“He’s got that edge and that likability factor too,” says Harvey Weinstein, who executive-produced Porno. “He’s the guy who goes first. You’ve got to admire his guts. You say to yourself: ‘Fuck, that guy’s brave!’”

Smut just seems to come naturally to Seth Rogen. As a matter of fact, he’s been in that zone half his life—and much of it half-stoned. He says he smokes pot almost daily, but it seems to have little effect on his productivity—a condition that Tommy Chong of the ’70s comedy duo Cheech and Chong readily comprehends. A fan of Rogen and his films, Chong says he met the actor last year at the High Times Stoney Awards, “and instantly felt like I was talking to an old friend.

“I could feel his intelligence honed to a sharp edge by his daily intake of the magic herb,” says Chong, currently on a stoner reunion tour with Cheech Marin. “Seth reminds me of a big, cuddly philosophy professor. He’s a very gracious guy. He falls into the Lenny Bruce vein of comedy, but with an Albert Brooks approach to his pot humor.”

Rogen says his true inspiration, though, is Kevin Smith. “About the same time Clerks came out,” the actor says, referring to 1994, just before he turned 13 years old, “I started doing stand-up, and I think that’s basically where my filthy sense of humor came from.” Rogen raves about Smith and Clerks as Jenna Jameson might praise Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat. “He’s the first guy who did a movie that had a 10-minute conversation about blow jobs,” says Rogen. “When Clerks came out, I remember thinking, Wow, that’s exactly how guys talk. I’m sure there was a rash of horrible, filthy screenplays sent to Hollywood after that movie came out, and Superbad was one of them.”

Shortly thereafter, the teenage Rogen’s parents started driving him to stand-up gigs in his hometown of Vancouver. Though he often notes that he doesn’t have any childhood trauma to inspire his jokes—he doesn’t quite fit the stereotype of the “sad clown”—one could argue that spending your impressionable teen years with dirty comedians at bars is also bound to warp a personality.

“From a very young age, I’d hear people say the funniest shit,” says Rogen. “There was a comic who had a 10-minute bit about the word fuck. He’d say it 400 times in 10 minutes. It made an impression on me.”

Eventually, frat pack overlord Judd Apatow discovered Rogen—and recognized something down-to-earth and familiar about the young actor, attributes that could cross over into television. Rogen moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles, where he still lives, and in 1999 Apatow cast him as the sarcastic high school sourpuss Ken Miller on the short-lived cult hit Freaks and Geeks.

Rogen soon became a key member of the Apatow ensemble, traversing from a bit part in Anchorman to a supporting role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (which he coproduced) to starring in Knocked Up. But Superbad, which he cowrote with his childhood friend Evan Goldberg, was his baby. It was the film that proved R-rated comedies weren’t just a flash in the pan. With this summer’s box office smash Pineapple Express, Rogen upped the ante by adding a dose of Tarantino-like ultraviolence to the gross-out comedy mix. None of these movies were extreme just for extremity’s sake; each simply focused on everyday human foibles and habits, no matter how tasteless.

“People do have unplanned pregnancies, and kids go and get drunk and do all this stupid shit,” Rogen says. “And, come on! Everyone loves porn. I mean, I haven’t been in a porno, but I’m very familiar with the world of porno, let’s say.”

So is Apatow, to hear Rogen tell it. He describes how the director’s wife, Leslie Mann, once found porn on her husband’s TiVo, and all the “performers” were Hispanic. “That must have been weird,” he says, laughing. “It wasn’t like Judd must have been saying to himself, I’m worried she’ll find my porno. It was now: She’ll find out what I’m secretly actually into.”

Rogen himself is “never embarrassed, never ashamed,” says Jonah Hill, his beefy costar in Superbad. Indeed, Rogen readily allows that he shares a porn-site password with his writing pal Goldberg. “Pretty recently,” he says, “the cleaning lady walked in while both of us were looking at a 3-D porn magazine and wearing 3-D goggles.” He pauses for effect. “She was with her 11-year-old daughter.”

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In the course of researching his role, Rogen delved even deeper into the world of 21st-century porn and made some fascinating discoveries. “One thing I’ve learned through various mainstream sex sites is that way more guys are into transsexual porn than one would like to think,” he says. “I feel like it’s the elephant in America’s room: the secret love of transsexual porno.”

This kind of stuff is fodder for some of Rogen’s most outrageous material. But where does one go after the taboos have been broken? Can incest be funny? “Sure,” Rogen says. Bestiality?

“Actually, that’s been done already,” he says. “When Virgin was first coming out, we had a test screening. In the film there’s this whole scene where I talk about the woman-fucking-the-horse show in Tijuana. And at the screening, some woman came up to me afterward and said, ‘You shouldn’t talk about things like that. You should be like Tom Hanks. He would never do something like that.’ And I said to her, ‘Have you ever seen Bachelor Party? In that movie they aren’t just talking about a woman fucking a horse—they actually show a woman fucking a donkey!’”

It raises the question: Could Seth Rogen be on his way to becoming a serious, award-winning actor à la Hanks? At first it sounds absurd: this guy? But he and Hanks have the same everyman charm, as well as an affinity for lowbrow gags. And you may not have noticed it, but he too can act. The difference? Rogen’s had three box office smashes by the age of 26, while also writing and producing movies. At about the same age, Hanks was trapped on TV, dressing in drag on Bosom Buddies.

Rogen’s future plan is, well, not having one. “I don’t have a ‘bigger picture,’” he says. “It’s just whatever project seems cool at the time. If it’s cool, I’ll do it.” Deemed cool are upcoming roles as a slacker who survives doomsday in Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse, the Green Hornet, and the lead in Jody Hill’s mall-cop dark comedy Observe and Report. “It’s a weird movie, man, not a straight comedy,” he says of Observe. “It’s like a funny version of a Scorsese film, like The King of Comedy or Taxi Driver. It’s super, super dark…”

Does that mean Rogen’s already leaving dirty jokes behind?

“Well, let’s put it this way,” he says. “One of the main characters is a flasher.”