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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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20
Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in 'Trading Places'
Trading Places (1983)
Dir John Landis (Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis)
‘It ain't cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.’
A definition of comedy greatness: a movie you can watch in the depths of winter, on a low-rent Canadian cable channel, dubbed into French (and you don’t speak French), and it’s still ridiculously funny. The Eddie Murphy we loved in the ’80s may be long gone, but we still have the memories, and movies like this. ‘Trading Places’ may not be as slick as ‘Beverly Hills Cop’, as confrontational as ‘48 Hrs’ or as raw as, um, ‘Raw’, but it’s still the best Murphy vehicle on the road: whipsmart, close to the bone, unashamedly capitalist but unexpectedly decent at the core. A bit like the man himself. TH
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19
'South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut'
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
Dir Trey Parker (Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Isaac Hayes)
‘Hey Stan, tell them about the part where Terrence calls Phillip a testicle-shitting rectal wart.’
What’s the greatest musical of all time? ‘Singin’ in the Rain’? Too cute. ‘West Side Story’? Too butch. ‘Meet Me in St Louis’? If Judy Garland had called Margaret O’Brien a 'donkey-raping shit eater', it might have stood a chance. Surely, the finest example of the musical form in cinema has to be this wistful rites-of-passage tale of life in a quiet Colorado mountain town, where all the folks need to worry about is parking provision, bad language, gay dogs, an impending land war with Canada, Satan’s fuck-buddy Saddam, whether it really was Cartman’s mother in that German scheisse video and, of course, those goddamned Baldwins. Aw, shucks. TH
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18
Leslie Nielsen in 'The Naked Gun'
The Naked Gun (1988)
Dir David Zucker (Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, OJ Simpson)
‘I promise you: whatever scum did this, not one man on this force will rest one minute until he's behind bars. Now let's grab a bite to eat.’
In the wake of ‘Scary Movie’ and ‘Meet the Spartans’, it’s hard to remember that the scattergun, slapstick, movie-pastiche genre started out with the noblest of intentions: to level the comedy playing field by making even the smartest moviegoers laugh like total idiots. In translating their criminally overlooked TV show ‘Police Squad!’ to the big screen, the Zuckers delivered the purest expression of the form outside of their own masterpiece ‘Airplane!’. ‘The Naked Gun’ is a film so devastatingly daft it leaves the stoniest of cynics gasping for breath and shrieking, ‘It’s Enrico Pallazzo!’ TH
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17
'Duck Soup'
Duck Soup (1933)
Dir Leo McCarey (Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx)
‘I could dance with you till the cows come home...But I would rather dance with the cows till you come home.’
Journalists ritually cite George Orwell’s ‘1984’ when bemoaning the rotten state of contemporary politics. Let's put that down to the fact that they’ve probably never seen ‘Duck Soup’. Groucho Marx plays Rufus T Firefly, the dangerously daffy autocrat of the sovereign state of Freedonia, whose anarchic style of governance is as much a rib-crackingly hilarious indictment of power-hungry tyrants as it is a harrowing harbinger of things to come. We may chuckle when he attempts to squeeze ‘financial assistance’ from a status-hungry dowager. We may guffaw when he inducts a pair of friendly nitwits (Chico and Harpo Marx) into high government posts. We may snigger when the boys break into song at a war crimes trial. But is this not also a bracing vision of a grim future (and, of course, a very funny one)? DJ
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16
Bill Nighy in 'Shaun of the Dead'
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Dir Edgar Wright (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield)
‘How's that for a slice of fried gold?’
Our voters declare this the funniest of the films made by the reigning kings of British comedy, the triumvirate of Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Previous beloved Brit comedy duos – from Eric and Ernie to Cannon and Ball and the great Hale and Pace – failed to make, or faltered on, their elevation from the small to the silver screen. It was more than the making of perky Pegg and frolicsome Frost – the surprise hit of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ catapulted them to just below demi-god status (as enjoyed by, of course, the Pythons) and to the second highest spot in the poll for British performers. ‘Shaun...' is not a film about survival: this genuinely suspenseful rom-zom-com is about respect, and the getting of it. That what’s Pegg/Frost/Wright give to the living dead of Crouch End, Highgate and North Finchley in spades, with due compassion, not a little heroism and without losing their sense of humour and essential Britishness. WH
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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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