How The 40-Year-Old Virgin Revitalized the Studio Comedy

A few weeks before Liam Neeson‘s Frank Drebin Jr. bumbled onto movie screens, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich published an essay with the audacious title, “The Naked Gun Is the Most Important Movie of the Summer.” Beyond just the hopes that Neeson and director Akiva Scheffer could recreate bizarre energy of the Leslie Nielsen originals, the essay captures the modern movie fan’s desperation for the return of mid-budget studio comedies. “Almost everything is ‘funny,'” Ehrlich says of our current state of blockbuster IP films. “Almost nothing is a comedy.”

Of course, the studio comedy never truly went away. Just this year, we had the incredible One of Them Days and Tim Robinson brought his absurdist humor to cinemas with Friendship. But neither of those movies captured the public imagination like even Game Night or The Hangover, let alone comedies that defined their era, such as City Lights, Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, or Wayne’s World.

Given our current paucity of giant comedy hits, it’s even more surprising to look back at The 40-Year-Old Virgin, whose shaggy mixture of improv comedy and heartfelt emotions broke the box office and spawned a decade’s worth of imitators.

A Forty-Year-Old, Twenty Years Ago

Although it’s only twenty years old, the first ten minutes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin feel like they come from a completely different era. As we watch meek Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) go through his morning routine, we’re shown signifiers of his nerdiness. Get this: Andy has a house full of action figures! He reads comic books! He likes to play video games!

Just as dated are the day to day operations of his job, a big box store modeled on Circuit City (remember them?). Clueless customers wander in to get advice from salesmen, most prominently Jay (Romany Malco) and David (Paul Rudd), who extol the virtues of DVD players and mini-DV cams. In the stock room where Andy works with Cal (Seth Rogen), we see stickers hocking Monster Cables, the $40 HDMI cords that Circuit City and Best Buy sold to unsuspecting customers buying their first 480p television.

But The 40-Year-Old Virgin really shows its age when the four leads get together at a card game and discuss their sexual exploits. To be sure, the content of the conversation certainly stands out. It’s hard to imagine any modern movie or show devoting several minutes to a bunch of straight guys detailing the qualities of women’s breasts. But even more striking is the way the conversation unfolds, clearly off-book and consisting of nothing but ad-libbed riffs. From Andy cluelessly likening a breast to bag of sand to Jay unironically taking ownership over Andy’s member, the conversation feels more like the result of funny guys hanging out than the work of a craftsman.

Which is, of course, the point, as director Judd Apatow (who shares a screenwriting credit with Carell) fills the movie with similar scenes. A speed dating sequence allows Mindy Kaling (in her first film appearance), Mo Collins, and Gillian Vigman to get in on the fun, doing their own bits as women forced to interact with these loser guys. Jane Lynch, already a veteran of Christopher Guest movies, appears as the boys’ manager and lovingly reminisces about an inappropriate relationship she had as a teen.

But the most famous improvised sequence is also the most painful. That’s when the hirsute Carell actually gets his chest waxed on screen. While there’s some Jackass-style laughs to be had to see the hair ripped from Carell’s body while Rogen, Malco, and Rudd chuckle on the sidelines, the true humor comes from the random lines that Andy shouts. The usually kind Andy begins screaming obscenities at the technician and, in one oft-quoted bit, just blurts the name “Kelly Clarkson.”

Physically demanding though the scene may be, it’s a far cry from even the expertly crafted slapstick comedies that made Keystone Studios a sensation a century earlier. And yet, The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a mega-hit, earning $177.4 million on a $26 million budget and making improv the king of comedy in the 2000s.

Riffing Around the Pop Culture Landscape

Thanks to the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Hollywood studios embraced what would be called “Apatow comedies.” After The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Apatow directed Knocked Up in 2007, Funny People in 2009, and This Is 40 in 2012, all hit comedies with ensemble casts of familiar faces, emotional stories about monogamy and the nuclear family, and lots of improv scenes.

Apatow also produced several other movies that shared similar sensibilities and structure, many of which were box office hits. After producing Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy in 2004, Apatow produced the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly two-handers Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers (to his credit, he does not have a credit on Holmes & Watson), as well as the then-underappreciated spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Apatow produced the Jason Segel vehicles Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement, and continued to support Rogen by producing Superbad, which Rogen wrote with Evan Goldberg. While he’s often accused of making laddie comedies, Apatow produced the female-led Bridesmaids in 2011 and directed Amy Schumer in Trainwreck in 2015.

This short survey doesn’t even take into account the influence on television. Where the American version of The Office, also released in 2005, originally imagined boss Michael Scott as another abrasive jerk like Ricky Gervais’s David Brent, The 40-Year-Old Virgin convinced producers to let Carell play his sweeter side. Moreover, The Office developer Greg Daniels followed Apatow’s lead in letting his actors riff, qualities that allowed the American version to distinguish itself from its British big brother and pave the way for Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and more.

Of course, this survey also reminds us that Apatow’s career stretched back long before The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. In fact, he first met Rogen while making Freaks & Geeks with Paul Feig, the wonderful coming-of-age series that ran for one season in 1999. Before that, Apatow co-created The Ben Stiller Show, and worked on The Larry Sanders Show and The Critic, all important cult series.

In fact, Apatow’s history with comedians such as Ben Stiller, Gary Shandling, and Adam Sandler underscores an important fact about his comedy style, one that people often forget when talking about the improv comedies that dominated the 2000s. He lets his actors riff because he recognizes funny people and trusts them to do their thing. He understands that good comedy starts with good comedians… and that’s a lesson that Hollywood has truly forgotten.

Let Funny People Be Funny People

By this point, we can confidently say that the fears David Ehrlich expressed in his essay on The Naked Gun never came to pass. The Naked Gun is hilarious, filled with the same indelibly crafted gags and brilliantly stupid humor that Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker brought to the original. Furthermore, Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson throw themselves into their roles, playing the parts with so little ego that even a chili dog poop gag feels fresh.

And yet, The Naked Gun, like its predecessors, gets a lot of its humor less from the fact that a funny person is saying things and more from the fact that its funny that these people are saying these things. Simply put, Neeson and Anderson aren’t comedians. They’re just good actors giving it their all.

Obviously, that’s not inherently a bad thing. But it does perhaps suggest that The Naked Gun isn’t going to totally reinvigorate the studio comedy, not when it spent the last decade convinced that the height of comedy involves big tough guys like John Cena and Dave Bautista doing things that are usually too silly for big guys to do. If the studio comedy is truly going to return, then producers need to take a page from Apatow’s book and look back at The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a movie that knew enough to let funny people just say funny things.