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Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mack, and today we’re taking a look at the one hundred best comedy movies of all time, according to Variety, I was saving this one for the holidays. I really haven’t looked at it. I kind of spoiled at what number one is, and but I’ve half erased from my brain. I think I know what number one is.
But if you’re new to the program, anytime I do one of these list episodes, I like to do it cold, without previously having formed opinions, so you can hear me react to the moment when I’m like, oh, good, pick word. That’s crazy. Variety says, in compiling our list of the all time greatest screen comedies, we thought long and hard about what makes a classic, but mostly we heeded the call of our funny bones. We hope these movies tickle yours as much as they do ours. One hundred Bridget Jones Diary, ninety nine Wayne’s World.
That seems absurdly low. What else are there really ninety eight fun films than Wayne’s World? Okay they’re rite ah. The Saturday Night Live spin off movie was a form that regularly popped up in multiplexes he had almost inevitably was not very good. It took characters like Stuart Smalley and the Coneheads and the Roxbury Guys and plopped them into feature length comedies that just wound up making you realize how perfectly suited they were to late night sketches.
All that’s fair, But Wayne’s world is different. Yes, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey created characters that exerted a residence far beyond how funny they were. In some weird way, they were just like us. Good Pick feels Low ninety eight, Pretty Woman ninety seven born yesterday from nineteen fifty. You may not be familiar with this one.
I’m not either. Belligerent small time criminal Harry Brock played by Broder Crawford, brings his galp Billy Dawn played by Judy Holliday to Washington, d C. But worries she’ll embarrass him, so he hires a reporter played by William Holden to two to her. Only the more education Billy gets, the less she appreciates being ordered around by a thug. Ninety six I’m Gonna get You, Sucker Brazil.
So far, I kind of hate this list. Ninety four, Clerks ninety three, Hairspray ninety two, The Jerk, If you weren’t around, the Jerk was like huge, and Steve Martin as a comedian was huge that year. I haven’t heard anybody mention the Jerk in a zillion years, I don’t think. Actually, I’m positive I’ve not seen it in the twenty first century. Ninety one, She’d Done Him Wrong from nineteen thirty three, starring May West, ninety Bob and Carolyn, Ted and Alice from nineteen sixty nine.
Eighty nine Fast Times at Ridgemond High. Okay, this is the gen xer in me. I know what you’re thinking of right now, me too. Two words, Phoebe Kates. We don’t even care if the movie is funny.
Have you seen that scene? Is that not etched in your brain? Fellow gen xer? It is, let’s all be honest. But even beside that, get that out of your brain for a second.
Jeff’spacoli, right. I feel like this should be way up there. Eighty eight Anchorman, The Legend of ron Burgundy. The more I see Will Ferrell movies, the less I like them. I know everybody loves this one.
Okay, fie. I won’t fight you on it. I mean, it’s definitely a funny movie. Eighty eight sure seems well ranked. Why not?
Eighty seven Everything Everywhere, All at once? Famous comedy? Eighty six Idiocracy is Idiocrasy a comedy? Or is it actually a documentary about America in twenty twenty six? I think it’s a movie from the future that was sent back to warn us, and we are ignoring all the warnings.
If you haven’t seen Idiocracy, watch it and you’ll be like, yeah, it’s okay. But twenty years ago it was like this is ridiculous, and now it’s just like a Tuesday Fiety rights. If you think what’s going on in America right now happened from the top down, check yourself. The truth is it just happened just as much from the bottom up. And Mike Judge foresaw that when he made his cracksatsire of the dumbing down of America eighty five to be or Not to Be?
From nineteen forty two.
All right, here’s a deep throw.
And I don’t know anything about movies. By the way, if you come to trivia night and they ask movie questions, I never ever know the answer. I know the random stuff, But movies is like this weird weak spot for me that I know nothing, and we all look at John Van. We’re like, John Van, do you know the answer to this one? But sometimes Fan doesn’t come and everybody looks at me, and I’m like, I don’t know.
Nothing worse at trivia than leaving it blank except in the fifth round if you write incorrect answer in the fifth round, they take off two points. But in the other rounds, a blank is just a blank, So you might as well guess I digress to be or not to be. From nineteen forty two, Brady tells us Adolf Hitler was at his heights and World War II was well underway when German expatriot and master satirist Ernst Lubitch took direct aim at the Third Reich. Using signature aspects of his comedic style. The Berlin born Helmer skewer the Gestapo and use comedy to support the Allies, cause plot twists and mistaken identity spoilers.
You had fifty seventy, now you had seventy years. No, you had eighty years. You had eighty years. Okay, don’t get mad at me. I’m spoiling a movie from nineteen forty two, You had time, plot twists and mistaken identities build on one another in the del lightfully concluded story of a theatrical troop who used their acting skills to fool the Nazis.
Never heard of that film. I also never heard of this film Number eighty four from nineteen eighty eight, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown pedro Outmodovar’s first films were looser and funnier than the serious oscar latted work that followed. This melodrama unspoils almost entirely in one place, the apartment of Pepa, a heartbroken woman who plans to enter her life with a batch of spice Caspacho, only to watch guests pass out as they consume it instead. I guess that could be funny. Eighty three Wet Hot American Summer eighty two.
Nineteen thirty seven’s The Awful Truth, director Leo Mcarrey encouraged his actors Carrie Grant and Irene Dunn to improvise as they played a married couple who were both convinced the others being unfaithful. Eighty one The Devil Wears Prada eighty Bamboozled from two thousand seventy nine, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All Right, that’s a fun pick. I like that one seventy eight Night at the Opera, seventy seven Blazing Saddles from nineteen seventy four seems absurdly low. No, what’s going to be the top twenty five like all the Adam Sandler movies.
Seventy six something called Me and You and Everyone We Know from two thousand and five. The movie is about his search for connection in the early aughts, when chat rooms let people feel a virtual sense of intimacy with total strangers. And number seventy five A movie I love. Sean of the Dead. Have you ever seen Sean of the Dead?
You should watch Sean of the Dead. Simon Pegg plays a sad sack London salesman named Sean. He of the dead, but he’s not dead. He and his best friend Ed takes shelter from the zombie apocalypse in a pub very very funny movie. And seventy five seems a nice round number on which to take the break.
Continuing varieties. One hundred Best Comedies, Number seventy four Private Benjamin from nineteen eighty That’s another one of those films that, like the Jerk, that was around and around and around and has disappeared, and I haven’t heard of it in a million years. Did they even make a TV show out of this? Did? I imagine that Goldie Hawn is a spoiled rich girl whose husband died on their wedding night and she’s accidentally enlisted into the US Army.
I have not seen that in this century, but I remember that being funny. A Napoleon Dynamite from two thousand and four is number seventy three, seventy two, The Big Lebowski from nineteen ninety eight. I know people really love that film. Seventy one is Miracle at Morgan’s Creek from nineteen forty four. For Preston Sturgis, nothing was sacred, at least of all the institution of marriage.
A screwball screenwriting genius and the first to direct his own material, Sturgis takes aim at the way many American gals gave enlisted men the warmest of sendoffs, only to be saddled with souvenirs of their hospitality some nine months later. I see what you did there? Okay? Seventy legally Blonde from two thousand and one. Sixty nine ace Ventura Pet Detective Jim Carrey making a movie that is worthy of Adam Sandler.
Variety writes there’s a certain kind of infantile hypomania comedian and the site examples Jerry Lewis and Adam Sandler, who wants his cherish but who critics inevitably dismiss as silly, mind numbing, lowest common denominator. In other words, name your synonym for dumb. I want to give that sentence standing Ovation sixty eight from two thousand and nine In the Loop, a whiplash version of how Western democracy operates. Never heard of it, not saying it’s a dumb pick. I’ll just telling you I’ve never heard of it.
I’ve also never heard of Hell’s a Poppin from nineteen forty one. One word hell’ za with a Z poppin with an apostrophe at the end. Hell’s a Poppin. That’s not me having the queen’s accent. It’s Hell’s a Poppin.
While less remembered than Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, the comedy duo of Olsen and Johnson had a huge stage hit with Helsa poppin The Sticky Show that was never the same experience twice as the pair injected topical jokes and fresh improv every night for three years. The Broadway hit was blisteringly fast paced and self aware, with the two stars frequently breaking the fourth wall. All right, that sounds fun. Sixty six Eddie Murphy raw, Isn’t that just a comedy special? Is that a comedy movie?
We’re counting that now? We just opened up a whole can of worms with this pic. I mean, yes, I love it. And Variety kind of sort of aligns with me here, who says that Eddie Murphy, as great as he is and was was just doing a Richard Pryor cover act. They point out his delirious Prior Esque fantasy of marrying an African princess.
Murphy, like Prior, rarely found a Hollywood vehicle that could channel his comic inspiration the way a stand up stage could. From twenty twenty three, there was a movie called Poor Things that comes in at number sixty five. Variety says, from Mabbitt and Costello meet Frankenstein to weird science, Mary Shelley’s classic Monster often works better as comedy than horror. Emma Stone is a reanimated corpse with the brain of a baby. Apparently that’s a movie that happened.
It’s quite funny. A fish called Wanda from nineteen eighty eight. People like me were like, I wish we had more Monty Python things, and they were like, how about people from Monty Python plus Jamie Lee Curtis, And I was like, all right, I generally am of the opinion that Jamie Lee Curtis makes things better. Michael Palin also in this one, and Kevin Klein was quite good in it. Sixty three from nineteen seventy four, Going Places a French film.
Okay, sixty two an outrage? Right now? How is this possibly sixty two? You’re going to tell me there are sixty one better comedy movies than Airplane? Are you insane?
There’s no way. How is the Airplane only number sixty two? It probably should be one outrage at least I’ve yet to say an Adam Sandlor film. But on the other hand, maybe the entire top twenty is the Adam Sandler filmography. I’m worried now on number sixty one.
The Bird Cage from nineteen ninety six, sixty, Tom Hanks in Big from nineteen eighty eight, fifty nine Pillow Talk from nineteen fifty nine, Rock Hudson and Doris Day filmmakers being a little fifties era Naughty Riddy says a good example is the split screen scene in which the two stars appear in separate tubs, arranged side by side, as if to suggest they’re bathing together. Number fifty eight, nineteen nineties House Party starring Kid and Play ranked higher than Airplane number fifty seven. My Best Friend’s Wedding from nineteen ninety seven is ranked higher than Airplane number fifty six. The Odd Couple, the Walter Matthew Jack Lemmon version from nineteen sixty eight, or I’d see there. I won’t throw my laptop across the room.
Great Film fifty five from nineteen twenty three, Safety Last. You have seen at least clips of this Harold Lloyd hanging off a clock high above the city scape. You’ve seen this this back when they used to do really cool special effects, before special effects went digital. You’ve seen this clip number fifty four. I may throw my laptop across the room.
Will Ferrell and Elf higher than Airplane number fifty three Broadcast News on your list of top comedy movies. Fifty two The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe from nineteen seventy two. What right he tells us? A French spy comedy. It’s funnier than all the Pink Panther movies put together.
This one, too, involves a fair amount of clueless bumbling. You see, Francois, a frizzy haired concert violinist, is chosen at random by a member of the counter espionage department. They pretend that Francois as a master spy. That sounds like it could be funny. Fifty one being John Malcovich from nineteen ninety nine and number fifty ah A, what a perfect time to wrap up today’s episode.
Our first Adam Sandler movie, The water Boy from nineteen ninety eight. Variety smoked some crack and wrote The water Boy is the most uproarious and indelible of Sadler’s early funny films. That’s because he basically took those two warring aspects of a persona the harmless arrested child side the one that was like Jerry Lewis on goofball steroids, they write, and then the violent walking in side. By the time Sandler released this unhinged grid Iron comedy, he had already begun his journey towards becoming a supple actor the wedding singer, His key transition film, came out nine months before. Right Will come back tomorrow with the rest of the list.
See you then,