He didn’t hear or see much Barbra Streisand growing up in his house. But Seth Rogen is Canadian, after all. As well as Jewish. And his parents were more “of the ‘Ghostbusters’ generation.”

But he was well versed on Streisand before taking on straight-man duties with her in the new mother-son road trip comedy, “The Guilt Trip.” He can thank his wife for that.

“She is REALLY into her. We’ve been together for seven years ― a long time. So for the last seven years I’ve been hearing about Barbra pretty much non-stop.”

Wait, your wife’s a 65-year-old gay man?

“Exactly. Don’t tell anyone. I’m married to Sir Ian McKellen.”

Actually, he’s married to writer-actress Lauren Miller. Still, Rogen, 30, knows a punchline when he’s set up for one. Since “Knocked Up” and “Pineapple Express,” he’s become one of the most reliable laughs in the movies.

It’s just that for “The Guilt Trip,” “I needed him to be the straight man,” director Anne (“The Proposal”) Fletcher confesses. It turns out, “he’s a great straight man, an Everyman. Or an Everyman with a Jewish mother.”

“The Guilt Trip,” opening Dec. 19, has Rogen playing Andy, a chemist-inventor who invites his mildly meddling mom along on a cross-country trip he’s taking to try and sell his invention. Along the way, he plans to re-introduce her to her long-lost first love.

Far-fetched?

“Not if you’re Jewish,” Rogen jokes. “Part of Andy’s goal is something any Jewish son would understand ― finding some old boyfriend of hers to palm her off on so you don’t have to deal with her anymore.”

While Rogen says the usual actor platitudes about loving “the script,” something else drew him to take on this movie.

“Honestly, just the idea of me working with Barbra Streisand was funny to me. Like THAT’LL ever happen.”

It almost didn’t. Rogen, Fletcher says, “held back, waiting to see what Barbra would say.”

And courting Streisand, convincing her to do her first starring role since 1996’s “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” took Fletcher a year.

She’d make demands, Rogen jokes ― “stipulations” Fletcher calls them.

“First, it was ‘I’m not leaving California,” Rogen says, laughing. “Eventually, it got down to ‘I’m not leaving Malibu.’”

Streisand didn’t want to work more than 45 minutes from home. For a “road trip” comedy that ranges from New Jersey to Virginia to Texas and the Grand Canyon to San Francisco, that should have been a deal breaker.

“I made it very difficult to hire me, and they still did,” Streisand says with a chuckle.

“She would throw stuff out there, and I’d go ‘SURE. What else you got?’” Fletcher says. Eventually, when the actress/ singer sat down with her son, Jason, who was convalescing from back surgery, “We read the script aloud together, and he told me, ‘Mom, you’ve GOT to do this,’” Streisand remembers.

But about this Rogen fellow, her co-star ― “I had seen a few of his films,” the 70 year-old Streisand says. “I was a little shocked, because I’m a bit of a prude.”

Having done smaller turns in the raunchy “Meet the Fockers” movies, Streisand was game. And Fletcher got her co-stars, and her movie.

“Even using special effects, putting the two of them into a car, in front of a green screen, I knew they’d do something funny,” Fletcher says.

And Rogen? He got to spend time “unfiltered” as he puts it, with “one of the dominant forces in movie history. Totally cool. My real mom’s more like her character in ‘The Fockers’ movies. Barbra’s a different kind of hilarious.”

They’d improvise, work out riffs on why a mother wouldn’t want her son to pick up hitchhikers. Streisand would make another impression on a whole new generation. Rogen, toning down his R-rated shtick, would reach an all-new audience ― of Ian McKellen’s contemporaries.

But hit or miss, “The Guilt Trip” guaranteed Rogen at least one thing ― peace at home.

“At least my wife’s happy.”

By Roger Moore

(McClatchy-Tribune News Service)