The dogs grow tired, but the Apatow Hit Factory rolls on

So, TMC and I had another non-erotic date Wednesday night, during which we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I went into the movie a bit skeptical -- the whole Judd Apatow crew has been popping out movies left and right lately, so it stands to reason they'll eventually drop a turd. And this one had some potential-turd-like ingredients: what looked in the previews like a pretty standard-issue romantic-comedy plot, a pompous Brit musician who looked like a collection of worn-out Lousy Love Choice cliches, a brief bit by Jonah Hill in which he played ... well, Jonah Hill.

Yet I'm happy to report that the only similarity between Forgetting Sarah Marshall and a turd is that both are hilarious.

The film's more 40-Year-Old Virgin funny than Superbad funny, which is to say that it is, at heart, a fairly sweet love story. But while it does have a fairly typical romantic comedy plot -- girl dumps boy, boy goes on vacation to forget about girl, finds out girl is vacationing at same place with new boy, but then boy meets new girl who he realizes is The One For Him (you may recall Helen Hunt and an even-paler-than-usual Andrew McCarthy covering similar ground in 1992's Only You) -- it doesn't slip into standard romcom treacliness. Mainly because a) it's laugh-out-loud funny, rather than awww-isn't-that-cute funny, b) the characters are more than faint simulacrums of real humans (even the obnoxious, self-involved Brit has his moments of humor and likeability), and c) it doesn't insult the audience's intelligence by ending with a wedding, or dancing, or a sunset.

Plus, for good measure, there's full-frontal male nudity. And a rock opera about Dracula. With puppets.