[6] Smith attended Henry Hudson Regional High School,[11] where he was a B and C student, videotaped basketball games, and produced Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy.

Smith maxed out more than a dozen credit cards, and sold his much-treasured comic book collection, to raise $27,575 to make the film,[14] while saving money by casting friends and acquaintances in most roles.

A religious-themed comedy that starred a post-Good Will Hunting Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, George Carlin, Alan Rickman, Linda Fiorentino, and Lee and Mewes, it was criticized by the Catholic League.

It stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the title characters who decide to make a low-budget pornographic film to solve their money problems.

'[40]It was announced in 2009 that Smith had signed on to direct A Couple of Dicks, a buddy-cop comedy written by the Cullen Brothers and starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan.

[40][51] In September 2010, Smith started work on Red State, an independently financed horror film loosely inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church and its pastor, Fred Phelps.

[52][53][54] Weinstein and his brother Bob, who had been involved in the distribution of Smith's films except Mallrats and Cop Out, declined to support Red State.

[79] On October 1, 2019, Smith announced on Instagram that Clerks III was happening and that Jeff Anderson, who had retired, had agreed to reprise his role as Randal.

He has written the trade paperback Bluntman and Chronic, published by Image, which purports to be a collection of the three issues of the series done by Holden McNeil and Banky Edwards (of Chasing Amy).

He produced a 15-issue tenure on Green Arrow for DC Comics that saw the return of Oliver Queen from the dead and the introduction of Mia Dearden, a teenage girl who would become Speedy after Smith's run had ended.

The series featured the villains Onomatopoeia (a character created by Smith during his run at Green Arrow), The Joker, Maxie Zeus, and Victor Zsasz.

[97] After issue six was published, Smith and Flanagan's work on their reality show, Comic Book Men, extended this planned break longer than expected.

[100][101] In August 2011, Dynamite Entertainment debuted Smith's The Bionic Man, which was based on a 1998 script he wrote that Universal rejected for being "more like a comic book than a movie.

During the mid-1990s, Smith directed and starred in a series of commercials for MTV, alongside Jason Mewes, in which they reprised their roles as Jay and Silent Bob.

In February 2017, Smith was announced to write, direct, and executive produce a TV series based on the Image Comics title Sam and Twitch for BBC America.

[114] In February 2019, Smith was announced to cowrite, with Dave Willis, an animated web series based on Marvel Comics' Howard the Duck for Hulu.

But he listed a number of unusual demands that producer Jon Peters made, including that Superman not be shown flying or wearing tights, and that he should battle a giant spider at the end of the film.

[122] Smith announced at the 2011 Sundance premiere of Red State that Hit Somebody would be the last film he directed, but that he would continue to tell stories in other media.

On March 12, 2015, Smith said he would film Clerks III in May 2015, followed in early 2016 by Moose Jaws and Anti-Claus (a story inspired by the Krampus tradition),[129] which he confirmed the next day.

[134] Toward the end of the month, Smith announced that he had closed a deal with Universal Television to pitch the series to networks and streaming services in August.

Smith played the role of Paul, a cynical divorced man, in a Showtime television series pilot, Manchild, filmed in December 2006.

[144] At year's end, he appeared briefly in friend and fellow writer-director Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, in which he played the legless conspiracy theorist General Simon Theory.

The same year, Smith did voicework for the CGI film TMNT as a diner chef and was seen as Rusty (a friend of lead Jason Mewes) in Bottoms Up with co-star Paris Hilton.

[149] Smith teamed with AMC and The Weinstein Company to co-host a late night talk show with Greg Grunberg, Geeking Out, which premiered in July 2016, covering San Diego Comic-Con with 8 subsequent episodes running weekly.

A second Secret Stash in the Westwood section of Los Angeles was opened in September 2004 and was managed by long-time friend and associate Bryan Johnson, who has appeared in Smith's films as Steve-Dave.

[162] Smith had announced that he would close after his lease expired and Johnson wanted to resign, but eventually relocated to Laser Blazer, a now-defunct laserdisc and DVD store in Los Angeles.

The thoughts and ideas he explored during this time formed the inspiration for his film Dogma, the beginning of which features characters using the shot glass metaphor used by the priest.

[citation needed] On February 25, 2018, after performing a stand-up comedy show at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California, Smith suffered a severe heart attack caused by a total blockage of the left anterior descending artery.

[180] On the fifth anniversary of his heart attack, Smith confirmed that he had quit using marijuana in early 2023 and had experienced a mental health crisis earlier in the year that led him to reassess his livelihood and identify as a co-dependent.

In 2019, Clerks was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".