As he sat on an all-star panel at Comic-Con recently, secure in the opening-day box office numbers for his co-production Step Brothers (it was headed for a $30 million weekend) and having excited his base the night before by screening his new Pineapple Express, Judd Apatow had reason to be a little smug.

He was quick with a response when an audience member challengingly asked the panel (which included fan boy mandarins Kevin Smith, Zack Snyder and Frank Miller), "Do you have more creative freedom now, or do the studio big-wigs have all you guys by the balls?"

"I might," Apatow said without much visible irony, "have their balls."

It was a vintage Apatow moment--his frequent and inevitable genital references make him the world's skankiest (and perhaps wealthiest) suburban dad--and he quickly seemed to realize he should take it down a testicle: "One ball anyway."

That was enough to send his comrade-in-arms, Kevin Smith, into a Hitler riff, but Smith's session-ending tribute highlighted just how central the Apatow School of Ribald Frat-Pack Comedy is in today's Hollywood marketing mill.

Smith bears no resentment that films Apatow has directed (like last June's Knocked Up for Universal, which came in at $148 million, and 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, also Universal, at $109 million), co-written (his old roomie Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan at $98 million) or produced (August's Superbad for Sony at $121 million, and 2006's Talladega Nights for Sony at $148 million) have stomped fare like Smith's Dogma that have hovered at or under $30 million.

"In terms of what they've done being more popular than what we've done, that just makes my job easier," Smith said. "Back in the day it was tough to explain what we were trying to do, then these dudes create movies that prove there's an audience."

Universal president of production Donna Langley greenlit Apatow's Knocked Up soon after she ascended to her post, and has the genre well-sussed: "Judd comes up with very relatable, what I call 'what if' scenarios--what if you were 40 and still a virgin? What if a beautiful career girl, Katharine Heigl, got pregnant by this stoner, slacker dude Seth Rogen?" 

Although young males between 18 and 35 comprise what she calls Apatow's "sweet spot," his audiences tally a good percentage of females, and he's had more overseas success (40-Year-Old Virgin scored $67 million overseas, Knocked Up $70 million) than is typical for comedies, along with robust DVD sales.

Thus, when it comes time to negotiate Apatow's deals (which vary widely depending on how many hyphens are involved), Universal is eager.

The upcoming Adam Sandler dramedy, Funny People ("What if a very successful comedian thinks he's dying and then finds out he's not?" posits Langley), went to Apatow "aggressively, with a big jump in his directing fee." As just one of the bidders for Apatow's services, the studio couldn't afford to be daunted by the relatively tepid numbers for April's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which totaled $62 million, or for March's Drillbit Taylor, which pulled in less than $33 million for Paramount.

Langley's confidence comes partly from the quirks of Apatow's production style. Even gunplay and car chases in Pineapple, which opens August 8, were kept within a $26 million budget. "He's efficient in terms of the number of days he shoots," notes Langley. "He burns a lot of film but he gets a lot of good footage."

Though a degree of backlash has emerged--Manohla Dargis's New York Times review of Step Brothers showed a real fatigue with "losers that only a mother, an entertainment manager, or a gang of self-satisfied comedy insiders could love," Apatow shrugs his critics off.

"It's hard to trust online content," he said at Comic-Con. "I was reading one [Web commenter] who said my work was just a fart added to American culture and then I read the name of the poster--Danny Glover's Dick Plug--and then I felt better."

Photograph of Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow by Lee Celano/WireImage/Getty Images