Knocked Up's Judd Apatow: How to Turn 40 Year-Old Virgins and Pregnant Ladies into Comedic Gold

He shouldn't be surprised: It's hard to imagine anyone ignoring his calls these days. Two years ago, Apatow popped his directorial cherry with The 40-Year-Old Virgin -- a film that managed to combine superbly crafted dick jokes with uncommon sympathy for its Aquaman-doll-collecting title character, played with puppy-eyed soulfulness by Steve Carell. Made for $26 million, it was a career-altering hit for Apatow, grossing $177 million worldwide, helping usher in a new wave of foul-mouthed R-rated comedies and -- perhaps unfortunately -- making "Do you know how I know you're gay?" every frat boy's favorite barroom query.

Already a definitive chronicler of the trauma of adolescence, Apatow turned to the pain of perpetual adolescents fumbling toward adulthood with 40-Year-Old Virgin. "I don't imagine American men ever found it easy to grow up," says Apatow. "But now you can delay it your whole life." Suddenly, it seemed he had a hand in every great comedy coming out of Hollywood. As a producer on the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, he had the idea to change the script from a preposterous farce (news anchors crash-land on a mountaintop, where they fight a war against a group of chimpanzees) to the story of Ron Burgundy's struggle to find love. The same boobish pathos is at the heart of the Apatow-produced Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which grossed $148 million.

In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen -- who's been working with Apatow since Freaks and Geeks -- plays another stunted man-child forced to mature. He's a pudgy, unemployed, bong-toting slacker who accidentally impregnates a blond goddess, played by Grey's Anatomy superhottie Katherine Heigl, during a one-night stand. Then he tries to transform his life to become worthy of her.

Apatow himself grew up long ago. Never much of a partyer -- weed gave him panic attacks -- he hangs out mostly with his wife and kids. "I don't generally bring young comedians everywhere I go," he says. "I am not building a posse." A former obsessive workaholic, he radiates an avuncular calm now, despite an insane schedule: In addition to directing Knocked Up, Apatow is producing at least seven films this year, from the ersatz music biopic Walk Hard (directed by Jake Kasdan) to the uproarious teen-sex comedy Superbad (which co-stars Jonah Hill and has a smaller role featuring Rogen, who co-wrote the screenplay).

Apatow finds writers, actors and directors who share his tastes and keeps them around in what former Freaks star Jason Segel calls "an insulated little world," inviting improvisations and suggestions. "He creates this atmosphere of openness -- anyone can say anything," says Rogen. He has also served as a mentor, nurturing Rogen and collaborator Evan Goldberg's Superbad screenplay for nearly a decade, and teaching Segel (now on CBS' How I Met Your Mother) screenwriting from scratch. "He literally took me into his office and sat me down and showed me how to do an outline and how to do a beat sheet and how to write a script," says Segel, who's currently filming Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a comedy he wrote that Apatow is (of course) producing. "He said, 'You're kind of a weird guy, and that's the only way you're going to make it.'"

Apatow is thirty-nine, and he can look a couple of years older on a bad day -- he's in relatively trim shape, but his hair and close-cropped beard are graying. Fending off brain-dead notes from network execs has left a few extra lines around his blue-gray eyes, which can appear icy when not warmed by laughter. Just above his bulbous, almost W.C. Fields-ish nose is a deep, circular childhood scar. He's wearing jeans, high-tech running shoes and a crisp brown polo shirt, which he just changed into for an appearance on Tavis Smiley's PBS show ("I'm gonna start calling you butter, 'cause you on a roll," the host told Apatow). Before that, he was wearing his usual striped Penguin polo, much like the one Carell rocks in the poster for 40-Year-Old Virgin. "I'm so bad at dressing myself that I just got a bunch of these," he says.