Comedy is given absolutely no regard. In any case, not nearly enough. Is there really anything more difficult than making the entire theatre burst into laughter? The material that people find humorous varies significantly from country to country, city to city, and generation to generation, as any stand-up comic would attest. Other genres have a far wider appeal.
Everywhere will cry during a tear-jerking drama, and ears will ring and faces will flush at a large, loud action scene. Comedy is a lot less resilient. What makes a crowd laugh until they almost pass out in 2022 might not be funny in a few years, much alone fifty. Therefore, people who have kept us laughing for decades are actually
Even while comedies don’t often win Academy Awards and many successful comic actors try to establish themselves as dramatic thespians, the best comedies are more memorable than almost any other kind of movie and are seen repeatedly.
We polled a small army of Time Out writers, actors like John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker, comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, and comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard about the movies that make them laugh the hardest and for the longest.
Thus, we think we’ve discovered the 100 funniest, most enduring, and most widely appreciated jokes in human history. You can find something here to suit your sense of humour, whether it be broad or bizarre, light or dark, or ridiculous.
The 100 best comedy movies
It’s always stressful to meet your partner’s parents, but Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) has it worse than most. It turns out that his prospective father-in-law (Robert De Niro) is a suspicious former CIA agent who possesses a polygraph lie-detector equipment. In the course of an eventful visit, Focker’s misfortune escalates while Teri Polo, his betrothed, watches. Both De Niro and Stiller are in hilarious, bumbling form right now.
Cady (Lindsay Lohan) experiences an unpleasant awakening when she transitions from an American high school to being home-schooled by her parents in Africa. She finds herself into the girl clique The Plastics after being confronted with the school’s hierarchy, where popularity is everything.
The script was written by Tina Fey and is full of zingers and hilarious moments. It’s a movie that offers sincere understanding and empathy in addition to a healthy serving of insults and comeuppances.
1. Hot Fuzz (2007)
Since there are so many explosions and pun-filled one-liners in action movies, they are a popular subject for parody. The team of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost, as with their ground-breaking zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, however, doesn’t just point to the genre’s clichés à la MacGruber and Hot Shots! – terrific comedies in their own right, to be sure – but builds a real movie around them.
In this instance, the film similarly mashes up stodgy ITV dramas, buddy cop movies, and a Satanic-panic twist, and finds great chuckles in the absurdity of that combination. It lacks Shaun of the Dead’s emotional impact, but it does feature a lost swan, a shootout in a grocery store, and Timothy Dalton as a villain who is so blatantly bad that no one seems to be suspicious save for Pegg’s seasoned big-city cop.
2. The Trip (2011)
What happens in “The Trip” is as follows: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, portraying fictionalised versions of themselves, travel through the English countryside while indulging in upscale dinners, quarrelling over their respective jobs, singing ABBA, and pulling off several celebrity impersonation.
That is essentially everything, and that is all there needs to be. Director Michael Winterbottom has staged the six-episode BBC television series, which has been condensed into a single film, as a collection of vignettes that all essentially unfold in the same way, but it’s still hilarious.
I watched many funny movies on Fmovies but The Trip 2011 is one of my favorite movies. I love Fmovies because it has a wide collection of movies free of cost. I will hight recommend Fmovies.
It’s hard to explain why, but it’s a road movie that swiftly enters travel delirium—that period of time during a protracted journey when boredom, tiredness, and annoyance merge into a kind of ecstasy, and things start to become amusing for no apparent reason. However, Coogan and Brydon have the kind of comedic chemistry that allows that idea to hold up over three, nearly equally amusing movies. You should start with this.
3. Safety Last! (1923)
- Film
‘The idea of working in your shirt sleeves! Think of the shock to your customers, women of culture and refinement!’
Director: Fred C Newmeyer
Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis
The silent comic Harold Lloyd’s schtick was to develop a pleasant boy-next-door character before putting his protagonist in hair-raising peril. He always wore round specs and a straw boater. In his most well-known film, Harold attempts the treacherous ascent himself after his publicity gimmick involving getting an athletic friend to scale a department store front fails.
In a wonderfully designed, highly amusing set-piece that doesn’t involve back projection or a single computer pixel, annoying pigeons and an uncomfortable clock face are introduced.
4. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
- Film
- Comedy
‘Goddamnit, this is a dark fucking period!’
Director: Jake Kasdan
Cast: John C Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig
Despite being decades out of date in 2007, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker-style spoofs almost had to be revived in order to offer an all-out roasting of a rising form of awards bait: the prestige musical biography.
Following Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning Ray Charles imitation and the Carter-Cash box office smash Walk the Line, co-writers Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow graft pieces of both into the lumpy shape of Reilly’s Dewey Cox along with some overtly Elvis, Bob Dylan, and Brian Wilson references. He is a well-intentioned rube who became a pioneer of rock ‘n’ roll, never quite losing his naiveté while becoming addicted to increasingly potent substances and penning songs with “an army of didgeridoos” in them.
Even though Walk Hard is quite absurd, it lacks the anarchic zaniness of its parodic forebears. However, it makes up for this with direct-hit explosions of its chosen target, from the cradle-to-grave structure to the reductive portrayal of the creative process (the title song debuts at number one half an hour after it is recorded) and dubious casting (“I’m Dewey’s 12-year-old girlfriend!” yells a Bohemian Rhapsody might have been saved from us if it had been a larger hit, if only out of pure shame.
4. Local Hero (1983)
- Film
‘We’ve been invaded by America. We’re all gonna be rich!’
Director: Bill Forsyth
Cast: Peter Riegert, Burt Lancaster, Peter Capaldi
Nothing can fill your bucket quite like an hour or two with Bill Forsyth’s classic comedy. A lawyer is dispatched to investigate a Scottish fishing village that an American oil firm is interested in, but Peter Riegert, a genuinely underappreciated ‘comic’ straight man (see also: The Mask, Animal House), ends up falling under its spell. Even the corporate behemoth, played by Burt Lancaster’s oil magnate, succumbs to the story of the little man sticking it to the big guy. Perhaps there is more to life than just making money?
5. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
- Film
- Comedy
‘The course of true love gathers no moss.’
Director: George Cukor
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart
The Philadelphia Story is a delightful comedy of errors and misdeeds and a romcom that sparkles like champagne. On the night of her wedding, which of three men will capture Katharine Hepburn’s cold heiress’s heart: her affluent ex-husband Cary Grant, nosy reporter James Stewart, or her uninteresting businessman fiancé John Howard? You may feel that she chooses the wrong man in the end, but you can’t deny that this funny, endearing, and romantic film is a comedy that comes very close to being perfect.
6. Harold and Maude (1971)
- Film
- Comedy
‘Harold, everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves.’
Director: Hal Ashby
Cast: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon
Harold and Maude, a film that doesn’t fit into any particular genre, has struggled on this list: is it really a comedy? Isn’t there a little too much discussion on the Holocaust and death? But what is Harold and Maude if it isn’t a comedy? Its genius is evidently that it is nothing else than real.
Harold and Maude is now firmly recognised as one of the all-time romantic masterpieces. Harold and Maude was controversial when it was initially released, forgotten for decades, and then joyously rediscovered (at least in part thanks to Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary). Although the main connection is unusual—a teenage lad falls in love with a 79-year-old concentration camp survivor—the principles of self-discovery and unconditional love apply to everyone.
7. The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
- Film
- Comedy
‘They should have warned us that there was a danger of running out of pecan pie.’
Director: Elaine May
Cast: Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin
Elaine May, a pioneer of improv, revolutionised comedy with her groundbreaking stage work with Mike Nichols, but as a director, she is best famous for the infamous mega-bomb Ishtar. If there were justice in the world, Charles Grodin’s twitchy performance in Neil Simon’s proto-cringe comedy Heartbreak Kid would serve as her calling card.
In a masterpiece of awkward tension, Grodin plays an indifferent businessman who discovers his new bride (Jeannie Berlin, May’s biological daughter) is the worst ever while on the way to the honeymoon. He subsequently falls in love with another guest (Cybil Shepherd) while his unaware wife recovers from a horrible sunburn.
