Richard Crouse

“When I’m lyin’ in bed at night,” Tom Waits sang, “I don’t wanna grow up.”

He’s not the only one. In recent years Cineplexes have been overrun by boy-men: adult males who still act as though they’re 16 years old.

This weekend in the Seth MacFarlane comedy Ted, Mark Wahlberg is John, a man-child who had trouble letting go of his childhood teddy bear who came to life as the result of a childhood wish.

He does everything with Ted — including cower when a storm hits. “Thunder buddies for life, right, Johnny?” says Ted. John replies with an answer we can’t print here.

That’s one of the hallmarks of the man-child movie, they’re raunchy.

Step Brothers is a rude and crude arrested development comedy with enough swearing to make Lenny Bruce blush. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play spoiled, unemployed men thrown together Brady-Bunch style when their patents wed.

They don’t get along at first — they even try to bury one another alive — but soon their shared passion for karaoke brings them together, like two overgrown kids in a playground.

Adam Sandler has made a career playing testosterone-fuelled men who never grew up. In Mr. Deeds, Just Go with It, The Waterboy and Happy Gilmore  he plays characters with the emotional age of a Baby Gap customer, but the classic is Billy Madison, where he plays a hotel heir forced to go back to grade school.

As Sandler was throwing temper tantrums on screen Jason Segel was slowly defining his child-man act. I Love You Man, with its Man Cave and Rush soundtrack, was a warm up to his most grown-up portrayal of an adolescent man. In Jeff, Who Lives at Home he plays a 30-something who lives at home and is obsessed with the M. Night Shyamalan film Signs. Overgrown and underdeveloped he turns an outing to the hardware store into a wild day.

Peter Pan with a plan

The common link to many of these man-child movies is one man — producer Judd Apatow.

•    If it ain’t broke… Not since Jerry Lewis has one man made so much money presenting the age-old gag of self-infantilizing on screen.

•    Big names. He’s worked with Ferrell, Sandler and Segel, and it was his R-rated The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up that gave us Seth Rogen’s brand of prolonged childhood.

•    Plans to recruit Paul Reubens? Apatow even recently announced he’s thinking about making a movie with pop culture’s ultimate man-child, Pee Wee Herman.