Justin Theroux and Gretchen Mol in The Ten Courtesy of THINKFilm

The comedy has had a rough road to movie theaters since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006, changing titles from The Pleasure of Your Company and The Next Girl I See to its current incarnation. Yet the film preserves Black's mix of crazed slapstick — Biggs shows up in a cupid costume that one could easily see Black wearing on The State — with the dry humor that has made him the most ubiquitous former State member as a frequent commentator on many of VH1's various nostalgia fests.

"It's gratifying in the way that climbing Mount Everest is gratifying," says Black of directing for the first time. "Which is to say, it's incredibly difficult and a lot of times you don't feel like you have any oxygen and you sometimes feel like you're going to die. But at the end of it, you sort of go, 'Well, yeah, I climbed that mountain.'"

Ken Marino and Wain have scaled not one but two such plateaus this year. Even though Marino was the most likely to become a matinee idol out of The State, he has made his greatest strides as a writer. This year, he and Wain toured the festival circuit with two films: Diggers, the 1970s-set dramedy about a legacy of Long Island clamdiggers, and The Ten, a comedic take on each of the Ten Commandments. Paul Rudd, The State's resident leading man, starred in both films, which, like most State-sanctioned productions, boast incredible supporting turns from Lauren Ambrose and Maura Tierney in Diggers and Jessica Alba and Winona Ryder in The Ten. Wain and Marino also made sure that The Ten would feature the second full State reunion of 2007, though Jann was out of the country during filming. (Marino and Wain improvised by posting a portrait of Jann "near a nude man's crotch.")

"The only thing that's possible right now for us to do as a group or in smaller factions of a group is film because there's an end to it," says Marino, who is currently working with Wain on another screenplay and with LoTruglio on a show for Comedy Central. "We're all just trying to create stuff that we think is funny, and we're all just trying to work, and film is the easiest way for us to work together because we can do it, and then we can break off and go do some other stuff that doesn't involve every member of The State because we're all spread out. It's not as simple as when we were in our twenties and we were all hanging out at a bar late at night and writing skits on napkins."

Christopher Walken in Balls of Fury Gemma La Mana/Courtesy of Rogue Pictures

But even if life is getting in the way of a State reunion, the daring spirit of State comedy remains the same. In addition to Wedding Daze and The Ten, Garant and Lennon will close The State's triple play in August with Balls of Fury, which Lennon calls "a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, if Jean Claude Van Damme was good at Ping Pong." But, according to Wain, there might finally be an actual State movie in the near future.

"The idea has been in the ether since 1988," Wain says. "People have come to us from studios and have approached us about it. We're actually ramping up for another run at trying to see if we can overcome the logistical hurdles to making it happen. It's really just a function of people's time, which with a group this size, is quite daunting."

Whatever happens, they are all still miles away from the comedy troupe that was once struggling for laughs at NYU.

"We were so insular coming up," Black says. "We only knew each other essentially in the comedy world, [so we were able to] really develop our own voice" — one that will now be simultaneously offending and entertaining the masses in Dolby Digital."