YMMV / The 40-Year-Old Virgin

• Adorkable: Andy, oh so much. His trash talk and pick-up lines are adorably awkward ("Hey Cal, how many pots have you smoked?"), he is adamant about video games and collecting toys being Serious Business, and well, he's a 40-year-old virgin.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • While the theme of the movie is that losing your virginity should be done with someone you care about, one can make the argument that the movie is also about toxic relationships, peer pressure, and how you shouldn't always follow the advice given by other people.
    • Although Andy's friends are well-intentioned in trying to help Andy lose his virginity, it's clear that none of them actually respect women and they sound like they have never actually spoken to a real woman in their life (something Cal haughtily points out). For example, Jay plays porn in the store and makes derogatory comments about women that nearly causes Jill to leave him if Andy hadn't covered for him. Then there's the time when they try to convince him to have sex with a drunk woman because it would be easy.
    • When Cal advises Andy to be more confident and let women just talk about themselves, Andy has much more success and feels more confident after talking to Beth. When Andy meets Trish, he's more confident and they both decide to take the relationship slow. By doing this, the relationship becomes much more mature and romantic, with Andy even building a repertoire with her daughters, particularly Marla who's quick to catch on to how much happier he makes her mother. Even his friends realize in the end that Andy will be happier with Trish than with Beth and encourage him to go back to her.
  • Another lesson that can be taken from the movie is "While being socially awkward and shy around women isn't something to aspire to, it's not the worst thing you can be and it's not the end of the world if you embarrass yourself in front of someone."
    • Although Andy is awkward in his attempts to seduce women, he's much more respectful of women than his friends as he doesn't objectify them in his goal to lose his virginity. For example, he tries to avoid embarrassing the woman whose breast slips out of her shirt, and he does genuinely befriend Trish's daughters and doesn't see them as detrimental to the relationship. The problem was that he needed better advice on how to talk to women in a romantic sense and needed some confidence, things he was lacking before he met Trish.
    • Andy's hobbies are portrayed as unmanly and a sign of him being socially inept, however, many female critics have said that his hobbies and overall attitude towards women make him way more desirable than his friends as he's got a healthy lifestyle, he's in good shape, he's got hobbies he enjoys and finds fulfillment, and he's got a successful job.
    • Although Andy doesn't drive, Trish doesn't think less of him for riding a bicycle and often laughs at his awkward jokes about his empty home. Whereas, Jay's girlfriend, Jill, almost leaves Jay when she finds his awkward and derogatory notes about the women at the speed dating event. Only staying with Jay because Andy took the blame for the notes while making sexist remarks to deter Jill's suspicions of Jay.
  • While the term wasn't in popular use at the time, a strong argument can he made that Andy is demisexual. He seems completely uninterested in sex or sexuality unless it involves someone he's already in love with.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The end sequence, a performance of the Hair number "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" featuring the entire cast. This happens immediately after Andy and Trish's consummation of their marriage. Word of God is that they were brainstorming ways to show how much more special sex was between the two in contrast with his friends' empty sex lives and decided a song-and-dance number showcased it perfectly.
• Genre Turning Point: While comedy films in which comedians/actors made all of the creative decisions and ad-libbed most of their scripts had existed before this one, they tended to be low-key indie cult films while the more popular studio comedies still used professional writers and directors (the first Austin Powers film was a major exception). While the Apatow-produced Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was the first film that proved to the major studios that movies where comedians are more or less allowed to "go off" for 90 minutes could work on a larger scale, this was the one that made it the norm for the next two decades. It also displaced the trend of over-the-top gross-out films that had been the norm up to that point for a decidedly more naturalistic style.
• Hollywood Homely: Cal. Granted, few people would consider Seth Rogen their dream man, but he is average-looking at worst and certainly not "ugly as fuck by traditional standards".
• Jerkass Woobie: David, thanks to his love/hate relationship with his ex-girlfriend. He doesn't handle it well at all, reaching a zenith with his drunken camera ramble in the store.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The title itself is often used as a go-to insult.
  • "Bags of sand" (the line that gives away Andy is a virgin) to refer to breasts. It also enjoys second life as a reaction macro used against Blatant Lies.
  • On many internet message boards, "You know how I know you're gay?" has become a typical comeback to somebody pointing out minor flaws on an otherwise attractive woman. Alternately, they'll just post a screenshot from the scene.
• Misaimed Fandom: In the years after it came out, a lot of people used the title and Andy as an example of how they don't want to end up, ignoring the fact that Andy has a pretty good life. He has hobbies where he finds fulfillment, a job he likes and plenty of people in his social circle he gets along well with. Even with his sex life, it's a completely understandable reason; he had some bad experiences, anxieties prevented him wanting to try again and he has simply made peace with it. Note that the central conflict of the movie kicks off not because of Andy's own problems but because of other people finding out about Andy's lack of experience and how their reactions to it make him feel.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • While plenty of comedy movies and shows had had lots of improv before, this was the first mainstream comedy in which all of the dialogue was ad-libbed or retroscripted like a feature-length line-o-rama reel for deliberately awkward comedic effect, and was seen as a unique new way to do feature-film comedy in 2005. Now, it's impossible to find any live action comedy whatsoever that isn't created this way and by the middle of The New '10s, the term "line-o-rama" became negatively associated with movies where comedians just ad lib poorly for 90 minutes.
  • This was also the film that convinced major studios to leave all creative decisions for feature-length comedies to the comedians rather than pairing them up with professional writers and directors. At the time, comedians being allowed to do what they thought was funny and clever was seen as a welcome break from the Totally Radical gross-out comedies that studios had been pushing since the mid-90s. The result was two decades of comedy movies where every creative decision looked as though it'd been made on the fly, which eventually became seen as less daring and more unprofessional, if not self-indulgent.
• One-Scene Wonder: Jonah Hill as the guy who wants to buy the goldfish platform boots so he can wear them. He reappears again during the ending sequence above.
• Retroactive Recognition: The movie basically plays as a who's who of future comedic name actors.
  • Yes, that is Stormy Daniels as the porn star Andy tries, and fails, to masturbate to. You know her now as the porn star linked to a Donald Trump scandal.
• Signature Scene: Steve Carell getting his chest waxed is the film's most famous scene, not only for its sheer hilarity, but because the actor's pain is very real. The clip is always featured in commercials, and most online articles about the film usually feature it in some manner, further contributing to its notoriety.
• Squick:
  • Andy's erection, which borders on priapism. At one point he pees in his own face.
  • Cal's reaction when he has to touch David's bare behind.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film is very explicitly a product of the early-to-middle part of the 2000s. The electronics store where the main characters work (the two products we see them pitch are a combination VCR/DVD player and a bulky, pre-LCD big-screen TV), Trish’s business selling other people’s items on Ebay, the extended PT Cruiser driving sequence, the low-rider-jeans-and-sequins-heavy fashion, the pervasive trans- and homophobic jokes… all point blatantly to the turn of the millennium. On the other hand, Andy's fanboy-ish passion for classic nerd properties like Marvel Comics and Star Wars, his interest in computers and the fact that he rides a bike instead of a car—while intended to show how pathetic and undesirable he is—would hardly be marks against him in The New '20s when such interests are considered perfectly normal for adults.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Andy's coworkers are supposed to be viewed as likable hooligans, but their antics and guidance reflects really badly on them.
  • While out clubbing, Andy's friends tell him to try and have sex with a drunk woman, going as far as to compare it to a lion tackling a gazelle. That's as literal an example of rape as you can get.
  • The guys also play porn and other adult-only content on the display televisions at work, which in any other circumstances would be grounds for sexual harassment and upper management would fire them on the spot for making their brand look insensitive.
• The Woobie: Andy's really a sweet man, and deserves love, but he's had a long run of bad luck and he's being helped in his quest for sex by guys who have more than their own fair share of issues with women.

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