Steve Carell, channeling Paul Lynde from that big center square in the sky, got the loudest laughs in "Bewitched" as Uncle Arthur.

Art Streiber Steve Carell's geekiness sweetens "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." Click photo for larger image. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" Rating: R for pervasive sexual content, language and some drug use. Starring: Steve Carell. Director: Judd Apatow. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" Web site

Sure, they were the only laughs, but Carell also cast a spell as a tongue-tied newsman in "Bruce Almighty," a weather forecaster with low barometric brain pressure in "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and, on TV, "The Office" manager sure to do or say the wrong thing.

Now, with "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," he proves he's got the goods (although not the girls) to be the leading man. His sweetness, innocence, earnestness -- his very geekiness -- make him one of summer's most sympathetic figures and the natural box-office successor to the wedding crashers, who never met a woman they couldn't pick up.

Carell's Andy Stitzer has the opposite problem.

Disastrous experiences have made him gun shy, so to speak, and Andy remains a virgin at 40, a fact his co-workers at an electronics superstore suss out during poker night. He's busted after describing part of a woman's anatomy in a way that leaves him feeling like a boob and a loser.

His colleagues -- winningly played by Paul Rudd, Romany Malco and Seth Rogen -- take it upon themselves to give Andy conflicting advice about women and try to push him into the arms of strangers, preferably drunken ones. But he takes a shine to a customer, Trish (Catherine Keener), who operates a business nearby.

She tries to nudge him toward an adulthood that doesn't revolve around an apartment that looks like it belongs to a teen fanboy with a lot of disposable money. In other words, it's filled with action figures, comic book collectibles, video games and the like.

"The 40-Year-Old Virgin" tracks Andy's attempts to lose his virginity, which dovetail with his male co-workers' efforts to mend or recover from their own relationships.

Directed and co-written by Judd Apatow, this comedy is both incredibly juvenile (there's a "You know how I know you're gay ..." duel, a wardrobe malfunction of outrageous proportions, and the dangerous combo of a drunken man, a bare behind, a camera and a bank of big screen TVs) and sporadically very funny. And raunchy.

Apatow is at his best when he's got the four guys hanging out. As with the stars of "Anchorman," this quartet clicks, allowing the supporting players to steal scenes from the guy who usually does that himself.

At roughly two hours, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" is about 15 minutes too long and -- it bears repeating -- foul-mouthed and graphic. But Carell gives it his all, and that includes some of his chest hair, waxed on camera. Those scenes almost look like outtakes, with everyone laughing, including the woman wielding the wax.