The Classic Story of Boy Meets Ira

This is the first entry in a dialogue about the films of Judd Apatow and the state of the romantic comedy among Double X Managing Editor Jessica Grose, Slate critic Troy Patterson, and Variety contributor Lael Loewenstein.

Hi Troy and Lael,

Judd Apatow has produced almost a dozen comedies in the past five years. We’re here to talk about the three he wrote and directed: Funny People, which premieres on Friday, along with its bawdy, bro-loving precursors: The 40-Year-Old Virgin from 2005 and Knocked Up from 2007. Both of the older movies were on TV Sunday night, leading me to an addendum to the Caine-Hackman Theory: At all times, there is a 100 percent statistical probability that a Judd Apatow-produced movie will be on cable.

Each of the three points in Apatow’s box-office bursting crown is a romantic comedy told from the male point of view. And as New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis puts it, each stars “a funny, smutty but sincere man-boy puzzling [his] way through adult heterosexual relations.”

She’s right—the man-boys of the Apatow universe are immature in a profound way. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carrell’s character still plays with action figures. In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen’s anti-hero is a mostly unemployed stoner. And now, in Funny People, Adam Sandler plays a wildly successful comedian who still dresses like a teenage boy and eats popsicles after banging groupies. In a movie within the movie, Sandler also plays a man who has been transformed into a baby, his gargantuan melon digitally attached to an infant’s body: a literal depiction of his inability to grow up.

Sandler’s character, 40-year-old George Simmons, has an existential crisis when he realizes that he is sick with a rare form of Leukemia. His choice in the face of this terrifying discovery won’t surprise anyone familiar with the Apatow oeuvre: Simmons befriends a much-younger struggling stand-up comic named Ira Wright, played by Rogen. In typical Apatow fashion, the homosocial love affair, or “bromance,” between George and Ira becomes the central relationship of the movie. Never mind that it has been marketed as a heterosexual romantic comedy; it’s their story line that follows the familiar romantic comedy arc: boy meets Ira, boy loses Ira, boy gets Ira.

If you agree with Katherine Heigl, who called Knocked Up “a little bit sexist” in Vanity Fair, you might see this relationship as a natural progression for Apatow, since his previous films left women increasingly on the sidelines. Double X founding editor Meghan O’Rourke wrote of the female leads in Knocked Up (played by Heigl and Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann), “It's as if women's inner worlds are entirely functional rather than playful and open.” This also holds true for the more fully fleshed-out character played by Catherine Keener in the 40-Year-Old Virgin. All three of these women are the enforcers of commitment and domesticity, and it is their job to corral the unruly boys, who get to have all the fun on-screen.