More than almost any other genre, comedy is subject to the changing social mores and attitudes of its time. This is something that Seth Rogen is realizing as his career has gone into its second decade. While promoting his new film Neighbors 2, Rogen has taken to reflecting on the bro comedy that has been his hallmark. And it hasn’t all been great. This week, he told The Guardian that he can look back on the films he’s made and acknowledge that “under the lens of new eras, new social consciousness” don’t age that well. “There are probably some jokes in Superbad that are bordering on blatantly homophobic at times.”

“They’re all in the voice of high school kids, who do speak like that,” Rogen continued, “but I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we also were, to some degree, glamorizing that type of language in a lot of ways.”

As an audience member and critic, finding ways to acknowledge the homophobia in modern comedy and either make your peace with it or raise a fuss about it is a depressing fact of moviegoing life. There’s such an area of plausible deniability in comedy now. Gay people don’t get actively mocked in comedies anymore; the homophobia comes from different angles instead, usually in the form of straight characters being put in “gay” situations. To some degree or another, it’s in every comedy that’s come out of the Apatow/Ferrell/McKay/Rogen/Franco genre for the last decade and a half at least.

The fact that Rogen is acknowledging this isn’t so much atonement or even epiphany on his part. It’s just a simple realization that comedy should be moving past this kind of thing, if for no other reason than it’s become cliché. To its great credit, Neighbors 2 is quite aware of this need to modernize its approach to humor, and the results are encouraging, but more importantly they’re incredibly funny. There’s a definite progressive streak in the film, which in a salty-and-sweet kind of way manages to only make the juvenile comedy that much funnier.

Still, the bro comedy legacy of homophobia won’t be easy to shake. Neighbors 2 features a heretofore closeted gay character whose revelation to the audience and subsequent story beats aren’t played for ridicule. But watching it with a general audience, they still laughed at the characters. Not with them, but at them. The audiences for Seth Rogen’s movies have been effectively trained to find the fact of homosexuality to be funny. It will probably take more than just one quote to roll that back.