That was my favorite scene, despite/because of the obvious improv quality of the whole thing.
I thought it was completely and unapologetically absurd in the best way possible and really funny.
I heard a review that said that the unfortunate thing was that the movie was a lot like actually hanging around with stoners - occasional uproarious laughter followed by long periods of seemingly interminable boredom.
I don’t think I’d watch it twice, and I really don’t like it as much as Knocked Up or any of the other stuff I’ve seen Apatow do.
On one hand, this movie reminds me of why I don’t hang out with stoners much, why I have a mild antipathy toward people who get high like it’s some magical experience. I think the stuff should be legal, but – and maybe this is just residual Just Say No conditioning rather than my irresponsible pothead friend or my really annoying smoked-in-our-room pothead college roommate – I tend to think a little less of the people who smoke it. I never liked the “watch some guys embarrass themselves” comedies, and watching drunk people is only really funny when I know them and can hold things over their heads in the morning. 
His relationship, for those who have seen it, really creeped me out. Yeah, he seemed like he really cared about her, but ugh.
As ridiculous as the movie was, though, I didn’t feel like it was a big joke at the expense of Saul and Dale. Everyone took them so damned seriously. The cop and Ted were wonderful. The campus liaison? I kept hoping I’d see her turn up later to save their sorry butts. The whole thing reminded me of 80s comedies like Meatballs, even if Rogen comes off as too nice to be the new Bill Murray. I was able to appreciate the ridiculousness of it, but a part of me really wanted to be doing my laundry.
I felt like I was just watching a movie about my old friends in college. The breakfast scene at the end was particularly familiar, minus the bullet wounds. The memories it brings back, though, are less “Hey, wasn’t that fun?” and more “Eeugh. I remember this.” Sort of like Napoleon Dynamite. If you WERE Napoleon or some variant of him when you were in high school, if you went to a high school very much like that in a town very much like that, the movie can lose a lot of its charm.
We just tried to watch this as a Netflix rental, and we got almost exactly halfway through it before giving up. We read a plot summary online which seemed to imply that we gave up just as everything was about to happen, but we were so bored out of our minds by that point that we just didn’t have it in us to continue.
It was unfunny and boring. I feel cheated out of the week we left the DVD sitting on the counter waiting to watch it, while something better could have been in the mail to us.
I thought it was one of his best. Dany McBride and the gangsters were hilarious, Franco and Rogen not so much.
I thought the film was hilarious. I thought it was a good spoof of action movies. I mean, the whole point of the film is wouldn’t it be funny if some boring non-heroic types got caught up in an action movie.
I loved what did they did with the love interest. I thought it was a great way to parody tacked on romance plots in action films. Instead of the exciting and dangerous circumstances bringing together two people who were seemingly meant for each other, the circumstances break up a couple who were a horrible match.
Besides, James Franco’s character was a weed dealer. Weed sort of was his lifestyle. But he had other interests. Wasn’t he planning on becoming an architect or a city planner or something? And didn’t he have season tickets to the opera?
I don’t remember much about Pineapple Express (and I’m not even a stoner!) except not liking it much, save for Danny McBride (who I find funny in general but tedious in larger doses). 40 Year Old Virgin was by far the best of the Apatow movies, even if it could stand to be trimmed by about 15 minutes. I don’t recall laughing even once at Knocked Up, but I found Superbad almost as funny as 40.
There, now, adding me to the mix of everyone else in this thread, have we covered all possible rankings of these four movies?
I agree with your judgement about people who seem to have weed consumption as the keystone of the personality (and indeed these were my peers throughout my twenties) but I really enjoyed Pineapple Express.
Out of shape stoners thrown into action that’s straight out of the late '70s/early '80s action flicks that they had been sitting on their asses watching with heavy-lidded eyes, and just going with it? Yeah, it worked well enough.
To be honest, I don’t remember it as well I’d like. Maybe I’ll watch it again now, if it’s still floating around here. I remember being a bit disappointed with it, because my expectations were that it was going to be THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD! and it really wasn’t - but I still had the impression it was a pretty good movie.
I watched about 20 minutes of this before I turned it off, thinking “these people have never smoked pot in their lives”. I ended up giving the movie to some friends who had already seen it and liked it. I thought it was stupid, unfunny and completely missed the mark(s).
I agree on basically every point with the OP. Stoners are not inherently funny to anyone except other stoners. Sorry.