If you were watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall a couple of years ago and thought, “I like this movie, but I sure do wish that there were more scenes with that kid from Superbad and quick-cut shots of Russell Brand humping things,” then I would say that you’re in luck, and also kind of weird. I would then direct your attention to Get Him to the Greek, a quasi-spinoff born out of Jonah Hill and Brand’s scene-stealing, undeniably dynamic comedic chemistry in Sarah Marshall, with a lot of predictably funny results.

It picks up on fictional singer Aldous Snow (Brand) at some point down the road from the time of the last movie, after his career has since taken a kind of Kanye-meets-Amy Winehouse downward spiral. We also meet Jonah Hill’s Aaron Green (who, hey, turns out to not be the same character as he was in Sarah Marshall—this time he has a girlfriend), interning for a record label headed by P. Diddy, who they keep insisting on calling “Sergio.” Aaron, a lifelong fan of Snow’s band, Infant Sorrow, spearheads the idea of an Aldous Snow comeback show at the Greek theater in Los Angeles and, when Diddy approves the idea and tasks Aaron with the enormous job of keeping Snow on-task and sober enough to perform—well, it would be difficult not to get some ensuing hilarity out of that setup, especially when you have that stocked arsenal of Hill’s self-conscious sarcasm and Brand’s witty, spinning Tasmanian Devil of hedonism.

Greek gets a lot of its successes, like Sarah Marshall, in building up its own alternate pop culture—one that keeps around Mario Lopez and the crazy-annoying spelling of “P!nk,” but posits a fictional Aldous Snow and others into the frame. Writer-director Nicholas Stoller forms a perfectly believable kind of pop-cult house of mirrors, seen through the flashes of magazine cover montages and noisy television promos. But, no matter how many fake starlets they write as singing pop songs about buttholes, Stoller and Co. also seem to realize that their simulated pop culture can’t even begin to rival how bats**t insane the real thing is, and they mine a lot of their best jokes from being able to show just a fraction of that, by placing us at a nice, laughable distance from it.

Where Greek falters, however, is in its apparent (and probably accidental) unwillingness to depart from the form and tone of its predecessors. The Knocked Up model is getting awfully played out; if you haven’t picked up on the quickly tunneling Apatow style I’m talking about yet, it’s basically: slightly nerdy, slightly stoner-cool main character, lots of penis jokes, scenes of single-camera improv that at some point have to include similes about Star Wars and reality television shows, surprisingly complex characters, vaguely self-mocking celebrity cameos, a killer music-nerd soundtrack and, typically, a foundation of principled sweetness that ends up reinforcing, in new, funny and interesting ways, the same traditional values that many of the films’ detractors claim they debase. It’s a basic formula that even still has a lot of comedic and cinematic potential, but Greek can sometime feel like it’s just going through the Apatow motions, with a palpable absence of the kind of energy and style that has made those movies the sorts of game-changers they’ve been.

I’m worried that this Apatow Familia approach to comedy movies, like the increasingly bad offspring of the early-to-mid ’90s SNL crowd, has developed into a genre so pigeonholed that it’s turning into a new kind of comedy schlock. In 10 years, will Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and Paul Rudd reunite for their own version of Sandler’s Grown Ups? I really, really hope not—though I’m banking on most of this bunch being too smart to let it happen, at least for very long.

I don’t know if Get Him to the Greek deserves a spinoff the way Sarah Marshall arguably did, but I will say that I would watch just about anything that has Brand and Hill costarring again—I’m thinking they would make for a couple of wicked buddy cops.