Originally released August 19, 2005:

Yes it’s an uproarious sex farce, that’s a given from the ads, but this movie is also surprisingly sweet and genuinely moving. A lot of credit goes to star/co-writer Steve Carell and co-writer/director Judd Apatow, creator of some of the best, most honestly funny TV series unjustly cancelled. Apatow is a master at mining human comedy for pathos, where you get a great sense of character and really feel for those onscreen, and yet nothing feels cheap or unwarranted, all the while deriving comedy from the situations. We need more men like Apatow in the film industry. Carell can do it all whether it’s deflecting his insecurity, which we feel so bad when he comes up with outrageous things he’s overheard to make himself seem like one of the guys. The supporting cast is top-notch. They’re basically the stock roles in a sex comedy and yet they bring so much more to the table, with a true-to-life boys-will-be-boys camaraderie that you can identify with. The character relationships in The 40-Year-Old Virgin really elevate the story and the jokes and make the film something really special. It’s not merely a barrage of gross-out humor; it’s a nice story with some very tender moments. This is a movie that goes well beyond its gimmick premise, never feeling like a skit blown up into a feature film. It mixes in psychology, heartbreak, awkwardness, but also insights into loneliness and human connection. The best character-based comedy in years.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

It’s always an interesting prospect to revisit beloved comedies decades after their impact. Comedy is, by its nature, a form of entertainment with the shortest shelf life. What one generation and time considers funny may prove antiquated or offensive the next or, just simply, not funny. I challenge readers to watch the old vaudeville routines and really try to laugh, not just snicker or titter but laugh, the kind of laughter where you have to hold your sides and worry about losing bladder control. Shakespeare wrote many comedies but I would argue most would view them today as clever rather than gut-busting. That’s just the nature of funny, which is in constant flux. One day you’re a popular comedian building your brand on copious “I hate my wife” jokes, and the next you’re a has-been who has transparent issues hating women. I experienced this before when I revisited the movies of Kevin Smith, a filmmaker who made a significant formative impact on my burgeoning sense of comedy and indie cinema. I found that the same movies that proved so funny and outrageous in my teenage and young adult years now, in the light of distance and decades, felt painfully dated and grasping, gassed and flailing. Comedy is a cultural time capsule.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a delightful surprise when it was originally released twenty years ago, but it wasn’t only a popular sex comedy, it began a new era of dominant comedy, the Judd Apatow Era. The prolific producer had been responsible for critically acclaimed TV series that always got cancelled too soon, like Freaks and Geeks (created by Paul Feig), Undeclared, and The Ben Stiller Show. He was a well-regarded writer with a sharp eye for talent, but it wasn’t until 2004’s Anchorman that Apatow had a hit under his name, a comedy that crossed over from a small cult audience into the zeitgeist. After The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s reign, the Apatow style of comedy became hip and desirable. It was a winning mixture of broad body humor and character-driven pathos, usually following lonely men suffering from arrested development and finding kinship, agency, and a fuller sense of who they are by the end. There were regular set pieces like traditional comedies but these were more focused on character moments and vibes, which lead to roaming running times and loose-goosey, improv-heavy jam sessions. It was the combination of salty and sweet that proved a winning combination, starring less conventional leading men like Steve Carell, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Jonah Hill, many of whom also wrote or co-wrote their own movies. The Apatow factory created a comedy coaching tree of influential big screen storytellers.

It was the apex of studio comedy and then… it wasn’t. This isn’t so much a tale of the world growing fickle to the Apatow formula, though with time any formula can start to wear out its novelty. Apatow went on a cold streak for me, first with 2009’s misanthropic and misshapen Funny People and then again with 2012’s This is 40, a sequel to Knocked Up that was obnoxiously wallowing in its sense of woe-is-me rich privilege (it definitely wasn’t my life turning 40). After that, he became something of a shepherd for exciting new comic voices, creating starring vehicles for Amy Schumer (2015’s Trainwreck) and Pete Davidson (2020’s The King of Staten Island) and Lena Dunham (HBO’s Girls). Then he made 2022’s The Bubble, a limp COVID-era satire of studio filmmaking that was painfully unfunny. It felt like Apatow had run out of things to say and even things to laugh about. It was pretty depressing for this comedy giant.

However, the downturn in Apatow’s influence also coincided with the downturn in studio comedies. These mid-budget vehicles used to dominate the box-office and then by the end of the 2010s, they seemed to vanish, seemingly folded into larger-budgeted superhero movies and/or ceded to streaming venues. This became even more entrenched in the theatrical environment during and “after” COVID. Even the occasional A-list starring vehicle, like 2023’s No Hard Feelings with a brassy Jennifer Lawrence performance and the selling point of a full-frontal nude fight scene, could only muster so much attention. Take for instance a Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon comedy released just this year directed by Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors). Can anyone even remember the title? I had to look it up myself and I watched it. Have moviegoers grown to expect comedies being lesser or have people lost their sense of humor in the Trump Era where every day can feel like a burdensome weight on your very soul.

I genuinely enjoyed most of the Apatow-related comedies of the 2000s, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin holds up because its central appeal is on the engaging characters, their winning camaraderie, and the relatable vulnerability and awkwardness of sex and dating. While some of the jokes and attitudes have changed in twenty years, there is a timeless quality to the inherent vulnerability of feeling like you cannot connect with others and the steps taken to rectify that, risking shame. Dating is still a minefield for awkward yet relatable observational comedy just as it was and just as it always will be. Apatow and co-writer Carell anchored their movie on a repressed man’s awakening, taking the formula of a sexual awakening we usually see in teen/young adult movies and applying it to an older man. It redefines a sub-genre but also provides a little sadness and sweetness, as we can’t help but hope that Andy (Carell) will luck in on pleasurable experiences denied him. He’s not a creep, and the explanation for how a man could hold onto his virginity for 40 years (the CDC stats say 0.3% of women and 1.2% of men aged 40 to 44 are indeed virgins) is painfully plausible. After a few embarrassing experiences, he just waited with the expectation it would happen eventually, and the longer it took, the more shame built, and the less certain he was to pursue a romantic relationship. He knows once his secret is out that people won’t just look at him differently, they’ll look at him as if he’s a freak and think less of him. That’s why it’s genuinely sweet how involved his co-workers get to help Andy get over this hump, so to speak. While each co-worker has a different perspective of advice, they open up about their own troubles with women and self-confidence. It’s not like this is a searing relationship drama, but the fundamentals that make it worth investing are there, and that begins and ends with the characters and their conflicts and their camaraderie.

Each of Andy’s co-workers is giving him bad advice because each one of them wants him to be someone else. Cal (Rogen) advises Andy to be inscrutable and standoffish, turning everything into a question while revealing nothing personal. It’s reminiscent of those smug 2000s pick-up artists that trained a generation of young men into thinking the way to a woman’s heart was to insult her. He does have a hilariously specific note (“Be like David Caruso in Jade”) that still made me laugh hard. Jay (Romany Malco) advises Andy about it being a numbers game, to embrace a bravado to ensnare women, and to pick them up where they are most impressionable. David (Paul Rudd) is still hung up on his ex and is lovelorn, so his advice is often coated in reflexive bitterness. He’s the friend who advises Andy to explore more about his own desires, leading to a very funny sequence where Andy sets up his home environment for his attempt at masturbation, turning around family pictures to spare their eyes. It’s actually through the character of Marla (Kat Dennings, Thor), the teen daughter of his girlfriend, that Andy finds a level of self-acceptance for being a novice to human sexuality. I think it’s telling that the best advice he receives on the subject is from a teenage girl rather than his horndog pals who consider themselves female experts.

The movie pivots into a more focused romantic comedy by its second half once Andy finally works up the nerve to ask out Trish, played by Catherine Keener (Get Out, Being John Malkovich). This is a natural transition because now Andy has a person to practice all the advice and prove himself. They have a chummy and self-deprecating chemistry together, so the challenge becomes how long he can hide what amounts to his secret shame. Things are going so well he throws out obstacles to delay their physical copulation because he’s afraid that’s when she’ll realize he isn’t worth it. You’re rooting for Andy to get over his hangups and recognize he’s actually a nice guy and that Trish would be really happy to have sex with him, especially after waiting over twenty-plus dates. This is one of Keener’s warmest performances in her storied career. This was Carell’s star-making role. He had been a notable scene-stealer before in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman, but now he was a leading man, further solidifying that same year with the role that would define him, as Michael Scott on the American version of The Office. The both of them are a winning pair and you want their shared adorkable energy to work out for the best.

Much of the comedy still works very well, like the famous chest-waxing scene where Carell really had his chest hair ripped out, but there are some elements that would have been scuttled had The 40-Year-Old Virgin been released today. It’s hard to conceive of a modern studio comedy that would allow two straight guys insulting each other with the many ways they are irrefutably gay. The 2000s was a time rife with gay panic jokes. What has aged the worst is the advice to prey upon “drunk bitches” because they have fewer defenses. Given the term, “prey upon,” you’ll no doubt surmise that this advice is predatory. This dubious thinking is something that would set up a guy as one of the bad men in Promising Young Woman, and it would have proven fitting had one of those women gotten one over on the guys. Frustratingly, Jay has a brief moment of recompense and self-reflection when his long-suffering girlfriend has had enough of his cheating ways, but then she goes right back to him and reveals she’s pregnant. We’re missing a scene that would help solidify how this event changes Jay, but instead he’s basically rewarded for his bad behavior with a baby and a woman forgiving him once again.

You’ve probably heard about the loneliness epidemic of modern men, a media-friendly term exploring how many of today’s available men are having difficulty making connections with women and some of them using this rejection and/or fear of rejection as the excuse to radicalize themselves. There’s been so much written on the subject, but I think most of it really just comes down to empathy. When you care about other people, and allow yourself to think about their needs and desires, it communicates an openness to others and that their time and emotional investment is worth it. It’s hard to fathom a swath of young men, the ones who identify as reactionary incels, deigning to view empathy as a strength rather than character defect. Empathy communicates two important self-realizations: 1) other people matter, and 2) being vulnerable and possibly being hurt is worth the risk. You can’t have one without the other. When young men reach that epiphany and acceptance, they will discover women are, amazingly, much more open to seeing them as a romantic partner worth their time, affection, and their bodies. Nobody owes anyone their bodies or emotional bandwidth. Sharing your life with others should be valued, not entitled.

This is also a perfect spot to talk about one of the minor co-stars, Shelley Malil as co-worker Haziz, who was charged with stabbing his girlfriend 25 times in 2008. He was released from prison in 2018 after serving eight years of a twelve-years-to-life prison sentence, which doesn’t sound very close to “life” for me, but on the flip side, “12 years to all years” seems like too expansive of a window of time to serve.

Twenty years later, The 40-Year–Old Virgin still funny and sweet and entertaining because it nails the tenets of what makes movies worth coming back to again and again, our connection to the characters and their relatable plights. Even two decades later, we can still see elements of ourselves in these characters, though maybe fewer. This was the announcement of the Judd Apatow Era of big screen yuks, and frankly I’d be happy to return to it if we got more movies like this and Knocked Up, a comedy I liked even more upon release. My original review was correct for all the accolades The 40-Year-Old Virgin deserved and still deserves, and so it remains a comedy classic with more on its dirty mind than many adult dramas.

Re-View Grade: A