When Boys Just Wanna Have Fun

Judd Apatow may not be able to do whatever he wants, but he sure gets to do a lot of it. He’s become a virtual movie factory since he transitioned from television to film in 2004, producing some 15 flicks to date, about half of which have come out in the past year or will come out by the end of 2008. What’s more, he’s been heavily and constantly criticized for the sexism and misogyny in many of his films—a criticism that is certainly grounded in some truth.

But here’s the thing: none of this matters to audiences, who are going to his movies in droves. In a year when even stars like George Clooney can’t open a movie—his period sports comedy “Leatherheads” has yet to make back its production budget—many are calling Apatow one of the most bankable people in Hollywood. According to the New York Times, his films have grossed almost a billion dollars once DVD sales are included. Something’s working.

Maybe it’s the films’ trademark balance of lewdness and morality. The Apatow canon includes full-frontal shots of both a live-birth and Jason Segel’s penis, as well as characters marked by their chastity and aversion to abortion.

Despite their success, even the biggest fans of box office hits such as “Superbad” would concede that perhaps the most shocking things about these films is their length, with many of them clocking in either at or around a convention-busting two-hour running time. But people still don’t seem to be complaining.

That’s because the Apatow humor aesthetic is founded upon the riff. Riffs are all about timing and sequence, and to get people into stitches you need to keep ’em coming. The writers of these films seem to be hyper-conscious of this fact—and the effect is that they can leave the viewer in a bit of a comedic haze upon viewing. I remember leaving “Knocked Up” amused, not remembering what exactly was funny but knowing that something surely was.

The same thing goes for the latest out of Apatow’s plant, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” the romcom centered around one man’s attempt to do just that. The first hour of the film is objectively funny, reveling in the structure of the riff and creating an environment in which the audience feels compelled to laugh at just about anything. It’s an experience well worth the price of admission.

After the first hour, though, the film falls off. Even more so than any other in the Apatow line, “Sarah Marshall” struggles to come to a close. Or perhaps more accurately, it can’t seem to figure out how to reconcile the film’s major oppositional forces—men and women—to each other. As in the past, genders are treated as camps—us vs. them—with the “us” always being “us guys.” And as at a middle school dance, the boys seem to be having a hard time talking to the girls.

Many people take issue with the establishment of the sexes as camps, or, more precisely, take issue with the fact that this stark delineation causes the female characters to suffer. To a certain extent, I’m one of them (though Apatow’s wonderful, tragically short-lived TV series “Freaks and Geeks” shows that he’s not averse to the idea of strong female leads).

I’m not one, however, who thinks it’s such a terrible thing for guys to make movies about guys being guys. While turning tales of the perennially unemployed, overweight, and substance-dependent into comedies does little to improve the image of us heterogametes, I understand the appeal. Undoubtedly, though, the films would benefit from a bit of refocusing and, perhaps more importantly, a feminine touch.

While this is unlikely to happen, it seems as though the women of American Comedy like to do things differently. And most recently, they seem to be doing it better. The Tina Fey and Amy Poehler vehicle “Baby Mama” grossed an estimated $18.3 million dollars this past weekend, coming in at number one. While the movie is certainly the story of a woman reconciling a career and her age with her wish for a family, it seems to be far less concerned with femininity’s comedic potential than Apatow’s films are with exploiting the humor in the positively unimpressive masculinity of his male characters.

While there’s nothing wrong with guys making movies for guys about guys, when I see women making movies that are about women but eschew whatever the female equivalent of a dick-joke is, I get a grin in the corner of my mouth. I get excited that there might be more than one acceptable way to make a comedy that stars same-sex actors as its leads and excited that the boys might get hip to the fact that there are other ways to do things. But in the meantime, to each their own.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.