To paraphrase Cartman: I saw Knocked Up. Who wants to touch me?

I’ll spare you the suspense: It’s fantastic. At the risk of sounding like a quote whore, I laughed the entire way through the film. Yes, it’s probably too long, and the film’s climax (ahem…) never quite achieves lift off, but who’s going to think about that stuff when they’re too busy laughing?

The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know: One-night stand leads to baby. Which could accurately describe the Matthew Perry/Salma Hayek trifle Fools Rush In, only Knocked Up director/writer Judd Apatow wisely ditches the mixed races thing and instead looks at a couple who could be more accurately summed up as mixed hotness. Seth Rogen plays Ben, AKA “the Knockee”, a roly-poly stoner whose sole aspiration appears to be the comprehensive cataloging of actress nude scenes. Heigl’s character Alison (AKA “the Knocked”) is the kind of girl who could probably have her pick of men, but winds up stuck with Ben.

Fortunately, the producers mostly avoid the clichéd clash of subcultures that this sort of situation is usually played as. (One scene, where Ben and Alison bump into her old friends in a parking lot feels tacked on and pointless.) Instead, they focus on the new couple looking into their potential future, as embodied by Alison’s sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her henpecked husband Pete (the brilliant Paul Rudd, who should probably get the lead in Apatow’s next film, whatever it may be).

The film feels not unlike a Christopher Guest mockumentary, and I suspect ad-libbing was rampant. This leads to a whole that is funnier than it is emotionally resonant – a balance that Apatow’s previous film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, pulled off better. Alison, in particular, suffers, as the character is basically a straight man, and Heigl isn’t a strong improviser. I never quite grasped why she fell in love with Ben, except perhaps that she felt she had to. The idea is touched upon but never fully explored, perhaps because it was funnier to focus on Ben’s wacky friends. Which is too bad, because as funny as those guys are, Debbie and Pete are funnier, and potentially more interesting and revealing, too.

The pack of friends, by the way, is practically a reunion for actors from previous Apatow projects, all of whom use their real first names in the film: Jay Baruchel (from Undeclared) plays Jay, Martin Starr and Jason Segel (from Freaks and Geeks) play Martin and Jason, and Jonah Hill (perhaps best remembered – by me anyway – as the heavyset kid who really wants to buy the boots from Trish’s eBay store in Virgin) plays, yep, Jonah. All four play variations on the overgrown, underdeveloped stoner manchild, and make for some great (if inconsistent) comic relief.

Knocked Up will, inevitably, get compared to Virgin, and I don’t think it’s nearly as solid as that film was. Its lack of structure weighs it down from reaching the heights that it clearly wants to. But it’s still the best comedy I’ve seen this year.

Oh, and Katherine Heigl is hot. Even with a prosthetic pregnancy belly.