40-Year-Old Virgin is a comedy. The very idea of someone reaching the age of forty with no experience of sexual intercourse is inherently comic because of the value society now places on sex. To be sexually inactive is to be a less-than-whole person, to be obviously unfulfilled or weird. The old sexual codes of celibacy outside marriage and chastity within it are considered ridiculous and oppressive, and their advocates wicked or stupid or both.
