Subway posters shout like graffiti in a bathroom stall: “You do look fat in those jeans Sarah Marshall!” The vitriol is a teaser for the revenge comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which opens next Friday. It’s the latest entry in what has become producer Judd Apatow’s male-hysteria-movie-of-the-season club, an oeuvre that began, modestly enough, with the 2005 smash “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which the Long Island native wrote and directed, and continued a year later with its thematic sequel, “Knocked Up.”

Mr. Apatow only produced last summer’s “Superbad,” a bro-mantic comedy written by the chubby stoner dad-to-be star of “Knocked Up,” Seth Rogen, and his friend Evan Goldberg. But his signature was all over the film, as was his name. It’s been many years since a phrase such as “from the guy who brought you” was such a foolproof marketing plan for box-office success. Then again, the success of “Superbad” wasn’t much of a surprise. It’s a prodigiously obscene (and often very funny) coming-of-age story about a pair of high school losers trying in vain to gain sexual experience on the eve of their graduation.

The Apatow imprint isn’t limited to a certain kind of topic, as the pop-culture spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” attests, nor are productions necessarily handed off to sidekicks. This summer’s looming stoner caper, “Pineapple Express,” another Rogen-Goldberg screenplay, is directed by David Gordon Green, the critics’ darling of “George Washington” and the recent “Snow Angels.”

One thing’s for sure, though: Mr. Apatow is a factory, and has generated such enormous box-office and home-video success that his name alone has become a brand. A guy whose 1999 television cult favorite, “Freaks and Geeks,” could not last a season on NBC, Mr. Apatow has sped from fringe talent to industrial force while boosting the fortunes of nearly every writer and actor associated with his projects — most noticeably the well-intentioned sexual novice of “Virgin,” Steve Carell, as well as Mr. Rogen and his “Superbad” costars Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, the latter of whom imported a variation on his character to the oddly parallel (if polar) “Juno.”

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” appears to follow the program: A long-suffering musician (Jason Segel) suffers even more when his glamorous girlfriend (Kristen Bell, of “Veronica Mars”) dumps him for a pretentious British rock star. Unable to get her out of his head, he flees to a Hawaiian resort where he immediately runs into the hot-and-heavy couple, and resolves to even the score. The bumbling man-child scenario is synonymous with the Apatow name. So, too, is the abiding sense that the filmmaker really doesn’t know what to make of his women. The misogyny implicit in the way “Sarah Marshall” is being promoted is a tip-off.

Of course, jocular guy comedies are harmless enough. Someone could easily argue that Mr. Apatow’s depiction of men as self-indulgent slobs and nerds obsessed with their own sexual organs, Internet porn, Spider-Man movies, and the copious intake of marijuana is a stereotype of the arrested adolescence that his heroes are challenged to escape. And it’s usually women who make the challenge. At least, in “Superbad,” the characters are actual teenagers, best friends whose gawky, hormonally addled behavior also feeds a “he-said/he-said” discourse on sexual mores.

But the pattern has not evolved much. Catherine Keener, the patient and understanding object of Mr. Carell’s affection in “Virgin,” pretty much takes the blame for making the poor guy sell all his collectible model toys (but whose side is Mr. Apatow on?), and spends much of her screen time mothering her infantile boyfriend.

“Knocked Up” offers even less. After a drunken one-night stand proves to have lingering aftereffects, Alison (Katherine Heigl’s sparkly blond entertainment news reporter) opts to keep both her baby and his unlikely father, a slovenly, unemployed jokester not remotely in her league (Mr. Rogen). Because he’s funny? Because he has lots of free time to babysit while she’s at work? It’s never really clear. Mr. Apatow casts his wife (the talented comedienne Leslie Mann) and repertory member Paul Rudd as Alison’s sister and brother-in-law, whose married life is depicted as an around-the-clock festival of misery. After mutual fights, the boys skip off to Vegas, eat some psychedelic mushrooms, and have profoundly wacky conversations about the meaning of life. The girls get dressed up and go to a nightclub, only to be rejected by the doorman because one is pregnant and the other is too old (thus prompting one of Ms. Mann’s character’s shrieking fits of invective).

Ms. Heigl, a romantic lead on the hit prime-time soap opera “Grey’s Anatomy,” caused a brief fuss when she complained about such script elements of “Knocked Up” in a Vanity Fair cover story. Though it may have seemed like bad politics, she was right to do so. Mr. Apatow wants to offer a paean to the pleasures of family life and adult responsibility, but his movies are more convincing when they revel in the beer-soaked bacchanals and jokingly — or, in the case of the “Superbad” duo, not so jokingly — homoerotic chemistry of male bonding.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, another comedic brand name, John Hughes, enjoyed a run of success similar to Mr. Apatow’s. Between 1984 and 1987, Mr. Hughes was responsible, whether as a writer, producer, or director, for many of the movies we remember from the period. He harbored a similar fascination with freaks and geeks, as well as situations arising out of adolescent (or adolescent-minded) social awkwardness. But Mr. Hughes managed to create strong, sympathetic female characters who had more to offer than drunken rites of passage or stern lectures about putting childish things behind.

Think about Molly Ringwald’s plucky, introspective heroines in “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink,” or Mary Stuart Masterson’s streetwise tomboy drummer in “Some Kind of Wonderful.” There’s a generosity and sensitivity to such characters that coexisted just fine with the lowbrow antics inherent to the teen genre. The girls in “Superbad” display brief flashes of personality beyond their roles as masturbatory icons, but the plot discharges so much energy on dirty jokes and drunken mayhem that there’s little time for further development.

No doubt, Mr. Apatow will be producing a lot more movies, undeterred by the occasional flop (the unfortunate Owen Wilson comedy “Drillbit Taylor,” which oddly enough has its story partially credited to Mr. Hughes). So maybe he’ll graduate, much as his beloved social misfits, to a new degree of maturity without sacrificing his wit. Maybe the shallow Sarah Marshall doesn’t deserve it, but Mr. Apatow’s audiences do.