Forgetting Sarah Marshall marks a more mature return to form for the Judd Apatow comedy troupe. I was starting to think that, after the success of his show Freaks and Geeks and the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, producer Apatow was turning into the big bully of geek comedies by just hammering dirty jokes over delivering real wit and substance in movies like Knocked Up and Superbad. With this film, however, the troupe hearkens back to a more classical comedy premise to mine some fresher, funnier jokes.

The setup is essentially something of a cross between the Blake Edwards comedy 10 and any recent Ben Stiller comedy where he gets dumped or harassed by his girlfriend/wife on vacation. A musical composer, Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), gets dumped by his girlfriend, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), and decides to escape to a resort, only to find that she is vacationing at the very same spot with her latest beau. Where Forgetting Sarah Marshall is more successful than all of those movies, however, is in avoiding the excessive objectifying ogling on Bo Derek and providing more comical dimension in our down-trodden hero than just the one note that Stiller has overplayed one too many times.

As the movie opens, we see that Sarah Marshall is a famous TV actress on a prime time crime show that plays, thanks to William Baldwin’s cameo as her onscreen sidekick, as a hilarious send-up of how grotesquely absurd those CSI shows can get. Peter works on scoring the same show and the couple was favorably in the spotlight. Then one day Sarah tells him that she is leaving him for another guy. A few weeks pass before Peter goes on vacation to Hawaii only to see Sarah and the guy she was cheating with, a hedonistic John Lennon-wannabe rocker named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) who likes to suggestively gyrate his hips to denote his free-wheeling liberal affection.

As was the case with Dudley Moore in 10, it goes without saying that gradually everyone in the island will huddle around and come to sympathize and warm up to Peter, and Segel crucially makes his character comically engaging to us, too. One key to this is in how fearlessly self-effacing he makes himself, whether he bares his flabby body stark naked during the breakup scene or literally emotionally, pitifully trashes himself to hilarious effect thereafter (such as crying and sobbing in pain while bedding with a woman he just randomly picked up). As the writer, he also comes up with better, wittier jokes based on the awkwardness of the situation than those of the mere shock value variety we normally get in sex comedies like this. He is even able to inject a little more verbal wit into the usual raunch that goes with the genre.