Judd Apatow

Steve Carell lies on a table in The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005) and has his chest waxed, and the distress is so convincing that enjoying it feels slightly unkind. We laughed harder than we felt we ought to. What made it possible is that Andy Stitzer is still a person we care about while the joke is happening, uncertain and likeable rather than a fool. That is Judd Apatow's habit in one scene: find the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a man, let it happen at length, and keep the man.

He came to it as a performer, doing stand-up at 17 in New York before going west to write for other people. His name is on the staff of The Larry Sanders Show (1992), where the writers' grievances give the comedy somewhere to go beyond the host's vanity, and on The Simpsons (1989). With Paul Feig he made Freaks and Geeks (1999), a patient, funny, often uncomfortable account of school life. Then came the features he directed as well as wrote: The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up (2007), Funny People (2009), This Is 40 (2012), Trainwreck (2015) and The King of Staten Island (2020). Through his production company he also turned up on the writing staff of Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's Girls (2012).

The method is improvisation. Scenes are worked up in rehearsal and on set, with regulars such as Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann and Jason Segel, and then sorted out in the edit. "The jokes can't work if the story doesn't work," he has said. "The whole thing will crumble." When it works, as it does for most of The 40 Year-Old Virgin, a crude comedy comes out warmer than its title, because the people in it have been allowed to behave like people.

When it does not, the same method produces the faults. The films are long, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin takes far more time than a simple story needs. The jokes about race and sexuality that Apatow and Carell's screenplay reaches for when another laugh is wanted ask nothing of the writers, and the affection elsewhere does not make them clever. The complaint that his early films are about one kind of man and give the women around him less to do is a fair one, and so is the observation that the messes tend to be tidied with a romance.

The best of him, we think, is in the television, where he is one voice among several. On Girls the writing is at its plainest and most painful in the standalone two-handers, Hannah shut in a room with one other person, and that is the same instinct without the set pieces. Start with Freaks and Geeks and The Larry Sanders Show. Then the films, which are long, so pick an evening with nothing after.