MONTREAL–Seth Rogen walked out onto the terminally tacky stage of the Metropolitan and the capacity house cheered for the star of the new film, Pineapple Express, opening this Wednesday.

Some of them had started lining up at 10 p.m. to get good seats, but it was nearly 2 a.m. before the guy they had waited all night to see finally began his stint as part of the loosey-goosey comedy show at Just for Laughs called Apatow For Destruction.

Judd Apatow, the producer/director who made Rogen a superstar in films like The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up had been playing the smutty talk card pretty heavily himself earlier in the evening, but now it was time for the Frankenstein Monster to prove that he could out-gross his creator.

"Has anyone out there ever wondered," Rogen asked in that dooby-darkened voice of his, "why chicks are never into our balls the way we're into their tits?"

A frat-house roar let Rogen know he had struck paydirt, so he kept on rolling. "Every time I'm at the beach," he continued, "I try to flash the babes a little ball cleavage, but, like, they're never interested."

He kept on going 'til the audience was exhausted and his jokes were done. Then he shambled off into the wings, a Smokey the Bear who carried his own forest fire along with him.

The next afternoon Rogen sat down in the blandly beige conference room of a nearby hotel and admitted how scared he really had been the night before, despite his Teflon air of bravura.

"Man, I hadn't done stand-up in over eight years," he said, shaking a head now devoid of his trademark mop of curls and trimmed close to military length. It also seems like Rogen has dropped quite a few pounds, and although his fashion statement still consists of a T-shirt and battered denims, he no longer looks like the unrepentantly sloppy characters he plays on-screen.

In fact, he radiates a kind of quiet confidence that might seem surprising, until you realize that his recent string of super-successes gives him every right to be entitled to it.

He returns to the previous night's show at the Metropolitan.

"I've gotten better at writing what I want to be talking about," he begins seriously before breaking into a grin, "which is pretty immature filthy s--t. It's all jacking-off jokes."

Rogen knows he's playing to an image and his sly air of complicity vanishes when he gets to the topic of his latest film.

Pineapple Express is another one of the slacker, stoner comedies that Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg bashed off in their teen years and then left in the bottom drawer until films like Superbad made even their teenage doodles look like solid gold.

Rogen plays Dale Denton, another marijuana-lovin' man-child who supposedly works as a process server, but is more interested in scoring killer weed off his sweet, clueless dealer, played by James Franco.

And although the movie has a lot of amazing action scenes as Rogen and Franco find themselves pulled into a drug war, Rogen firmly believes that "what makes Pineapple Express more than entertaining is that it's about a friendship and the parts I like best are the relationship between the two friends."

The buddy-buddy bonding is a theme that runs through Superbad and Knocked Up as well and Rogen admits his upcoming take on The Green Hornet "is in a similar vein.

"The stories me and Evan think of are these friendship stories. More than friendship." Rogen almost blushes as he gets a bit defensive. "Look, Cameron Crowe writes these male-female love stories all the time and we write these male-male love stories."

Rogen's heterosexual status is so confirmed in the public's mind that he can even launch a riff – as he did during Just for Laughs – about how much he wants to be bedded by George Clooney.

When reminded of it the next day, he doesn't skip a beat. "Clooney, oh man, he's breathtaking," he gushes like a true girly-man. "I so totally want to hook up with him one day."

Realizing he may have gone too far, even for Rogen, he backpedals just a bit into safe, straight country.

"Look, I have a great relationship with my girlfriend (Lauren Miller), but my relationship with my guy friends, wow, that's something else. You can not see each other for a year or two and then you can pick up right where it was. You can't do that with a girl."

His supposed insensitivity to the female sex still gnawing at him, he suddenly bursts out complaining: "People always say when we're pitching s--t, `Why are girls going to like this?' And we say `Because it's funny and girls have a f--king sense of humour. You don't have to put dresses in a movie to make girls like it.'"

There's something offbeat about Rogen that makes him special and has contributed mightily to his success. The average American might not figure out what it is, but Rogen has no problem telling everyone.

"I grew up in Vancouver, man. That's where more than half of my style comes from."

He was born there on April 15, 1982, to Mark and Sandy Rogen, a pair of self-styled "Jewish socialists" who had met on a kibbutz in Israel.

The Rogen family lived in a downscale neighbourhood of 55th Ave., between Main and Fraser.

"Most of my friends were from Kerrisdale, where the rich Jewish kids lived," observes Rogen with the slightly superior air of someone who has become rich after a childhood spent with his nose pressed against the glass. "We weren't part of that world, even if we weren't actually poor."

But bar mitzvah classes were the great leveller and all the young Jewish men of that period took Hebrew instruction for that significant event at the Talmud Torah ("25th and Oak," chimes in Rogen with his knack for details).

It was there that Rogen met Goldberg, who remains his writing partner and best friend to this day. They also had a third musketeer, a total nebbish named Fogel, whom Rogen and Goldberg immortalized right down to his real name in Superbad.

At bar mitzvahs: "All of our other friends were inside, trying to hump the girls, but Fogel and Evan and me were just outside hanging out, making jokes and smoking weed."

Rogen holds out his hands. "You see what I mean? Superbad was our life." In fact, he and Goldberg wrote the screenplay when they were 14, and Rogen claims it didn't change that much when it finally made it on to the screen a decade later.

"My high school years," says Rogen with just a touch of bitterness, "were exactly like Superbad. Lots of people were having sex, but for my friends and I, that was like so outside the realm of our experience. No, I didn't get laid in high school at all, but it wasn't for lack of trying."

Rogen had found some compensation in the stand-up comedy routines he began at age 13. "As soon as I realized you could be funny as a job, that was the job I wanted."

Then almost overnight, the Rogen family changed dramatically.

"When I was 16, my dad lost his job, then my mother quit hers and they had to put our house on the market and move into a much smaller apartment."

By this time, Apatow had seen Rogen perform and invited him to Los Angeles to appear in what would become a cult hit series, Freaks and Geeks. The Rogen family relocated to L.A. with Seth paying the bills.

The only time in a lengthy interview when the man without shame looked embarrassed was when he was asked if he had become, in effect, the man of the house at 16.

"I mean I supported them to some degree," he stammers, "but with your parents isn't it always a question of who's supporting who? It was always the family's money. It was never my money.

"My money has always been useful to my family and it still is but I never felt I had a complex over it. I never felt like, `Oh, my family's f--ked.'"

After Freaks and Geeks, Apatow cast Rogen in his next series Undeclared and then Rogen and Goldberg became writers for the anarchic Da Ali G Show, where he worked with Sacha Baron Cohen.

A few minor roles in movies, then his turn as Steve Carell's buddy in The 40 Year-Old Virgin made him suddenly hot. There's at least a half-dozen projects stacked up like planes over Pearson that will see Rogen through to 2010. How does he feel about this?

Ask the man himself.

"I'm allowed to work at the job I love which is great, but on top of that, they give me a f--kload of money, which is even better.

"And the problem would be ...?"