The Summer Movie Season™ is essentially over by mid-July. August is where the bodies are buried. After rolling out nine-figure blockbusters for three straight months, studios unload their misfits and embarrassments to a public as fatigued by hype as they are by the heat. The best they can hope for is a sleeper hit to lighten the red ink on the ledger.
Released 10 years ago today, Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin was no mere late-summer sleeper, but a phenomenon that even a $100 million-plus return on a $26 million investment doesn’t come close to explaining. Apatow’s ingenious twist on the teen sex comedy would become the wellspring of American studio comedy—launching careers, kicking off trends and counter-trends, and bringing order to a genre that feeds off chaos. Here are five reasons why The 40-Year-Old Virgin is the most influential comedy of the last decade.
There’s some irony to Apatow becoming a force in mainstream comedy, because for the decade or so before making his directorial debut with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he had the opposite of the Midas touch. Everything he touched turned to a cultishly adored flop: The Ben Stiller Show, The Cable Guy, Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared. None of his TV shows lasted more than one season—Undeclared had the misfortune of premiering two weeks after 9/11—and The Cable Guy, which was Apatow’s first feature producing credit, put an abrupt end to Jim Carrey’s big-screen winning streak. In retrospect, however, these losses were the foundation to a much larger and more lasting victory for Apatow, who had amassed both critical goodwill and a stable of comedy talent that would pay off in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and beyond.
Seth Rogen may be the only cast member who followed Apatow from the TV shows to Virgin, but consider the gallery of bit players who went on to stardom: Jonah Hill, Jane Lynch, Elizabeth Banks, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart, Kat Dennings. Consider also the Apatow players who were suddenly ascendant on the wings of his success: James Franco (who returned to being funny), Jason Segel, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Jay Baruchel. Or the former collaborators who would became hitmakers themselves: Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy), and a trio of Undeclared writers and/or directors, including Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors), Greg Mottola (Superbad), and Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). In fact, a good argument could be made that Apatow’s curatorial instincts are sharper than his filmmaking instincts. He used the leverage from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to become the David O. Selznick of good-hearted raunch, and even the odd dud hasn’t knocked him from the perch.
As an adolescent in the early to mid-1980s, Apatow was surely weaned on the post-Animal House glut of smutty frathouse comedies with a little bit of T&A and a lot of sexual embarrassment. The freaks and geeks that populated pay-cable after midnight were nearly all bespectacled virgins, subjected to endless false starts and public humiliations before finally scoring in the end. The premise for The 40-Year-Old Virgin is such a simple twist on the same formula that it’s amazing it took so long for anyone to think of it. It’s possible to imagine that Andy Stitzer, Steve Carell’s post-post-post-adolescent naif, was raised on these movies, too, which helped reinforce the idea that sex was a terrifying prospect and that breasts possibly felt like bags of sand.
Making a sex comedy around a middle-aged man only partly explains how the film turns the disreputable subgenre on its head. What made most of those ‘80s comedies so intolerable is they were fundamentally cruel: They may have nerds for heroes, but they’re aligned mostly with the bullies who laugh at them. Apatow brings a sweetness, self-deprecation, and camaraderie to The 40-Year-Old Virgin that not only invests the other characters (and the audience) in Andy’s quest to get laid, but makes it seem as if he’s not the oddball for holding out for so long. He just has a little growing up to do.
Romantic comedies need some friends to give terrible advice. The 40-Year-Old Virgin offered three of them in Andy’s co-workers, played by Rogen, Paul Rudd, and Romany Malco, who take personal responsibility for getting him laid. Each one, indeed, has terrible advice: Rogen wants him “to be kind of a dick, like David Caruso in Jade,” Rudd makes monogamy seem like pathological sickness, and Malco’s tomcatting ways are far too advanced for him. But they mean well, and they care about Andy’s happiness.
Mostly, though, they hang out and go on little side adventures together, trading juvenile one-liners and half-baked philosophical nuggets that are nine-tenths stupid to one-tenth wise. As with Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, the men have a pack mentality that’s good for friendship and hijinks but is really about marinating in maleness.
The bro comedies of the ‘00s didn’t start with The 40-Year-Old Virgin—perhaps Old School, from two years earlier, deserves more credit for that. But Apatow would go on to make a cottage industry of man-child characters working their way through arrested adolescence. At the same time, Hollywood followed suit with The Hangover trilogy; Wedding Crashers; Dodgeball; I Love You, Man; and countless others, which in turn prompted Apatow to change directions and put his name behind comedies about women. He produced Feig’s Bridesmaids and Lena Dunham’s HBO show Girls, and more recently turned Trainwreck into a Knocked Up with writer Amy Schumer in the Rogen part. The smutty/sweet dynamic of Apatow’s bro comedies are still present, but from the other side of the gender divide.
Following Anchorman (which Apatow produced) the year before, The 40-Year-Old Virgin cemented the improvisational looseness that would take over comedy for the next decade. While there are consequences to Apatow’s comic digressions—running times that balloon to two hours and beyond (and longer on “Unrated” DVD cuts), an excess of random jokes and non sequiturs, that bizarre intervention with Matthew Broderick and Marv Albert in Trainwreck—many of the best scenes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin are off the cuff. The chest-waxing scene and the “you know how I know you’re gay” exchange are the most widely noted, but there are specific riffs and references that have the spontaneity of improv whether they’re scripted or not. After Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the power in comedy shifted to actors who were skilled at thinking on their feet, and have the creative freedom of not being bound to the page.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a hit in August, but it would be the last time the studio released an Apatow comedy in the dog days of summer. Knocked Up, Funny People, Trainwreck: All came out in July, right alongside the big-budget remakes, reboots, sequels, and superhero movies that traditionally rattle the multiplexes. With big enough stars and a hooky enough concept, studios have rightly felt confident that audiences would shell out full admission for comedy as they did for the latest 3D effects-driven spectacle.
To some degree, that’s forced filmmakers to come up with big, outrageous setpieces like the food-poisoning scene in Bridesmaids or the tiger transport in The Hangover. But still, there’s something refreshing about recognizable, all-too-human characters making fools out of themselves in the middle of summer. Blockbuster comedies have to aim for the rafters, but The 40-Year-Old Virgin proved it could done with generosity and a bigness of heart.