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100 best comedy movies
The 100 best comedy movies, picked by experts from across film, TV and comedy
Explore the full list of 100 films
Read our contributors' top tens
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The experts have spoken
From Dan Aykroyd to Edgar Wright, browse through the film lists submitted by over 200 contributor...
Discover more Time Out film lists
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100 Best British Films
The 100 best British films as chosen by a panel of 150 film industry experts, including directors Sam Mendes, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Wes Anderson.
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Time Out's 50 greatest animated films
Time Out ushers in the help of master animator Terry Gilliam to run down 50 of the greatest animated features of all time.
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50 Essential comic-book Movies, with Edgar Wright
Strap on your utility belt, starch up your cape, pull your underpants over your trousers and prepare to fly faster than a speeding bullet with Time Out's superheroic countdown.
By Tom Huddleston, David Jenkins, Adam Lee Davies, Derek Adams, Edward Lawrenson, Wally Hammond, Ben Walters, Gabriel Tate and Phil Harrison. Explore the individual top tens of every contributor.
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90
Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Rachel McAdams and Lacey Chabert in 'Mean Girls'
Mean Girls (2004)
Dir Mark Waters (Lindsay Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Rachel McAdams)
‘She’s fabulous but she’s evil.’
Where does ethnography meet teen comedy? At North Shore High! Lindsay Lohan stars as Cady, the sensitive and naive heroine – you could get away with such casting in 2004 – who gets a rude awakening when she enters the school system after being home-taught by zoologist parents in Africa. She’s soon dealing with the complexities of adolescent social interaction, most of it underhanded and bitchy, while trying to keep her head. The script, by Tina Fey, is inspired by high-school ethnography 'Queen Bees and Wannabes' and offers genuine insight and empathy as well as a hefty dose of put-downs and comeuppances. BW
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89
The Great Dictator (1940)
Dir Charles Chaplin (Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard)
‘Heil Hynkel!’
'The Great Dictator' was Chaplin’s first ‘complete’ talkie, but the transition to sound for the silent-cinema star was no simple matter. A satire on the rise of Hitler, this brave, heartfelt, moving film features scenes of its eponymous tyrant – Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel – speaking German-sounding gibberish. A serious point underlies the funny business. Stripped of his poisonous rhetoric, Hynkel/Hitler is exposed for what he really is: a ridiculous buffoon. EL
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88
Dudley Moore in 'Arthur'
Arthur (1981)
Dir Steve Gordon (Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, John Gielgud)
‘I’m going to have another drink. Do you want another fish?'
Russell Brand’s best efforts notwithstanding, Arthur is Dudley Moore: rich imp, broadly functional alcoholic and little boy lost in the high life of Manhattan. Steve Gordon’s script bursts with witty one-liners as well as conjuring genuine pathos from Arthur’s situation as he decides whether to marry a bore for the sake of his trust fund or embark on a romantic adventure with working-class Liza Minnelli, all under the precisely foul-mouthed eye of John Gielgud’s trusty butler. With its stress on character and dialogue, it has something of an old-school screwball feeling – and that’s no bad thing. BW
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87
Kevin Kline and Michael Palin in 'A Fish Called Wanda'
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Dir Charles Crichton (John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin)
‘You’re the vulgarian, you fuck!’
An astonishingly low placing for perhaps the best British comedy since the heyday of Python (seriously, ‘Clockwise’ is higher?) With ‘Wanda’, John Cleese deliberately attempted to move away from the satirical silliness that made his name and back to a more inclusive, plot-driven, unmistakeably British brand of comic caper, even going so far as to rope in 78-year-old Ealing stalwart Charles Crichton to direct. The result is a barnstorming success: a film which, like its slippery American heroine, is madly in love with language, from tongue-teasingly delicious sarcasm to some truly outrageous swearing. Add to this four iconic performances (five if you count the inimitable Tom Georgeson as cockernee gangster George ‘Unbe-fackin’-lieveable!’ Thomason), and the result speaks for itself. Number 87? Unbe... etc. TH
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86
Jacques Tati and Nathalie Pascaud in 'Mr Hulot's Holiday'
Mr Hulot's Holiday (1953)
Dir Jacques Tati (Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Micheline Rolla)
Essentially a silent comedian plying his trade in the ’50s and ’60s, Jacques Tati is the iconic French Vaudeville stalwart who gifted the world with his bumbling, pipe-smoking everyman, Monsieur Hulot. Set in the mundane seaside town of Saint Marc Sur Mer, just west of Nantes, this is a simple chronicle of Hulot’s holidays that derives its humour from hundreds upon hundreds of micro-choreographed miniature moments. Though the content of Tati’s film presented him as an ardent admirer – a keeper, almost – of tradition and local custom, the bold, idiosyncratic style of his comedy showed him as a brilliant innovator of the cinematic form. The character of Hulot remained a blessing and a curse for Tati: in 1969’s ‘Playtime’, Tati removed Hulot from the action wherever possible; in the film he was intending to make before he died in 1982 – a TV station-set comedy called ‘Confusion’ co-starring Ron and Russell Mael from the band Sparks – he even intended to kill his hero off. DJ
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85
Bill Murray and Chevy Chase in 'Caddyshack'
Caddyshack (1980)
Dir Harold Ramis (Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray)
‘Did somebody step on a duck?’
The Bushwood Country Club is either one of Florida’s more exclusive and prestigious golf clubs or ‘a crummy snobatorium’. The latter description is courtesy of Rodney Dangerfield, the wisecracking, cigar-chomping, ogling vulgarian who horrifies the patrician stiffs running the Bushwood club when he decides to join. For those unbelievers who maintain golf is boring, this exquisitely crass film offers as a riposte Chevy Chase’s womanizing zen golfer, Bill Murray’s incoherent, gopher-hating groundsman and Dangerfield’s endless one-liners. Plus, some valuable advice on how to clear a full swimming pool with an unwrapped chocolate bar. EL
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84
Aliens in 'Galaxy Quest'
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Dir Dean Parisot (Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman)
‘By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!’
There aren’t too many films that work so completely that you couldn’t – if really pushed to do so – pick out the odd tiny fault. ‘Godfather II’? Bit long. ‘Rear Window’? Enough already with the windows! But ‘Trek’-spoof ‘Galaxy Quest’ is such an elegantly conceived and precision-tooled belter that it gets as close as a movie can to achieving all-round perfection. A big-hearted film that boasts some mighty action sequences and a perfectly drawn cast, it also displays the love and understanding for its original source material that’s necessary to sell any genre parody. Director Dean Parisot misfired next time with 2005 flop ‘Fun With Dick and Jane’ and has since been demoted to directing TV. A shame. ALD
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83
Joel McRea (left) in Preston Sturges's 'Sullivan's Travels'
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Dir Preston Sturges (Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick)
‘There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cock-eyed caravan.’
The appearance of Preston Sturges’s meaning-of-life masterpiece at a paltry 83 is a damning indictment of the state of film education in this country. Believe it or not, there was comedy before 'Monty Python' and 'Saturday Night Live', and some of it was pretty damn funny. ‘Sullivan’s Travels’ is perhaps best known today as being the movie that ‘inspired’ the Coens' ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, but it deserves so much more. At once witty, wacky, wholesome, devious and devastatingly smart, it showcases a writer-director at the absolute pinnacle of his game, offering up not just a wildly entertaining Hollywood romp but a razor-sharp (and explosively political) examination of why comedy matters at all. A work of genius, plain and simple. And damn, Veronica Lake! TH
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82
Peter Sellers in 'The Pink Panther'
The Pink Panther (1963)
Dir Blake Edwards (David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner)
'Simone, where is my Surété Scotland Yard-type mackintosh?'
The first in a long-running series of five films featuring the clumsy antics of Peter Sellers's bungling pseudo-French detective Inspector Clouseau, 'The Pink Panther' is also the most measured, languorous and subtle of the set. Not wishing to sound patronising, but there's a nagging suspicion that one or two of our contributors for this poll may have mistakenly or forgetfully chosen this diamond-heist comedy as a generic title for one of the others in the series, possibly 'The Pink Panther Strikes Again' (at number 95). While often very funny, Sellers's incompetent character only came to the fore from the second film, 'A Shot in the Dark', onwards. Consequently, anyone seeing this expecting wall-to-wall Sellers may be a mite disappointed. But hey, it still knocks spots off the awful 2006 remake. DA
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81
Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage in the Coens' 'Raising Arizona'
Raising Arizona (1987)
Dirs Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman)
‘Would you shop at a store called Unpainted Huffheins?’
A wild and raucous world away from their laconic desert-noir debut ‘Blood Simple’, the Coen brothers’ second outing sees them showcase their genius for creating jabbering arias of breakneck cartoon anarchy that never, ever threaten to tip over into ‘zaniness’. Baby-snatching may not strike you as the perfect trigger for comedy dynamite, but this is a film shot through with so much goofy charm and homespun warmth, and giddy with such an uncommon degree of cinematic zest that you just know that abducted blond munchkin Nathan Arizona Jr is in the safest of hands on his turbocharged odyssey through trailer-park Americana. A cracked and dusty gem that’s too often excluded from broadsheet rundowns of the Coens’ very best work. ALD
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Comments
Elf deserves to be there despite whatever the comments say - it is the funniest Christmas movie I have ever seen. Why isn't Coming to America in the top 10? Why isn't Office Space in the top 10? This is Spinal Tap is NOT FUNNY. There were way too many Woody Allen movies and where is Superbad? Galaxy Quest - are you serious? Movies 100 - 91 were not funny. How can you have a movie that is not funny at number one? Are you at all serious?
Down with the naysayers, This is Spinal Tap at No. 1 - need I say more
Egregious omissions:
"Death at a Funeral" had me in apoplectics more than 90% of these films.
"The In-Laws" (original with Peter Falk) and "Blazing Saddles" are also superior to many of these picks.
I do agree with "Top Secret" and "Galaxy Quest".
Spinal Tap at number one? Above Life Of Brian?
Nah mate, nah.
Spinal Tap is one of the most overated THINGS ever, let alone comedies.
Spinal Crap more like....
the list is made by a moron who are the the morons who are supposed to be these experts
This list sucks. I don't think that top 10 movies r really top ten.. I give you 2 out of 10. The point 2 is for your hardwork to make this list not for the movies you add. It's ridiculous.
Wow...most best of lists are awful but this is among the worst Ive seen :(
Shows how subjective a genre comedy is...well any genre to be honest, because I have watched Spinal Tap twice now, and I still think it's not really very funny at all... maybe it's something about the rock n roll attitude thing, but apart from a few very funny moments I thought it was a pretty limp, flat experience. Each to their own...but I would personally have Duck Soup well above Spinal Tap -- it's 50 years younger and about 4 times as funny.
Placing The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) at place 95 makes this list a joke!!
sorry
Travis Bickle's list is a helluva lot better than yours. Were the people who made this list list born in 1990?
Missing in action:
Bringing Up Baby
Our Man Godfrey
The Awful Truth
The Palm Beach Story
The Lady Eve
Ninotchka
Love Me Tonight
It Happened One Night
Modern Times
The Gold Rush
City Lights
Our Hospitality
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Christmas Story
MASH
Moonstruck
My Favorite Year
The Twelve Chairs
A Shot In The Dark
The Lavender Hill Mob
Mon Oncle
Paper Moon
The Graduate
Election
Sideways
Honeymoon In Vegas
Ruthless People
Clueless
Thank You For Smoking
The Cooler
Welcome To The Dollhouse
Something's Gotta Give
As Good As It Gets
Jerry McGuire
Porkies (Just kidding!)
This list is complete b.s. These guys have a chubby for Woody Allen... No 'dazed and confused',happy Gilmore, but no billy Madison? Dont think I saw one John Hughes film... HorsePoop
ok why so much woody allen films? and furthermore where is beetlejuice, brother, where art thou?, in bruge, grosse point blanke and to a lesser extent the exorcist.
This list is absolutely terrible. Napoleon Dynamite was entertaining but should NOT be in the top 100
How much did Woody Allen pay you to take so many spots with his outdated unfunny films?
Factor in the omission of Spaceballs, Idiocracy, Super Troopers, Beverly Hills Cop, PCU and Out Cold and this list is pretentious pointlessness.
Anybody who thinks Will Ferrell is funny ought not to be allowed out of The Home for the Bewildered.
I only had time to look at the top 10, and was astonished that the two laugh-out-loud funniest films ever were not there: Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, both directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant. I assume they are lower down the list, but not in the top 10?!!!
its a mad mad mad mad world
the private war of harry frigg
the tiger makes out
THislist is very imcomplete! and the expert used to make that list are from most of them old generation 40 to up...years old, so as we can most of the movies selected are oldies...or unknown at all....There are a lot great cool comedy missing on it....like super heroes parodies or SC-FI parodies are totaly absent that clearly show partiality in jugment....
Napoleon Dynamite is on this list, thus rendering it invalid. Move along.
The downside of the internet is that even someone who ranks Borat and Team America above The Big Lebowski is allowed to publish their "thoughts" to a wide audience.
The Big Lebowski should be number 1, one of the greatest (and funniest) films of all time. Good list though, Spinal Tap had a monumental influence, a deserving candidate for the top spot :)
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I like the choices on this list, for sure, and althought I think some should've been higher than others, I think its a decent list, except for the following:
1) Glaring omission of two Pink Panther jewels: "The Return of the Pink Panther" and, especially, "A Shot in the Dark", both of which are funnier than the original film itself, and as funny as "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (really happy to see this one included, I must note). "A Shot in the Dark:", especially, showcases, along wtih to "Dr. Strangelove", Peter Sellers's complete comedic forte as a perfomer, and in contrast to Kubrick's opus, while portraying only one role. Just genius.
2) The placing of "Spinal Tap" as number One. Why not "Life of Brian"?
3) Baseketball?! Really? The film is free-loading bunch of BS. Its painfully unfunny, steretypical scatology at its best. Its not only nowhere near Team America or South Park, but its nowhere near the top 500 - no, I did mean five hundred.
4) Glarring omission of M*A*S*H? One of the greatest, bravest anti-war satires of all time is not here - but Baseketball is?
5) Glarring omission of "Spaceballs", aka Mel Brooks's Final Laugh. Why? Maybe it didn't have Gene Wilder in it... Although it should've!!
6) Not-as-glarring omission of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "48 Hrs". Eddie Murphy's shining in them. i can understand not having them, but still missed anyhow.
Otherwise, not a bad list. But the omissions are just glaring - did I mention that? :-D
I hate the number one choice,that doesn`t mean i hate the film but number 1,come on! Also no MASH,no Lost in America,no What About Bob? no Bringing Up Baby?
Not as atrocious as the recent 100 songs list but still a very poor list. And any 100 greatest comedy films list that doesn't include Clueless is not to be taken seriously. And where is Happiness, Love Me Tonight, Singin' in the Rain, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Welcome to the Dollhouse? A joke.
Team America is much funnier than Ghostbusters.. Anchorman, also, definitely top 10 IF YOU HAVE SMOKED AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF CRACK COCAINE.
Ghostbusters is the best action/comedy to ever grace the silver screen. It is a work of comedic art, true genius, and should be in the top 5 of this list, if not top 3. That is all.
Baseketball?
REALLY?!
Any semblance of respectability goes out of the window with that dross there.
And this is coming from someone who absolutely loves South Park, Team America & The Book of Mormon!
The Annie Hall quote is not actually Woody Allen's, and he mentions that in the film.
The snubbing of the better side of Apatow Productions in this list is disgraceful.
A mockumentary? Really? I hate bloated, self-aggrandizing deadpan bs. Comedies are supposed to be funny.
List is rubbish. It includes Elf, Dodgeball, GalaxyQuest, etc, but leaves out many others far more deserving such as Idiocracy.
Fantastic that Monty Python is in the top 10 twice. Fantastic. I'm a little sad that StepBrothers isn't on the list, though (unless I missed it?).
This was rather awkward way to try to see if my movie is in there but I love the movie "Real Genius" with a teenage Val Kilmer.
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