Workmanship. They say to write what you know. They also say that you get a lifetime to write your first hit and six months to write your second. To them I say: Superbad’s spec script, partially inspired by true events, was penned by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg during high school. Our heroes’ names are Seth and Evan. Superbad benefits from an uncommon level of attention, continuity, and character, the likes of which can only be found at the intersection of hard work and expertise.

Cinematography. Superbad parades some of the most grandiose characters through some of the most ridiculous scenes put to tape. It gets away with it, too, thanks to its lab coat of vérité realism. This movie toes the line between the absurd and the heartfelt like a tumescent trapeze artist, the rare comedy whose gritty filmmaking serves to enhance its farcical plot, naturally by subverting it completely.

Seth needs Evan more than Evan needs Seth. This isn’t a fairytale, and it doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. I’d go so far as to posit that the movie isn’t even just about getting laid. Seth and Evan’s relationship is wracked with uncertainty, and between the two, Seth stands a lot more to lose here. The opening scene lays it bare: Seth cannot wait 90 seconds, so he calls Evan with a plan; Seth is a connoisseur of pornography, and Evan is completely over the conversation; Evan spares Seth from getting busted by his parents in the course of their brief back-and-forth.

Seth’s inability to identify a good fucker. He postulates that Becca can take a dick, when in fact she never has.

Spittin’ Jesse. Seth’s pugnacious orc of a bully has exactly one raison d’être: to spit on people. Immediately after spitting on Seth, he begins grotesquely hawking up another batch. The only other time we see him, he’s spitting on Officer Slater. Spittin’ Jesse receives perhaps one minute of screen time, and boy, does he make the most of it.

The grad party. That these kids are holding grad parties is significant. At a grad party, every graduating senior would be invited ipso facto. This is the perfect premise by which a bunch of losers can finally hope to get laid, and Jesse’s salivary disinvitation of Seth and Evan is a vicious rebuke of their social standing.

The writers attended public high school. It’s plainly evident in the little touches that could only come from having lived it: Jules getting hot over last summer; the two girls trailing the rest of the pack during phys ed; the math teacher attempting in vain to teach imaginary numbers during the final month; the home ec partner who’s never there; the dependence upon older siblings for alcohol; having to refer to Mike Snyder by his full name; Seth and Evan sharing electives.…It’s relentless.

Becca has no game. She’s just as clueless and inexperienced as the boys, anxiously fiddling with her hands, thanking Evan profusely for his pen, and offering to come attend Seth’s parents’ party or gate-crash a strip club sometime.

The clear animus between Seth and Mrs. Hayworth. Seth joined this class because he thought he’d be cooking with a partner, and he begrudges Mrs. Hayworth for assigning seats. By this point, she’s counting down the days harder than he is. “I didn’t invent odd numbers, Seth,” is a line with zero fucks left to give.

Dick pic escalation. There’s a clear storyline told within the dick drawings here. It begins with doodles, progresses to schoolwork, explores media such as craft paper and paints, and culminates with high-quality parodies of Dr. Strangelove and Tiananmen Square.

Seth endures the same bully from fourth grade. The kid who hit Becca’s foot with Seth’s dick (“Pussy!”) is clearly the same one shoving his books off the lunch table in the present day (“Hey, pussy.”).

Shirley is a real one. Jules’s best friend asks Seth to get them booze so that Jules doesn’t have to. Later, when Seth finally arrives at the house party, she’s the one to rap an anxious Jules on the leg and let her know.

Fogell has no fear. He withstands Seth’s verbal abuse and defiantly out-nerds him. The fake ID was entirely Fogell’s idea, and it is Fogell who procures the alcohol for Jules’s party. He refers to his friends as “gangstas,” follows Nicola’s G-string around like a cartoon dog, and clearly wouldn’t know cool if he fell ass-backward into it. His character transformation is fully telegraphed. Furthermore…

Fogell is done with Seth. Their relationship is outright contentious. He ridicules Seth at every opportunity, referring to him at various points as “asshole,” “assface,” “dumbass,” “Danny Ocean,” and “jerkoff.” He pokes fun at Seth, insults his intelligence, and dares him to go cry about it. Fogell clearly regards Evan as his best friend and Seth as a necessary obstacle.

Evan’s incorrect assumption. Looking over the fake ID, he refers to their prospective liquor store clerk as “this guy.” Of course, it turns out to be a woman studying for her veterinary exam.

Seth’s instincts regarding formalwear. He can’t let Jules see him in what he wore to school, as it’d be completely unbecoming. Evan, of course, is far more interested in his video game, despite becoming actively frustrated with it. Later, Evan is the only person at Jules’s party seen wearing what he wore to school.

Seth’s tacit admission that Fogell had a point. Fogell pegs himself at 25 years of age on his fake ID, citing strategy. “Just how many 21-year-olds do you think there are in this town!?” Later, when Seth brainstorms ways to swindle alcohol from the grocery store, the imaginary grocer demands his age, to which Seth replies, “22.”

The liquor store employee moonlights as a legend. The sadsack “fuck my life” guy tasked with cleaning up Fogell’s mess arrives fashionably late to Mark’s house party, carrying a box of liquor and proclaiming, “Look what fell off the truck!”

"From Attack of the Clones?" Officer Slater using Episode II as his frame of reference for Yoda prompts a look of pure derision from McLovin.

The bloodthirsty house party. Find someone who loves you as much as this crowd loves a good fight. The one man in Evan’s audience wakes up every morning praying to see a fuckin’ fight. When Francis the Driver gets kicked in the 'nads, the entire party erupts with an “OHHHHH!!!” The very moment Mark confronts Seth about his bloodstain, Scarlett implores him to kick his ass, while our friend from the liquor store goes barreling into bedrooms. Finally, Mark’s fiancée wastes absolutely no time at all in attacking Seth with a lamp.

Slater and Michaels’ multifaceted incompetence. I can’t decide which aspect of the arrest scene is funniest: the way Michaels warns McLovin about hitting the deck, then whips out his second cock at the slightest provocation; the way Slater and Michaels are more concerned with each other’s wellbeing than they are with the rummy; or the way Slater announces in triumph, “I’m buying you a beer, McLovin!” toward a beleaguered 17-year-old.

Evan’s hypocrisy. It goes to show his dissociation with Seth. Despite warning Seth that “this is something a smart person wouldn’t do,” the moment Evan drops a phone call from Becca, he turns right around and marches back into the house party.

Chicks lined up outside the bathroom. A nice touch.

Michaels shot that cat last week. There is almost no circumstance under which Michaels should’ve ever done that. Slater making fun of him for it being dead makes the whole scenario that much more egregious.

McLovin’s moderating influence. As Michaels takes aim at the stop sign, McLovin tries to prevent Slater from cheating. This is a cute way of illustrating that their chemistry is real and that McLovin makes for a good third friend of theirs.

The cops exceeding themselves. Michaels introduces McLovin to smoking, then gets out and casually pitches his own cigarette after a single drag. He then proceeds to vomit up his .06% BAC and fire off his handgun some more, to which Slater takes exception: “Give me a fucking warning before you do it!!”

Our protagonists are the cool kids. Seth, obviously, is the life of the party, but so too are Evan and Fogell the first to retire upstairs.

Seth gets friendzoned. Jules reacts with revulsion to his kiss and with obvious dismay when she runs into him at the mall. She’s also shown to be quite outwardly friendly, remaining friends with Seth despite glowing up, laughing at his stupid joke about the location of his back, and tracking him down at the party after he runs off to have a cry. She ain’t no dummy. When she splits the party at the mall, she does it out of fiscal responsibility and so that, to use her words, “Evan can take Becca home.”

Love is strange. Curtis Mayfield provides a lovely send-off for a comedy whose heart throbbed nearly as proudly as its member. Unlike our two leads, the soundtrack never fails to bang. Seth can scarcely hear Jules over it. On that note…

The lad doth protest too much. Seth’s palpable insecurity renders him quite outspoken. He feels the need to trumpet his virility during the course of picking up a Red Bull before class, and he proffers that he would get killed for pussy, no questions asked. But despite going to such extraordinary lengths to get into Jules’s pants, he neglects to even carry a condom with him—something Fogell thought to do. Jules is clearly able to wound him with her playful jibe about “cutting the cord,” and at the party, after he blacks out and headbutts her, the need to save Evan from the cops jerks Seth back to life. He refers to Miroki benignly tying Evan’s apron as the most fun he had ever seen in his life, and when he serendipitously gets paired up with Jules, he spends most of his time in class attempting to communicate with Evan—a gesture he then repeats at the end of the movie as he and Jules descend the mall escalator. Seth spent his nascent pubescent years drawing penises, compares looking into Matt Muir’s eyes to the first time he had heard the Beatles, and admits that a vagina by itself is just not for him. He even invents nonexistent slang terms such as “vagine,” “va-gee,” and “vag” (pronounced “väjh”), betraying his internal struggles with the concept. Despite this…

Seth is a piece of shit. Evan’s diagnosis is accurate. Seth spends every moment of this film unrepentantly taking advantage of everyone around him. He steals a parking space; forces Evan to buy him a Red Bull; dickpunches his friends while they shotgun beers; tries to exclude Fogell from Jules’s party; tells Fogell that Evan wanted to exclude him from Jules’s party; forces Jules to do most of the work on their tiramisu; hates Evan’s crush on account of his own disorder from fourth grade; causes Evan to have to run laps during gym class; punts Greg’s soccer ball; trashes Evan’s room; gets period blood on Evan’s dad’s pants; bullies Fogell into buying alcohol; destroys Evan’s bottle of lube; ditches Fogell on sight of the cops; coerces Francis the Driver; volunteers Evan for an ass-kicking; blames him for leaving; starts an altercation over it; guilt-trips Fogell and Evan for never addressing the housing situation that he himself had never addressed; steals the booze and the credit; plans to weasel consent out of Jules; stunts Evan’s long-term social development; and generally just behaves like a misogynist, bellicose prick without fail. On the one hand, this is funny. He freely admits that he will do terrible, disgusting, unforgivable things to hook up with Jules. On the other hand, Seth is not a sympathetic protagonist, and the bitter pill he’s forced to swallow while the credits roll is extraordinarily hard-earned.

It’s so over. The upshot of the story is that Fogell is the friend Evan needed all along.