100 best comedy movies: the list

Groundhog Day (1993)

Dir Harold Ramis (Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Stephen Tobolowsky)

‘Needlenose Ned? Ned The Head? I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing!’

Sometimes miracles can be found in the unlikeliest of places. Sure, it sounds like the tagline for a shitty straight-to-DVD 'Barbie and Friends' movie, but it also happens to be true. Who would have predicted that a writer-director who hadn’t been involved in anything decent since ‘Ghostbusters’ a decade previously would team up with a leading man  whose career was, to put it politely, off the boil and a former model who couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag and come up with a dyed-in-the-wool comic masterpiece? ‘Groundhog Day’ is one of those movies which seems incapable of putting a foot wrong, marshalling a wildly complex plot and a sprawling cast of often unlikeable characters with effortless ease, setting a relentless pace and sticking to it, and chucking in a few unforgettable gags for good measure.

But what’s most miraculous about ‘Groundhog Day’ is that it does all this while offering a series of keenly observed, often uncomfortable truths about the human condition. Phil Connors may not exactly be everyman – he’s too wealthy and self-important for that – but he is, perhaps, every man on his worst day: irascible, selfish, vain and short sighted. And while his journey – from bitterness to acceptance, from loneliness to love – may be predictable, it’s travelled with the minimum of mawkishness and a heartening reliance on pitch-black humour. TH