008, followed two years later by Get Him to the Greek, which took a supporting character from that film and gave him his own.

His comedies are built like relationship dramas that happen to be funny. The Five-Year Engagement is about an engagement that refuses to end; Neighbors puts new parents against the fraternity that moves in next door; Bros applies the same architecture to a gay romance. The jokes tend to come out of the argument rather than being set up in front of it, which is why his films are quotable in whole scenes rather than in one-liners, and why the sequel he made to Neighbors is noticeably thinner than the original: the relationship was already resolved.

The other half of the career is work-for-hire and television, and he is good at both. He co-wrote The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, directed the animated Storks, and co-created The Carmichael Show, Friends from College and Platonic, plus the Goosebumps series and its follow-up The Vanishing. He turns up as himself in The Studio, which is a fairly precise joke about where a comedy director of his generation now sits in the industry. You're Cordially Invited is the most recent feature.