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(Note that the protagonists played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are named Seth and Evan, respectively.) The first is when the drunken pals lie in separate sleeping bags after a fight and make up (but do not kiss) by unashamedly confessing their best-friend love for each other. Seth gives Evan an affectionate tap on the nose: "Boop!"

That connection is what makes their impending separation, the subject of the movie's first scene (along with porn Web sites and the boobs of Evan's mom), both possible and bearable. In the movie's final images, Seth and Evan part ways on a mall escalator, physically and metaphorically, each taking his first tentative independent steps with a girl, glancing back with a slightly apprehensive shrug in anticipation of what awaits him on the next "level."

If there's a myth we cling to in America, it's that life is arranged in stages of "personal growth," and each one leads to a higher plane of enlightenment. But Apatow seems at least somewhat ambivalent about the idea, which is why his movies tend to end with reunions rather than the weddings or engagements that have concluded traditional comedies for centuries.

You know what they say about the difference between comedy and tragedy -- it's all in where you choose to end the story. Apatow's films begin with something less than tragedy ("Are you living your dream?" Ben's dad asks him sarcastically in "Knocked Up") and end with something less than a love-you-forever promise. The road ahead for Andy (Steve Carell) and Trish (Catherine Keener) in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," Peter (Segel) and Rachel (Mila Kunis) in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (billed as "The Ultimate Romantic Disaster Movie") and, especially, Ben and Alison in "Knocked Up," will be uphill and, most likely, riddled with obstacles and potholes they can't possibly anticipate until they hit 'em. That emotional open-endedness feels both satisfying and refreshingly honest.

You don't see a lot of wedded couples in ApatowLand. The marriage of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann -- Apatow's offscreen wife) in "Knocked Up" is one of the few examples of matrimony in ApatowLand -- but it's not a rosy one. "Marriage is like an unfunny version of 'Everybody Loves Raymond,'" says Pete. "Only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever." For Apatow's characters, relationships -- for all their satisfactions -- are often grueling work. They don't come naturally to them at all.

The problem comes down to this: The guys are pretty sure they love the girls, but feel those feelings ought to be (1) self-evident; and (2) enough. So what if they have to sneak off to play fantasy baseball, or eat Froot Loops and wear Costco sweatpants around the house every day for a week? Who cares?

Well, the women do. They're pretty sure they love their man-child mates, too, but they also know that's absolutely not enough for them. They need the guys to change. What's more, the women need them to want to change -- to better suit their better halves. This appears to be an unresolvable lose-lose scenario, but there it is, and there's no avoiding it. (In this respect, the teenagers of "Superbad" are probably the most mature in Apatow's body of work so far: The boys and the girls really do like each other for who they are. But they're still in "like." Love, which to some is a sacred declaration of perpetual ownership, changes everything.)

Also: 'The Big Debate': Is Judd Apatow the Funniest Man Alive?

In "Knocked Up," Pete confesses a revelation to Ben when they're high on mushrooms in Vegas: "The biggest problem in our marriage is that she wants me around. She loves me so much that she wants me around all the time. That's our biggest problem, and I can't even accept that? Like, that upsets me?"

"You can't accept love?" Ben cries. "Love -- the most beautiful, shiny, warmy thing in the world -- you can't accept it? ... She's chosen to give you her life! She's picked you as her life partner!" If only it were that simple. Everybody knows what they think they're supposed to feel, but then what? If Apatow's characters "learn" anything it's not that they should have read the baby books, or that it's time to put away the action figure of the Six Million Dollar Man. It's that choices -- any choices -- don't solve anything. Even when they're the "right" ones, living with them may be just as hard as if they'd made the "wrong" ones. But once you've made them, there's no way to know for sure.

If the role of women in their lives involves guiding the boys toward the fabled "responsibilities of adulthood," the gals could learn a thing or three from them about how to loosen up and learn to play. When a guy tosses a toy for a little girl and she fetches it, he's not treating her like a dog (see "Knocked Up"). They're sharing a game, and they're having fun. Together.

Critics always mention the "sweetness" in Apatow's sensibility, and that's because no matter how raunchy his guys may talk, they still talk. They talk about their fears and their insecurities -- and they relentlessly, even cruelly, bait and tease and insult one another. They talk the way guys talk around their friends, or like to think they do when they're relaxed and cracking themselves up over a few beers and bong hits. But they're not cartoons. They don't pork apple pies when they get horny. They might talk about it (actually, they'd come up with something more original), but they don't do it.

So, back to penises. No matter how many of them Apatow includes in his movies, you won't find a lot of foreskins in there. His films are as Jewish as they are male and heterosexual: "When Hebrew Met Shiksa ... " Although Apatow's male characters -- Jewish or Canadian -- are sometimes dismissed as losers or underachievers, that's missing the point: They're outsiders in an overwhelmingly goyish American culture. And these nice boys never seem to date Jewish girls. When Alison compliments Ben on his curly hair and asks if he uses "product" on it, he has to explain: "No, I use, uh, Jew, it's called."

In an interview with the Australian Jewish News, Apatow said of his blond wife Mann: "I may be the first Jew she has met. I feel it every day in the way we react to situations and our world views. Part of our daily struggle is that I always anticipate problems. That's how I live my life and that's how I make movies. That's where I start and then I try to do everything to avoid that from happening. It's a dark way to live your life."

Funny, too.

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Jim Emerson is the former editor of Microsoft's online/CD-ROM movie encyclopedia, Cinemania. He has written a lot through the years, mostly about movies, for many publications and Web sites, and is now the editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also publishes his blog, Scanners.