The 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time

It will often be said of a movie, “They could never make that today.” In the case of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” it’s closer to: They wouldn’t make that today. And that’s a damn shame, since the cathartic thing about Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones is precisely what a bad role model she is. She’s an effusive mess of a London publishing PR assistant who drinks and smokes too much, binges on junk food and sleeps with her cad of a boss — and if you want to see the film try to justify that, just know that he’s played by Hugh Grant at his most dreamboat smarmy. What makes this adaptation of Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel a singular screen comedy is the way the entire film is blithely amused by the casualness of Bridget’s transgressions. Zellweger plants herself inside the soul of this disreputable British singleton, playing her with just the right touch of exuberant masochistic style to turn the movie into “Pride and Prejudice” for the age of train-wreck hedonism.  

Ah, the “Saturday Night Live” spinoff movie! It was a form that regularly popped up in multiplexes, yet almost inevitably it 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. But “Wayne’s World” is different. Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, as the arrested but blissed-out suburban-basement metalhead teenagers Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, created characters who exerted a resonance far beyond how funny they were. In some weird way they seemed to be just like us, and the first “Wayne’s World” movie is a glorious slapdash headbanger full of savory moments, all rooted in the joy with which Myers and Carvey enact the magnetism of eternal adolescence.

Even as it turned Julia Roberts into a singular and transcendent movie star, Garry Marshall’s so-big-it-shook-the-culture love story was greeted by a fair amount of huffing and puffing over the incorrectness of its premise: Edward (Richard Gere), a wealthy, buttoned-down corporate raider (i.e., the dreamboat everyman of the future), offers to pay $3,000 to Vivian (Roberts), a brash Hollywood sex worker in black vinyl boots that practically go up to her neck, if she’ll stay with him for a week. What the scolds missed is this: Every rom-com must have its obstacle, and in “Pretty Woman” it’s the off-puttingness of the arrangement that’s the stumbling block. This was the movie that elevated Roberts’ supersize smile into a national treasure, but the film’s secret weapon is that it’s a duet of smiles, with Gere’s wry smirk expressing a silent affection that grows in every scene. And when Héctor Elizondo and Jason Alexander enter the picture, “Pretty Woman” becomes classically hilarious. The movie helped to usher in the age of princess feminism, but what’s memorable about it is also what’s slyly funny: that anyone who thinks money can buy love is a joke.

Every so often, a comedic supporting role comes along that’s so funny, a star is born. Think Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny” or Mira Sorvino in “Mighty Aphrodite” — parts that likely wouldn’t have existed if not for Judy Holliday’s Oscar-winning helium-voiced turn in George Cukor’s irresistible version of Garson Kanin’s stage play. The “Pygmalion”-esque concept is simple enough: Belligerent small-time criminal Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) brings his gal Billie Dawn (Holliday) to Washington, D.C., but worries that she’ll embarrass him, so he hires a reporter (William Holden) to tutor her. Only the more education Billie gets, the less she appreciates being ordered around by such a thug. “Drop dead!” she squeaks, getting laughs with practically every line. Holliday’s performance is a master class in comic timing, occasionally working without dialogue at all, as in the gin rummy scene, when she sings and constantly reshuffles her cards, beating her “not couth” boyfriend at his own game.

The rib-joint scene, in which Chris Rock plays a customer too poor to afford a full order who tries to haggle for one rib, should be enough to place Keenen Ivory Wayans’ directorial debut in the comedy hall of fame. As a kind of warm-up to “In Living Color,” Wayans took the ZAZ formula and twisted it into a full-blown spoof of Blaxploitation movies. Behind the counter in that rib scene are ’70s screen legends Isaac Hayes and Jim Brown, whose good-sport participation gave the film cred. Instead of repeating tired stereotypes, Wayans turned them on their head, serving up memorable parodies of ’80s excess (like the guy who overdoses on gold chains) and a Mr. Big who’s white for once. Another classic moment: the post-club sex scene, when Anne-Marie Johnson sees Wayans’ “12 inches” and raises him a wig, falsies and a fake leg.

Franz Kafka and George Orwell have been adapted more times than one can count, and yet none of those movies comes as close to the dystopian nightmare societies they forecast as Terry Gilliam’s visionary satire. The Monty Python veteran’s magnum opus was badly compromised by the studio when it came out, and though there is no entirely coherent version of Gilliam’s anarchic cri de coeur, the 142-minute director’s cut suggests the impressive scope of the oppressive society he imagined, where military police burst in and arrest citizens without warning and cumbersome paperwork makes even the slightest task impossible. Naturally, the guy who swoops in to skip those hurdles is labeled a terrorist (a rare comedic role from Robert De Niro), while the film’s real hero is its bumbling dreamer (a bureaucratic functionary played by Jonathan Pryce, who snaps out of it “Matrix” style). Like “1984,” “Brazil” was undeniably ahead of its time, delivering a warped looking-glass prophecy that’s at once authentic and laughably absurd.

Martin Scorsese described how a generation of budding filmmakers saw John Cassavetes’ low-budget, shot-on-the-street “Shadows” in 1959 and thought, “Hey, we could do that too.” That’s the primal indie spirit that animates Kevin Smith’s exhilarating first film. It’s a movie about two listless slacker dudes, Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), working at a Quick Stop Groceries convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey, as they while away the hours talking about “The Empire Strikes Back” and infidelity and porn and God knows what else. And that’s all it is. But the beauty of “Clerks” is its form-follows-function hipster primitivism. Shot in glarey black-and-white in an actual convenience store (the fluorescent schlock-food-and-beer market as ready-made movie set), it has the feel of a slacker documentary that’s making itself up as it goes along. This, the movie seems to be saying, is where America is headed, or where it already is: a collection of short-shrift lives that keep laughing at themselves.

John Waters began his career making underground movies with his outsider friends, priding himself on his capacity to shock. But the bad-taste auteur reined it in for “Hairspray,” giving New Line the only PG-rated entry of his career. Political correctness notwithstanding, the project — which was inspired by “The Buddy Deane Show,” a segregated dance program in Waters’ native Baltimore — was subversive in other ways. There’s the casting of Divine as a corpulent housewife, plus the unconventional choice of newbie Ricki Lake to play teenage Tracy Turnblad, the “pleasantly plump” young woman who forces the TV show to integrate. Although the jokes may be gentler than singing assholes and scratch-and-sniff farts, “Hairspray” only pretends to be wholesome, demoting the popular kids in everyone’s eyes, while giving the underdogs a boost via scandalous dance moves and outré looks, like the roach-print formal gown Tracy wears for the finale.

“I was born a poor Black child,” opens the film that made arena-filling stand-up comedian Steve Martin into a movie star. The line always killed when Martin delivered it in his live act, so director Carl Reiner and co-writer Carl Gottlieb decided to take it literally, building a movie around a white guy named Navin R. Johnson who’s so naive he doesn’t notice even the most obvious things. When an assassin tries to shoot him at a service station, missing Martin and hitting the oil cans right behind him instead, Navin shouts, “He hates these cans!” Where so many of Jerry Lewis’ characters were dumb, Martin went dumber, committing to a character whose idiocy became endearing, elevating silliness to the sublime. In doing so, he paved the way for films based on “Saturday Night Live” sketches (“The Blues Brothers” landed the following year) and a panoply of other dimwit characters.

“Listen, when women go wrong, men go right after them,” quips Mae West, who could turn any line into a double entendre with a voice that made clear what she was really talking about. No wonder the bawdy blond was considered such a headache for the Hays Code, which put strict limits on how movies dealt with subjects like sex and prostitution. West had to tone things down when adapting “Diamond Lil,” a racy play she’d written and starred in on Broadway — though it still sizzles all these years later. Among her tactics, West always made a late entrance, strutting in after other folks had talked her up. According to legend, West didn’t care for the male co-star Paramount had in mind for the movie. Then she spotted a suave young Cary Grant crossing the studio lot and said, “He’ll do for my leading man.” The pairing is perfect, as the 38-year-old West works her charms, bending the moral up-and-comer to her will.

In the early decades of Hollywood, comedies routinely made bed hopping and wife swapping a source of fun, but once the Production Code kicked in, the studios got chaste and seemingly so did the country. Then came the sexual revolution, and suddenly the movies had to catch up to what their newly liberated audiences were doing. Enter Paul Mazursky, whose portrait of two couples working through their sexual hang-ups starts with Bob (Robert Culp) and Carol (Natalie Wood) returning from an awareness retreat determined to practice complete honesty, which upsets their more conservative friends Ted (Elliott Gould) and Alice (Dyan Cannon). Off-camera, the husbands indulge in extramarital affairs, news of which their wives take very differently, leading all four to test out a partner-swapping arrangement. What makes this time-capsule comedy of manners so amusing is the squirmy awkwardness of watching hyper-articulate adults trying to surf the free-love tsunami.

In his mid-20s, the former Rolling Stone magazine boy wonder Cameron Crowe went undercover at a high school to find out what suburban California teens were really like. His book on the formative mall-rat generation became the basis for director Amy Heckerling’s beguiling teen hang-out comedy, which has a wild card at its center: Sean Penn’s scene-stealing performance as Jeff Spicoli, the pie-eyed stoned surfer whose every “Life’s a party!” utterance made him into America’s Valley Boy. An enduringly funny and often boundary-pushing snapshot of the early ’80s, stocked with a cast of future stars, “Fast Times” channels the dislocating vibe of teenagers growing up too quickly on the cusp of the Reagan era.

Will Ferrell specializes in the comedy of debauched egomania. And there has never been a Ferrell movie in which the distance between his character’s belief in himself and who he actually is becomes more witheringly, laceratingly funny than it does in “Anchorman.” Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy, a news anchor in 1975 San Diego who is “kind of a big deal,” is convinced of his own monumental importance. But he’s actually just a lazy cue-card reader who makes delivering the news a form of slumming. (Part of the film’s ripe joke is that slumming is what local TV news became.) Ferrell and his collaborator, the writer-director Adam McKay, go off on the kitsch ’70s with viciously on-target cunning, whether it’s Ron’s psychedelic straight-arrow wardrobe, his propensity to play jazz flute or his dumbfounded loathing of the idea that an anchorman could actually be … a woman! And the supporting cast is stocked with juicy comedy-stars-to-be like Steve Carell, who broke out in this movie with memorable aplomb.

Marvel, take note: This is how you make a multiverse movie. There’s an ecstatic “more is more” quality to the reality-bending story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a struggling laundromat owner whose IRS audit kicks off a romp through various dimensions. The filmmakers, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (billed as Daniels), put everything on spin cycle, mixing martial arts action, absurdist slapstick, hot dog fingers, universe hopping and mother-and-child reunions into one irresistible piece of cinematic chutzpah. But “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t an exercise in meaningless style. Evelyn goes through the dadaist gauntlet so that she can reconcile with her estranged daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and recapture the spark that has faded from her marriage to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). That’s a destination worthy of a hero’s journey.

If you think what’s going on in America right now happened from the top down, check yourself: The truth is that it happened just as much from the bottom up. And Mike Judge foresaw all that when he made his cracked satire of the dumbing down of America, conjuring a sick-joke vision of what it looks like when the USA hits bottom. Joe and Rita (Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph), a librarian and a sex worker, are selected for a government suspended-animation experiment and wind up being blasted 500 years into the future. They land in an America that’s become a happy-talk dystopia of consumerist zombies, where people dress in corporate insignias and a fast-food chain has the slogan “Fuck You, I’m Eating!” Judge fashioned a weirdly prescient send-up of how late capitalism could serve fascism by scooping out people’s brains. “Idiocracy,” a movie that sets off tickles of recognition, was designed to be Judge’s follow-up to “Office Space,” but it was barely released by its studio, 20th Century Fox, leading to speculation that it had been suppressed due to all the corporations it mocked. That the movie remained outside the system, becoming the cultiest of cult films, now feels connected to what’s so prophetic about it.  

Adolf Hitler was at his height and World War II was well underway when German expatriate and master satirist Ernst Lubitsch took direct aim at the Third Reich. Using signature aspects of his comedic style (the so-called Lubitsch touch), the Berlin-born helmer skewered the Gestapo and used comedy to support the Allies’ cause. Plot twists and mistaken identities build on one another in the delightfully convoluted story of a theatrical troupe who use their acting skills to fool the Nazis, impersonating German officers (and eventually the Führer himself) to recover a list of resistance fighters from enemy hands — a concept that later inspired Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” The film is full of witty repartee but famously earns laughs for all that goes unsaid, like the off-camera tryst implied by the title: a handsome pilot sneaks backstage every time he hears Hamlet’s soliloquy to make it with the actor’s wife (Carole Lombard).  

As with Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar’s first films were looser and funnier than the serious Oscar-lauded work that followed. That’s pretty much where the comparisons between the two filmmakers end, as the Spanish director’s exuberant queer aesthetic takes telenovelas’ wild theatrics as its starting point. This overheated (and ultra-saturated) melodrama unspools almost entirely in one place: the apartment of Pepa (Carmen Maura), a heartbroken woman who plans to end her life with a batch of spiked gazpacho, only to watch guests pass out as they consume it instead. Eccentric characters come and go, pointing pistols (in the case of her ex’s jealous wife) or dangling from the balcony (like her terrorist-dating pal Candela), while Pepa runs around putting out fires and trying to calm her irksome pet chickens. The oh-so-’80s farce marks the madcap height of the director’s early camp spree.

A delectable parody of dawn-of-the-Reagan-era teen flicks — which may sound like much ado about nothing, except that it’s so hilariously sly about something so fetishistically trivial that it seems to be taking in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese. It’s set on the last day of summer camp in 1981, and it pinpoints that invisible tectonic moment when the ’70s turned into the ’80s. The film’s creators, David Wain and Michael Showalter, come up with a loving and meticulous re-creation of the last moment before American youth culture went permanently ironic. Wain, in his directorial debut, crams the screen with priceless period detail (like Showalter’s earnest girly-man loser-hero being made over in a post-“Rocky”/ pre-“Flashdance” kung fu workout montage), resulting in the most irreverent pop satire since the glory days of ZAZ.

Most people think that studio comedies have gotten more scandalous with time, and though they’re certainly more explicit today, the awful truth is that there was a lot more hanky-panky happening (or at least implied) during Hollywood’s screwball heyday. Director Leo McCarey famously encouraged his actors, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, to improvise as they played a married couple who are both convinced that the other is being unfaithful. They’ve agreed to a divorce, but before the split becomes official, they’re expected to spend 90 days apart. Instead, they wind up trying to sabotage their respective new suitors. People are constantly ducking in and out of doorways, narrowly avoiding discovery (though the jig is up after a clever gag involving a bowler hat and the film’s adorable dog). The whole misunderstanding poignantly resolves with another portal: The door between adjoining rooms simply won’t close, obliging the couple to reconsider their feelings.

“That’s all.” With those two words and a withering look over her thick-framed glasses, Meryl Streep created an icon: Miranda Priestly, the high-powered fashion magazine editor from hell. The endlessly quotable workplace comedy, which also stars Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt as Miranda’s harried assistants Andy and Emily, is based on Lauren Weisberger’s dishy roman à clef about working at Vogue and, as such, it often feels like a more stylish version of audiences’ own work woes. (“Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. Means it’s time for a promotion,” Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, the magazine’s underappreciated art director, quips.) Streep’s incisive glances earned her both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. And then there was the fashion, designed by Patricia Field (fresh off “Sex and the City”). Long live those thigh-high Chanel boots!

Spike Lee’s most radical movie — and one of his three or four greatest. Yet even as it looks more prophetic than ever, “Bamboozled” remains such an extreme satire that the larger culture never totally found a place for it. Damon Wayans, in a performance of stylized meta uptightness, plays a television executive, foundering in a white world, who has a “Network”-like revelation: He will save himself by creating a variety show built around two tap-dancing stars (Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson) he finds on the street, and they will become, under his guidance … a 21st-century minstrel show! The audacity of Lee’s concept, which can leave you sputtering with laughter (or at times merely drop-jawed), isn’t just that he turns these forbidden images from the past into an all-too-plausible vision of mainstream American entertainment. It’s that the film dares to say that contemporary popular culture has retained countless elements of minstrelsy, a tragedy it lays bare with a scalding relevance that’s part Spike Lee joint, part “Natural Born Killers.”  

The fabled midnight cult movies almost always fell into one of two categories: They were quirky crowd-pleasers, like “Harold and Maude” and “King of Hearts,” or they were outré fantasies with an edge of danger, like “Pink Flamingos” and “Eraserhead.” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” bears the distinction of being both at once — a boys-and-ghouls party movie that’s simultaneously silly and subversive, driven by friendly West End pop-rock tunes and a vision of gender-bending truculence designed to leave you feeling unhinged from your old self. It all came together in the chewy center of Tim Curry’s great performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. When he sings “Sweet Transvestite,” the camera glued to his every domineering pout and sashay, the movie seems to have beamed “Cabaret” into the 21st century. Curry makes everything he does feel supremely naughty, and his spirit is the literal definition of infectious. “Rocky Horror” became an audience-participation phenomenon, and all that midnight toast-tossing and time-warping is just what the film needed to complete it. 

It’s not the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, but in many ways it’s their quintessential assault on Western civilization, especially during the climactic grand-opera sequence, which they reduce to the most uproarious of shambles. Along the way, there’s the infamous state-room scene, a contract discussion about a “sanity clause” that outdoes their “Why a duck?” routine and some very square musical numbers — added, at the behest of Irving Thalberg, to help sell the movie — that somehow wind up setting off the madness around them with a just-so perfection. 

As any parent can attest, you can hardly watch a kiddie comedy today without encountering at least one or a dozen fart jokes. If you want someone to thank, look no further than Mel Brooks, who makes no distinction between lowbrow and high, as he proved for all time in the groundbreaking eating-beans-around-the-campfire scene. From the 1940s to the ’60s, the Western was Hollywood’s most popular genre, so that audiences knew by heart the codes and clichés of the horse-opera form. That made the dusty format ripe for spoofing, which Brooks was all too happy to do, pitting Harvey Korman’s robber baron Hedley Lamarr against the residents of Rock Ridge. But he’s no match for Madeline Kahn’s cleavage, scene-stealer Cleavon Little as the West’s first Black sheriff, or the great Gene Wilder, who respectfully describes the “people of the land” they’re protecting as “you know, morons.” 

Best known as a performance artist before making her modestly budgeted first feature, Miranda July is independent even by indie film standards: Her deceptively slight, undeniably profound debut owes nothing to others, inspired no direct imitators and features a wry, melancholy sense of humor that probably wouldn’t have been funny in anybody else’s hands. Among other things, the movie is about the search for connection in the early aughts, when chatrooms let people feel a virtual sense of intimacy with total strangers (a dynamic the film likens to “pooping back and forth forever”), and primitive video cameras enabled July to practice her craft. Half her cast were children, who prove all the more amusing for not playing it cute. Practically everyone’s lonely here, which is where the laughter comes from: The shy, pink-shoed July offers a soft-spoken embrace of the awkward moment, free from judgment. 

The best joke of Edgar Wright’s horror comedy is that it’s a riotous satire of zombie movies that is also … a smashingly effective zombie movie. So much so that it helped bring the moribund genre back to life. Simon Pegg, who plays a sad-sack London salesman named Shaun, co-wrote the script with Wright, and they find a demented glee in the notion that Shaun and his dim best friend, Ed (Nick Frost), taking shelter from the zombie apocalypse in a pub, are so slow on the uptake that there’s not all that much difference between them and the ghouls. Full of mad scenes like the one in which the characters fend off an undead horde with pool cues to the tune of “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Shaun of the Dead” takes the hint of discordant comedy that was always there in the zombie genre and nudges it to the surface, as Shaun discovers a purpose in life by having to fight for his. 

Goldie Hawn upended the conventional Hollywood wisdom, which held that it took male stars to make a successful comedy, by carrying this “G.I. Jane” comedy on her own. Whereas earlier film roles had typically reduced the “Laugh-In” alum to playing daffy girlfriends, “Private Benjamin” offered a uniquely compelling setup: What if a spoiled rich girl, whose husband expired on their wedding night, enlisted by accident in the U.S. Army? The film pokes fun at how ill suited Judith Benjamin is for the job, showing Hawn scrubbing toilets with her electric toothbrush, but winds up taking a feminist stand as the dingbat saves the day — and learns to stand up for herself in the real world. Screenwriter Nancy Meyers found her voice on the film (directed by then-husband Charles Shyer), going on to make such beloved comedies as “Something’s Gotta Give” and “The Holiday” on her own. 

In the early 2000s, the Sundance Film Festival became synonymous with quirky independent comedies, thanks in large part to Jared Hess’ low-budget debut. Made for less than half a million dollars with a cast of unknowns, the movie opened the floodgates for stylized portraits of weirdos and outcasts (like “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Juno”) and came to define distributor Fox Searchlight’s brand for more than a decade. But none of those imitators could touch curly-haired newcomer Jon Heder’s blithely unselfconscious performance as the ultimate dork: Oblivious to bullying, loyal to a fault (just ask Pedro), the easily flustered Napoleon Dynamite was a little too old to be practicing any of his childish pastimes, from bike jumps to drawing ligers — “Gosh!” — and that made him cool, despite his moon boots and oversize aviator glasses. What’s more relatable than awkwardness, especially to the young audiences who embraced the funky-dancing freak? 

Having just declared the 1996 pitch-black “Fargo” a masterpiece, critics were immune to the shaggy charms of the Coen brothers’ follow-up film, betraying a barely suppressed annoyance at the duo for squandering their Oscar-winning legitimacy to make something as loose-limbed and low stakes as a stoner parody of a Raymond Chandler mystery. To quote the Dude, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” It took time for audiences to embrace “The Big Lebowski,” which became a cult favorite on home video, where, presumably, many viewers enjoyed it with a bud. But the Dude didn’t just abide; he prevailed. Now it’s one of the Coens’ most beloved films, and that’s in no small part thanks to Jeff Bridges, who as Jeffrey Lebowski, a shambling, blitzed-out slacker turned amateur detective, delivers a comedy performance for the ages. 

For Preston Sturges, nothing was sacred, least of all the institution of marriage. A screwball screenwriting genius, and the first to direct his own material (a right he earned by selling this script to Paramount for one dollar), Sturges takes aim at the way many American gals gave enlisted men the warmest of send-offs, only to be saddled with souvenirs of their hospitality some nine months later. Tricky to depict, the scandalous phenomenon was so widespread that an estimated 650,000 children were born out of wedlock during World War II. But Sturges was nothing if not clever, building his “Miracle” around a different predicament: Yes, Betty Hutton’s Trudy Kockenlocker winds up pregnant after attending a party for the troops, but the trouble is that they all agreed to get hitched, and she can scarcely remember who the father, er, her husband is. Enter poor Norval (Eddie Bracken) to protect her honor. 

Reese Witherspoon’s irresistibly perky, divinely oblivious, shallow-but-deep portrayal of blond ambition stands at the head of the class. When Elle Woods, a sorority president with a pink-scented résumé, gets dumped by her trust-fund frat-boy beau, she decides to prove that she’s “serious” by following him to Harvard Law School. There, Elle learns an important lesson about pushing past people’s low expectations and embracing all that makes you unique. The role effectively promoted Witherspoon to a kind of poster girl for positivity — an empowering change from her more conniving turn in the 1999 “Election.” Her performance is delicately calibrated so that Elle’s blondness is never dimmed by her apparent braininess. (Elle got a 179 on her LSAT, after all.) What other movie delivers such affecting attitude while also informing the audience about the cardinal rules of perm maintenance? 

There’s a certain kind of infantile hypomanic comedian (Jerry Lewis, Adam Sandler) who audiences cherish but who critics inevitably dismiss as silly, mind-numbing, “lowest common denominator” — in other words, name your synonym for dumb. Jim Carrey got a lot of that when he starred in his first movie, playing the title character as a rubber-faced hysteric prankster, as if he were all Three Stooges rolled into one. But if you leave the reflexive snobbery aside, you’ll see that there’s an astonishing purity to what Carrey brings off here. He’s like a harlequin psychotic who will literally do anything for a laugh. He plays Ace Ventura as if his entire being were trapped in a state of surreal sarcasm. Thirty years later, now that we know what a truly wide-ranging comedian and actor Carrey is, it’s clearer than ever that “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” was a piece of performative insanity in which Carrey literally seems to be wearing his id on the outside. 

Adapting his scalding political satire “The Thick of It” to the big screen, British television vet Armando Iannucci pioneered a profane style of insult comedy, which subsequently impacted everything from “Veep” (the show’s U.S. equivalent) to “Succession” (whose characters roast each other at every turn). Pushing the rat-a-tat repartee beyond even screwball speed limits, Iannucci introduced a whiplash vision of how Western democracy operates: The way he sees it, we are governed by an irresponsible posse of foulmouthed children, constantly berating each other in a game of petty one-upmanship. It was funny before it became true. Now that amateurs hold the highest offices, the film — in which low-level officials nearly start a war by misstating their position to the press — anticipates what we call “fake news” and invites us to laugh at the chaos that has become our daily reality. 

Betcha didn’t realize a movie could squeeze so many jokes into just 83 minutes. While less well-remembered than Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, the comedy duo of Olsen and Johnson had a huge stage hit with “Hellzapoppin’”; the shticky show 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, which carried over to the big-screen version. At one point, Chic Johnson calls up to the projectionist and orders him to rewind the film. A few minutes later, the director interrupts the shenanigans (which involve rubber chickens and horses and flying dwarves). “We can’t shoot this kind of stuff,” he objects. “Pictures are different. You’ve gotta have a story.” When the plot kicks in, the pair watch and make wisecracks, “Mystery Science Theater 3000” style, at their own movie. 

Eddie Murphy, in his blissfully no-holds-barred stand-up-comedy concert film, stalks around the stage in a purple leather suit like a comedy pasha, reveling in the kinds of routines that make commentators say things like, “You could never get away with that today!” Maybe not, but the scolding wags never ask why. The measure of Murphy’s inspiration is how far he pushes his bits into what was thought of at the time as politically incorrect outrage, whether it’s the gay cop imitating a police siren and saying “Pull ovah!” or his delirious Pryor-esque fantasy of marrying an African princess named Unfufu. Murphy, like Pryor, rarely found a Hollywood vehicle that could channel his comic inspiration the way the stand-up stage could. This movie doesn’t just show you why he was a star. It shows you how his masterful effrontery electrified audiences. 

From “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” to “Weird Science,” Mary Shelley’s classic monster often works better as comedy than as horror. But none of those retellings is quite as deranged as Greek Weird Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos’ take on the mad-scientist story. The subversive art-house hit reunited Lanthimos with “The Favourite” collaborator Emma Stone, whose game-for-anything attitude makes her a rarity among movie stars: someone more committed to the work than to maintaining her own image. Watching her demolish people’s expectations is half the fun: As a reanimated corpse with the brain of a baby, the actress (who won her second Oscar in the role) reveals social limits by breaking them — say, by pleasuring herself at the breakfast table or bingeing on tarts until she barfs. “Poor Things” recalls ’70s movies like “That Obscure Object of Desire,” positioning its maker as this generation’s Luis Buñuel. 

From “Beverly Hills Cop” to “Lethal Weapon,” action movies adopted a noticeably more comedic tone in the 1980s, although the decade’s funniest crime film was a sexy diamond heist in which the participants start to double-cross one another as soon as the jewels are stolen. Written by Monty Python alum John Cleese (who also plays the film’s uptight barrister), the swift, twist-filled movie’s secret weapon is American actor Kevin Kline, who earned an Oscar for his performance as the hotheaded Otto, a psychopath amusingly oblivious to his own idiocy. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Kline tortures his stuttering colleague, Ken (Michael Palin), by stuffing french fries up his nose and eating his pet fish straight from the tank. Meanwhile, Ken proves a worthless assassin, incapable of killing a little old lady, whose three dogs aren’t nearly so lucky.

Today, it’s a cliché to call any comedy “anarchic,” but that’s just the word to describe the shocking countercultural sensibility of French novelist-turned-filmmaker Bertrand Blier. His breakthrough film paired Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere (who went on to make several hit movies together, earning the foreign-film Oscar for Blier’s no less subversive next effort, “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs”) as a pair of aimless hippie drifters who commit petty crimes and pick up pretty women (including Miou-Miou, whom neither of these lotharios can satisfy). French movies had come a long way from “Jules and Jim,” to the point that every attempt to make the nihilistic duo more likable is immediately undone by some insensitive stunt on their part. Rare is the half-century-old film that still packs the capacity to shock, but the chaotic unpredictability of “Going Places” (whose French title is slang for “nuts”) feels as unhinged as ever.

Hardly anybody remembers “Zero Hour!,” the 1957 disaster movie in which a food poisoning outbreak endangers everyone aboard a seemingly doomed flight, leaving it to a traumatized WWII vet to take control of the cockpit. But that doesn’t make the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker send-up of the ridiculously earnest drama, which it nestles inside a parody of the popular “Airport” franchise, any less funny. Coming off 1977’s more disconnected pop-culture spoof “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” ZAZ embraced the genre’s oh-so-solemn line deliveries, as future “Naked Gun” star Leslie Nielsen takes everything entirely too literally. The trick was to treat the crisis as a legitimate cause for alarm, then squeeze irreverent jokes in anywhere they might fit, the way a stewardess does those last few carry-on bags. The film’s most memorable line pretty much says it all: “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”

Set at a flamboyant South Beach drag club, director Mike Nichols’ sidesplitting remake of 1978’s Oscar-nominated French farce “La Cage aux Folles” is every bit as outrageous as the original, but landed at a time when the culture was shifting toward an acceptance of same-sex relationships. That makes for some poignant moments — like the bench scene in which Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) reaffirm their love — amid some of the most unapologetically queer comedy ever featured in a big-studio film (Williams’ whirlwind impressions of well-known choreographers is a standout). Playing it butch, the “Mrs. Doubtfire” star and diva-like Lane are a gay couple obliged to pose as straight in order to fool their ultraconservative future in-laws, which puts Albert’s drag skills — and their relationship — to the test. Gene Hackman deserves special mention for being the rigidly uncomfortable “straight man,” while Hank Azaria does the most as their incorrigible Guatemalan houseboy.

Tom Hanks, playing a 13-year-old boy who lands in the body of an adult, gives a performance of such captivating sly innocence that he makes every moment a wide-eyed surprise. What makes Penny Marshall’s seminal comedy so delicious is its subtext that no other body-swap comedy can match. Yes, it’s funny to see Hanks’ overgrown teenager try to talk his way in and out of situations he has no idea about. But the movie’s real theme is that in so many ways, the yuppie adults of the ’80s felt like kids. “Big” is really a fantasy projection of the impostor syndrome, which is why its comedy, 40 years later, resonates more than ever.

By 1950s standards, the first collaboration between Rock Hudson and Doris Day is about as racy as studio movies got. Though the saucy rom-com isn’t as overtly sexual as “There’s Something About Mary” or “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” it might surprise you just how much the duo managed to get away with for the time. 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 (and later sleeping) together. Hudson plays a hot-blooded playboy, whose garish apartment is rigged for seduction, while Day’s more reserved character works as an interior decorator. The pair share a party line but haven’t met in person, which allows him to court her under an alias. Compared with the relatively explicit humor of today, the movie is a master class in the art of innuendo.

Kid ’n Play, the stars of Reginald Hudlin’s blissed-out and rather gritty party comedy, started off as a hip-hop act who showcased themselves like walking cartoon characters: Kid with his Bart Simpson ’fro, Play with his stylized scowl. Yet “House Party” is witty and lived-in enough to be a lot less broad than most of the life-in-the-hood movies it wound up inspiring. It’s as authentic a portrait of ebullient youth energy as “Hairspray” or the early films of John Hughes. There are many laugh-out-loud moments (especially when Kid goes to jail), but what’s telling is how the film’s comedy expresses its characters’ newfound liberation in fusing hip-hop attitude with middle-class dreams.

If you were standing before a heavenly jury and had to prove the proposition “Julia Roberts isn’t just a great movie star — she’s a great actor,” you could do no better than to show this movie, which has the distinction of being the greatest romantic comedy of the rom-com-happy ’90s. It’s great because there’s so much heartbreak in it, which only fuels the laughs (but remains heartbreaking). As Jules, a 27-year-old food critic who learns that Michael (Dermot Mulroney), her longtime best friend, is getting married to Cameron Diaz’s ditzy Kimmy (Jules and Michael had agreed that if they were both unhitched by 28, they would marry), Roberts portrays a woman so distraught that she’s driven to sabotage the wedding in every way possible — a scenario that allows the sneakiness of screwball comedy to morph into something more vulnerable and exposed. Yet the director, P.J. Hogan, has such affection for everyone on-screen that “My Best Friend’s Wedding” becomes the rare amorous fairy tale that will have you giggling in empathy with the most shameless mishaps. It’s Roberts’ most soulful and haunting performance, and maybe her most romantic.

Neil Simon’s legendary comedy about a pair of mismatched New York bachelors — Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau), poker-playing sportswriter and slob extraordinaire, and Felix Ungar (Jack Lemmon), fastidious housekeeper and fussbudget — is one of the only Hollywood movies to inspire a sitcom spinoff that’s every bit as much a work of art as the original. In fact, the ’70s TV version, starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, was such perfection (it showed you that the sitcom was really the form Simon had been working in for his entire career) that it has now overshadowed the movie version. But if you go back and watch the film, it’s got a tasty exuberance as bracing as the plate of spaghetti that Oscar throws against the wall when he just can’t take it anymore. Oscar and Felix are really Simon’s parody of an old married couple, and the movie plays like late Billy Wilder meets early Norman Lear meets the pure terrifying spectacle of male desolation.

In the silent era, long before visual effects went digital, Harold Lloyd got big laughs performing his own stunts. A virtuoso physical comic, Lloyd realized that audiences loved seeing him risk his life at great heights. In shorts such as “Ask Father” and “High and Dizzy,” he experimented with what would become, in “Safety Last!,” his most famous gag, wherein Lloyd’s ambitious young sales clerk scales the side of the department store where he works, hoping to score a $1,000 bonus. Near the top, he grabs the hands of a giant clock, which pivots outward and leaves him dangling high above the street below. For the actor’s safety, the scene was staged on a Los Angeles rooftop using a dummy facade, though Lloyd occasionally sustained real injuries (he once blew off several fingers when a prop explosive went off in his face). Look carefully, and you can spot the custom glove he wears in the scene.

Will Ferrell wasn’t yet a bankable star when he was cast as Buddy, a doe-eyed, syrup-obsessed human raised by elves at the North Pole. Yet it’s hard to picture this fish-out-of-water comedy, about Buddy’s journey to New York City in search of his biological father, working without Ferrell, who was best known at the time for his impersonations of George W. Bush and Alex Trebek on “Saturday Night Live.” James Caan, Zooey Deschanel, Bob Newhart and Peter Dinklage have standout scenes, but it’s Ferrell’s childlike earnestness in delivering the film’s indelibly daft lines — “You sit on a throne of lies!,” “Son of a nutcracker!” — that turned “Elf” into a high-concept classic and cemented its place as a Christmas perennial.

After winning best picture for “Terms of Endearment,” James L. Brooks turned his attention to the world of TV news, but really, the movie is all about showbiz (emphasis on the business). There was a time when Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow explained what was happening in the world with a certain gravitas. “Broadcast News” marks the moment that era ended and it all started to be treated as entertainment — a reality so entrenched today that the cynicism of Albert Brooks’ character (an old-school reporter named Aaron) seems almost quaint. It crackles more like subsequent Aaron Sorkin dramedies than Paddy Chayefsky’s biting “Network” before it, but that doesn’t make the film any less effective. Aaron finds himself in one corner of a love triangle with his producer (Holly Hunter) and the handsome up-and-comer (William Hurt), who he views as “the devil.” These days, it’s hard not to feel it’s all gone to hell.

A French spy comedy that’s funnier than all the “Pink Panther” movies put together. This one, too, involves a fair amount of clueless bumbling, but here the premise is comedically ingenious. At Orly Airport, François (Pierre Richard), a frizzy-haired concert violinist, is chosen at random by a member of the Counter-Espionage department. They pretend that François is a master spy (it’s all part of a scheme to undermine the department’s chief), and he spends the rest of the film being treated as one, even though he has no idea what’s going on. Richard’s performance is a priceless piece of slapstick obliviousness that gets more and more unhinged as the movie becomes an escalating tangle of crackpot deception.

Have you ever wanted to be somebody else? Comedy went cerebral in screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s audaciously outside-the-box response to that age-old question. John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a scruffy puppeteer who discovers a curious portal into another person’s subconscious — the mind of respected character actor John Malkovich, to be precise. The acclaimed thespian scores extra laughs with his self-effacing turn as a humorless crank. Such playful metatextuality became Kaufman’s signature, as characters appear to lose control of their own reality. Even Einstein would be hard-pressed to untangle the complexity of Kaufman’s scripts, though his galaxy-brain imagination gave others license to bend time and space for laughs. The movie was way ahead of its time, anticipating things such as avatars and augmented reality. That’s especially true of the gender-questioning subplot involving Craig’s dissatisfied wife, Lotte (a stereotype-defying Cameron Diaz), who gets the last laugh.

Like all vintage comedy anarchists, the young Adam Sandler had two sides. There was the dopey, harmless arrested-child side — the one who was like Jerry Lewis on goofball steroids. And there was the violent walking-id side. “The Waterboy” is the most uproarious and indelible of Sandler’s “early, funny films,” and that’s because he basically took those two warring aspects of his persona and brought them together into one Godzilla-size laugh machine. His Bobby Boucher is a dim-witted, socially inept loser who works as a college football waterboy … until he taps an inner rage that turns him into a fearsomely destructive linebacker. By the time Sandler released this unhinged gridiron comedy, he had already begun his journey toward becoming a supple actor (“The Wedding Singer,” his key transition film, came out nine months before). But the beauty of “The Waterboy” is that Sandler’s stylized performance is actually an artful one — an eruption of demons wrapped in demented innocence.

Hal Ashby’s elegant and gently lascivious New Hollywood bedroom farce is one of the great demonstrations of how a ’70 movie could tackle so many things — the sexual revolution, the entertainment industry, Nixon — and still emerge as a perfect spinning-in-the-air diversion. As George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser who’s such a born seducer that he always makes it look like the women are coming after him, Warren Beatty plays a character who isn’t just tailored to the actor’s off-screen image as counterculture Hollywood’s most legendary lothario. The film is a study of the soul of a womanizer — maybe the richest ever made, as Beatty and screenwriter Robert Towne dive into the metaphysics of what it means to adore women so much that you can’t commit to loving just one of them. The movie is structured as Beatty’s sly confession, but it’s also a portrait of how the corruption of the Watergate era seeped into the glam echelons of L.A. It bubbles along like a Restoration comedy on Champagne and Valium, with a haunting final scene that locates the melancholy underneath the laughter.

As bespectacled paleontologist David Huxley, the usually dapper Cary Grant plays an uptight dweeb opposite Katharine Hepburn’s brash heiress in Howard Hawks’ kooky screwball classic. David’s all set to be married when the hurricane-like Susan Vance blows into his life with her unpredictable pet leopard, Baby. The title’s a clue to what the film’s really about: David’s fiancée swears off “domestic entanglements of any kind,” whereas David kinda wants kids. Dealing with several tough-to-manage critters — not just Baby but also the cute terrier who steals the intercostal clavicle bone from David’s almost complete brontosaurus skeleton — gives David a taste of what parenthood might feel like, while Susan, for all her frustrations, suggests an undeniably exciting alternative to his current mate. Nearly 90 years later, it’s a novelty to see such well-trained animal actors, though they’re no match for Grant’s vaudeville-honed physicality, from David and Susan tearing each other’s formalwear to the flamboyant negligee gag.

Every one of Wes Anderson’s movies is, on some level, a comedy. That whole “Isn’t it ironic?” quality of his is integral to what’s beloved about him. But “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is different. It’s not his most emotional film (that would be “The Royal Tenenbaums”), but it’s the movie of his in which the comedy bubbles up with a delight that feels more uncanny than usual. Maybe that’s because it’s a caper film that doesn’t pretend to have loftier matters on its mind. Or maybe it’s the perfect center of gravity provided by Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H., the concierge of an old-world mountainside hotel who is framed for the murder of a wealthy dowager (Tilda Swinton). He and his protégé (Tony Revolori) embark on Anderson’s version of a snowbound Eastern European road trip, and it’s at once thrilling and — thanks to Fiennes’ quippy hauteur — uproarious.

Arriving when Eddie Murphy had become one of the biggest box-office draws of the ’80s, thanks to comedies like “48 HRS.” and “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Raw,” his reunion with “Trading Places” director John Landis revealed that the comedian had a softer (but still R-rated) side. It also introduced one of Murphy’s signatures, as he and co-star Arsenio Hall assume multiple personae over the course of the urban fairy tale — a gag that would snowball until he was playing practically an entire family in “The Nutty Professor” and “Norbit.” Here, his main character is Akeem, crown prince of Zamunda, whose politeness proves disarming, considering how raunchy audiences knew Murphy could be. “Please refrain from using any further obscenities in front of these people,” Akeem — who’s reduced to mopping floors at a fast-food restaurant — calmly asks the young thug (Samuel L. Jackson) trying to stick up the joint.

It’s the apotheosis of the Ealing Studios school of dry elegance, and it’s also one of the most scathing black comedies ever made. Seventy-five years after it was released, there remains something singularly amoral and almost shocking about the Edwardian saga of Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), whose mother was disowned by her aristocratic clan after she eloped. Louis, born poor, is eighth in line to inherit his family’s royal title (and the fortune that goes with it), a situation he decides to rectify by murdering each of the seven relatives who stand in his way. Every one of them is played by Alec Guinness, in a feat of brash chameleonic play. Yet it’s Price’s cunning performance that lends Robert Hamer’s movie its wicked edge.

The premise is sheer high-concept silliness: Robin Williams, as an embattled husband on the cusp of divorce (from a sharp-tongued but sympathetic Sally Field), attempts to manipulate the situation by sneaking into his kids’ household disguised as the no-nonsense Scottish nanny Mrs. Doubtfire. You could say that it’s “Tootsie” meets “Mr. Mom” (and that’s probably how it was pitched), but Williams’ performance as the middle-aged dowager with an innocuous surface and a savage tongue is a comic gift that keeps on giving. Speaking in a sly burr, he makes Mrs. Doubtfire an anarchist in frump’s clothing. The movie was a monster hit, and you can see why: It’s a synthetic domestic farce that’s probably the most sheerly funny movie Robin Williams ever made.

Arguably “too soon” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone set their sights on Jerry Bruckheimer’s hyperbolic brand of rah-rah spectacle, in which chiseled American action heroes — represented by 22-inch-tall marionettes of the sort seen in the classic “Thunderbirds” TV series — go around blowing stuff up, causing untold collateral damage in their attempts to keep the world safe. The equal-opportunity offenders poke fun at Kim Jong Il (the insecure North Korean dictator sings “I’m So Ronery” at one point), but also paint liberal Hollywood celebrities as dumb enough to fall for his tricks. Nearly as funny as what appears on-screen (including hilarious set designs that include a secret base inside Mount Rushmore and an expendable version of Paris with croissant-shaped cobblestones), the film was initially rated NC-17 for “graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language — all involving puppets.”

The title explicitly outlines the film’s plot, but it doesn’t begin to hint at the wit, poignance and passion that make Mike Newell’s sparkling romantic comedy such an exhilarating ride. Released in 1994, a time when generic meet-cute stories were flooding multiplexes, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” embraces many staples of the genre as it charts the push-and-pull attraction of Charles and Carrie: Hugh Grant in the lovably mumbling, stumbling performance that defined him and a bewitching Andie MacDowell. By the time Charles kisses Carrie in the rain, pouring out his feelings for her, we know the mismatched pair intimately. We understand Charles’ commitment phobia, just as we grasp Carrie’s need to be committed, because we’ve observed how they cope with their overlapping circles of self-absorbed friends, exes and such. Through misplaced wedding rings, bumbled vows and the death of their most flamboyant pal, the pair learn to let down their guard and open their hearts.

They were the greatest rock group in the history of the world, but as if that weren’t distinction enough, the Beatles were the greatest comedians in the history of rock. (Those two things are not unrelated; the Beatles approached many of their songs with an incandescent irony that was nothing if not comedic.) And in Richard Lester’s a-day-in-the-life-of-Beatlemania docudrama, a jukebox movie at once enthralling and hilarious, the Beatles portray themselves with a witty nonchalance that makes them seem like playful gods who’ve touched down in London for a few days and are mingling with the mortals to pass the time before they do the one thing they actually care about: making music. Paul and his surly grandfather, Ringo and his “bloomin’ bewk,” John and his come-hither hostility — with its inside-the-bubble-of-pop-fame black-and-white mystique, every moment of “A Hard Day’s Night” is indelible.

A comedy whose knowing imbecility is its greatest weapon, Ben Stiller’s deliriously zany send-up of the fashion industry casts him as superstar male model Derek Zoolander, whose dim-wittedness is surpassed only by his vanity. The film’s daffy fearlessness is incarnated in Derek’s most iconic pose, known as Blue Steel, a self-adoring moue with attitude that says, “I’m the sexiest man alive … in my own mind!” The plot, in which the deranged fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu (Will Ferrell, in a wig and beard that make him look like a demonic refugee from Oz) brainwashes Derek into assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia, is just window dressing draped over a series of riffs about the megalomania of the fashion world, a place where Derek and his archrival, Hansel (Owen Wilson), can face each other in a “walk-off” as if they were red-spangled-leather-and-purple-chiffon prizefighters of the runway. “Zoolander,” when it first came out, received a mixed response, but it ripened into the kind of cult film where the very moments that many initially rolled their eyes at became camp nuggets to cherish.

“As if” anyone could forget Amy Heckerling’s quintessential and endlessly quotable teen comedy. A loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” “Clueless” centers on Beverly Hills debutante Cher (Alicia Silverstone), her troop of high school cool kids and her misadventures in matchmaking — and matching outfits. But what sets “Clueless” apart from other ’90s teen comedies is how clued in Heckerling was to the actual dynamics of young adults of the era. She studied students at Beverly Hills High to master their slang (“Audi,” “buggin’,” “Betty,” “whatever!”) to create a pop-culture time capsule. And Silverstone takes a bubble-gum-twirling ditz and invests her with such nuance that anyone can relate to her plight, whether it’s learning to drive or owning her feelings for her ex-stepbrother (Paul Rudd).

For decades, the rap on Jerry Lewis was that he was a bad filmmaker, but they loved him in France. There was truth to that (the French had a special reverence for Lewis’ goofball camping, which mostly worked much better in his ’50s comedy-team heyday opposite Dean Martin). Yet Lewis made his movies with a care that was sometimes ignored, and in this gem of a riff on Jekyll and Hyde, which transforms that infamous tale into a dark thriller farce for the age of Playboy, Lewis seems to be acting out his demons with a confessional ardor that’s at once riveting and uproarious. As Prof. Julius F. Kelp, who invents an id-tapping personality serum, Lewis is the buck-toothed clown the French adored, but as Buddy Love, Kelp’s swinging alter ego, he’s a study in the insatiable male hunger of a new age, and you can feel the comedy come to life around him.

Unapologetically pilfering from classics like “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” screenwriter William Goldman described his tongue-in-cheek homage to fairy-tale romance and swashbuckling adventure (which originated as bedtime stories for his daughters) as “the good-parts version,” but it’s really more of a remix. The swoon-worthy story’s metafiction conceit — in which an old codger (Peter Falk) shares the favorite book of his childhood with an impatient grandson — allows its knowing narrator to skip past the boring bits, jumping straight from sea monsters to sword fighting to the battle of wits between the Dread Pirate Roberts (Cary Elwes) and Wallace Shawn’s too-clever-for-his-own-good Sicilian. The studio didn’t know how to market the genre-blending oddity, which eventually found an ardent following on home video, where cult status cemented funnier-through-repetition lines in the popular consciousness, from Inigo Montoya’s pledge (“You killed my father — prepare to die”) to Shawn’s oft-repeated “Inconceivable!”

Edward D. Wood Jr., the infamously incompetent director of “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” enjoys the distinction of being known as the worst filmmaker of all time. But how could a movie about this bottom-scraping grade-Z Hollywood hanger-on be Tim Burton’s greatest movie … and feature Johnny Depp’s most exquisite performance … and be one of the most sublime movies ever made about Hollywood? It’s all because Burton, working from a brilliant script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (who with this film invented the genre of biopics about people you don’t make biopics about), sees the magic light on the other side of Ed Wood’s artistic awfulness. Yes, Wood was the ultimate bad filmmaker, but he believed in what he was doing with a terrifying sincerity — especially when he made his first film, “Glen or Glenda” (1953), about his own “transvestite desires” and portrayed the title character with a sincerity that now seems like courage incarnate. With Depp’s Wood as an ebullient naïf, and Martin Landau playing the aging morphine junkie Bela Lugosi as a figment of the Dream Factory, “Ed Wood” finds comic gold in celebrating the spectacle of moviemaking that’s too pure (and horrendous) to be anything but glorious make-believe.

Jack Black is great at what he does, but he’s not commonly thought of as a “great actor.” Yet he gave what may be the single greatest performance of 2003 in Richard Linklater’s ingeniously fun rock ’n’ roll fable about a failed musician who fakes his way into a gig as a substitute teacher, bringing a class of desultory 14-year-old prep schoolers back to life by teaching them all about the glory of (you have to say it with a tongue roll) r-r-r-r-rock! The script, by a still-in-the-process-of-defining-himself Mike White, gives Black a perfect framework in which to improvise, which he did by playing a blissed-out, air-guitar-happy Zeppelin-and-Deep-Purple fan and turning that character into something larger: a cockeyed testament to the power of rock to save us. The luscious joke of the movie is that rock ’n’ roll, after driving the culture for 50 years, had become a form tailor-made for kids. And so they — along with Black’s overgrown kid of a teacher — were now the ones born to play it.

No one had heard of Richard E. Grant when he starred in Bruce Robinson’s electrifying comedy of dilapidation. He plays Withnail, a failed counterculture actor with a lust for adventure best expressed by his willingness to drink anything in a bottle, including furniture polish. Yet it’s a performance so weirdly soulful in its ferocious hysteria that Grant, to this day, has never equaled it. His Withnail is like a Shakespearean derelict high on his own inner voice, and when he and his only friend, Marwood (Paul McGann), go out to the country to spend a weekend with Uncle Monty (played by Richard Griffiths as the courtliest of predators), the film proceeds with a blithe waywardness that probably gets closer to the true spirit of the late ’60s than a hundred fake “political” movies do.

Albert Brooks, in his most indelible movie, plays what was once called a yuppie — in this case, an upwardly mobile ad-agency drone who, in the opening scene, obsesses over the Mercedes he’s buying as a signifier of his status. That scene is telling you that the American aspirational dream will always be a rat-on-a-treadmill climb; it’s also telling you that Brooks’ exquisite cringe comedy is going to keep you in stitches. When Brooks’ ad man loses his job, something in him snaps. He convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty) that they should buy a Winnebago and drive across the country as if they were the characters in “Easy Rider” — and the juicy joke of it is that the leftover hippie dream crossed with the we’re-living-in-our-vehicle desperation expresses more about what was happening in America then (and now) than you’d find in 100 facile corporate fables. Through it all, Brooks talks and talks and pleads and harangues and rationalizes with a fervor that makes him a middle-class stooge for our time.

The charge that Hollywood “elites” are out of touch with the common man is nothing new, as Preston Sturges’ screwball classic demonstrates: At the tail end of the Great Depression, popular director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is hit with an existential crisis, which he believes he can fix by making a stark commentary on “the problems that confront the average man.” The trouble is, he’s known mostly for disposable studio comedies — which has him second-guessing the genre Sturges does best. In the name of research, Sullivan dresses up as a hobo and hits the road. He intends to suffer alongside those who have it hardest, but meets his match almost immediately in a struggling actress (Veronica Lake). Sparks fly and she lets him have it, ultimately bringing Sullivan around to the merits of comedy: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” he concludes — and who are we to argue?

In 1972, a few years before the punk-rock revolution, John Waters made a movie — a very filthy Baltimore fairy tale — that was so grungy and violent and primal and shocking, with needle drops by rockers like Link Wray and characters who were like angry freaks from another planet, that it was like seeing the cinematic birth of punk. Except the fact that no one even had a name for it was part of what made it scary and hilarious. Divine, with a half-shaved head, the eye makeup of a demon and a 300-pound body wedged into a skintight dress, acted with a rage that was high camp yet real, to the point that the film’s central character was like the Wicked Witch of the West reborn as a charismatic drag avenger. Waters, in the movie that made him a legend, pushes everything further and further, until Divine commits the ultimate big-screen atrocity, and the only possible response is to laugh, helplessly, at a movie that redefines what human beings are capable of.

The word “cringe” tends to be an insult, at least when applied to those who are so cringe you feel embarrassed for them. But embarrassment is the secret weapon of Mike Myers’ sublimely daffy Swinging London spy bash. At its center may be the least self-aware character in movie history: Austin Powers, who sports ruffled blue-velvet Carnaby Street suits, horn-rims and a bouffant hippie perm, as well as a bucktoothed grin so guileless it’s almost childlike, and who Myers plays with an exuberant shamelessness that becomes a kind of tonic. Myers also plays Dr. Evil, an eggheaded mad scientist who is equal parts Ernst Stavro Blofeld and (as legend has it) Lorne Michaels. He and Austin the nerd “swinger,” who rocks out to “I Touch Myself” with a self-love that must be seen to be believed, actually have a great deal in common: the triumphant myopia of megalomania.

A game-changing romantic comedy — in fact, it brought the romantic comedy back from oblivion — that’s remained a cultural touchstone, because the central question it asks (“Can men and woman really be friends?”) will always be relevant. Director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron put their own experiences and those of their friends into the script, which crackles with knowing dialogue and gives the movie a warm, lived-in quality. Meg Ryan’s Sally encouraged a generation of woman to embrace being high maintenance, even if that means taking “an hour and a half to order a sandwich.” And Billy Crystal laid on the charm as Harry, an unwitting fashion plate in his white cable-knit sweater, showing us the neurotic urban male psyche from the inside out. Come for the iconic fake-orgasm scene at Katz’s Delicatessen, stay for the nostalgic vibes of Manhattan in the fall.

Lenny Bruce paved the way for him, and a few of his successors (George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Eddie Murphy) scaled heights of their own, but there’s no debating that Richard Pryor is the greatest stand-up comedian who ever lived. He channeled the world around him — the world of race and sex, men and women, rage and guilt — and he thrust himself into that world like a fast, hustling soothsayer with demons. His best performance became a landmark concert film, in which Pryor turned everything he touched (the lives of animals, the collapse of his marriage, his incredulous view of white people, his own heart attack) into a scaldingly funny theater of truth. It’s the most awesome stand-up performance you’ll ever see, to the point that it is also, in its way, a great movie.

The blissfully sophisticated comedy that resuscitated Katharine Hepburn’s career (after a string of box office disappointments sent her packing from Hollywood) was written expressly for her by Philip Barry, who tapped into — and slyly subverted — the star’s haughty East Coast upbringing when developing the character. Hepburn is “yar” as Tracy Lord, a socialite caught between three parties: her fiancé (John Howard), her ex-husband (Cary Grant) and the society reporter (James Stewart) assigned to cover her wedding. Earning his only Oscar for the role (on the heels of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “The Shop Around the Corner”), Stewart endears as the tipsy idealist who can’t handle his liquor. Grant’s strategy for getting laughs (and Tracy) is to play it aloof but come off flustered. Like a good Jane Austen novel, the rom-com makes at least two of Tracy’s suitors perfectly reasonable options, which keeps audiences guessing till the final scene.

Borat was one of three colorful characters Sacha Baron Cohen created for “Da Ali G Show,” in which the British comedian assumed a far-out persona and then posed inappropriate questions to politicians, celebs and other notable figures. Teaming with “Seinfeld” staff writer Larry Charles, Cohen took the show on the road, never breaking from his alias as a Kazakh TV reporter assigned to make a documentary about the United States and its customs. Cohen’s rowdy “Candid Camera”-style scenarios were notoriously disruptive, if not downright dangerous (like kidnapping Pamela Anderson and butchering the national anthem at a red-state rodeo). Those anarchic stunts did more than merely embarrass his unsuspecting targets; they tested the generosity of some and exposed the bigotry of others. Cohen’s ridiculous accent became iconic, as did the bright yellow mankini he wore at Cannes, which demonstrated how far the comedian would go for a laugh.

In 1970, as the counterculture was winding down and the New Hollywood was ramping up, Robert Altman created a comedy that had just the shock value America needed. It was an Army burlesque steeped in blood, with Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, as Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre, cracking wise in the operating tent as the tubes and spurting bodies lay beneath them. The thing about these two is that they weren’t just funny, they were cool — too above-it-all to pretend to care about the “regular Army clowns,” but also weirdly sane in how they brandished their hipster cynicism as the ultimate defense mechanism. “M*A*S*H,” set during the Korean War, was a thinly disguised allegory of Vietnam, but its real subject was the new attitude of casual bombs-away one-upmanship, which the film somehow made wittily heroic.

A depressing debate — “Can women be funny?” — was forever put to rest with a “chick flick” that’s equal parts raunchy and touching. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo wrote this laugh-out-loud R-rated landmark, which achieved something singular in turning an epic food-poisoning sequence into the stuff of awards bait. Wiig puts herself through a hilarious wringer of masochistic tribulations as Annie, a down-on-her-luck single woman who feels hopelessly inadequate serving as the maid of honor at her best friend’s obnoxiously clubby wedding. Everyone in her orbit is a standout: Maya Rudolph is the bride-to-be in meltdown; Rose Byrne is the glamorous, ultracompetitive new bestie; Rebel Wilson steals scenes as Annie’s insufferable roommate; and Melissa McCarthy earned an Oscar nomination for her breakout role as the groom’s unhinged sister. Back when bromances were dominating the box office, producer Judd Apatow’s biggest hit was this ode to female friendship.

To the extent that any romantic relationship is based on trust, the two parties’ fear of betrayal is compounded when both are thieves: Gaston (Herbert Marshall) cons rich folks out of their fortunes, while Lily (Miriam Hopkins) is more small-time. They meet under false pretenses, then fall in love after realizing they share a penchant for picking pockets (including one another’s). Ernst Lubitsch’s personal favorite of all his movies came at the tail end of American cinema’s libertine streak, before the Production Code cracked down and restrictions were put on so many of its most charmingly amoral ingredients: namely, infidelity and unpunished criminal activity. Here, Gaston is hired to be an heiress’s secretary after promising, “I would give you a good spanking — in a business way, of course.” The sparkling diamond in Lubitsch’s oeuvre, “Trouble in Paradise” is such a gem, its greedy lovers would surely find a way to steal it if they could.

In the late ’70s, the movie comedy that changed Hollywood — and changed the culture, not necessarily for the better — was “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” But even as that showy retro frat-house bash became a classic, it was never as funny as the casually delirious snobs-versus-slobs golf comedy that arrived, in its wake, two years later. “Caddyshack” is a teasingly outrageous sports farce that pulls the putting green right out from under you. It features a cavalcade of comic styles, from the debonair WASP mockery of Chevy Chase (in a performance that blows away the “Fletch” films) to the cuddly grunge of Bill Murray to the herky-jerky senior-punk lunacy of Rodney Dangerfield — the pre-counterculture comedian as found object, slaying with every line. We also love the gopher and (yes) the welcome-to-the-’80s breeze of Kenny Loggins’ “I’m Alright.”

As the grouchy and often-inebriated family man Egbert Souse (pronounced “Soo-say”), W.C. Fields could be seen as the forefather of such deadbeat sitcom dads as Al Bundy and Homer Simpson, stumbling into elaborate predicaments through no initiative of his own. Egbert is loafing about a bank when a robber trips over him mid-getaway, which lands him a reward (“a hearty handshake”) and a swell job protecting the joint from future stickups. Ironically enough, said buffoon soon becomes the bank’s greatest threat. The master of the comic one-liner, Fields had no qualms about making himself the butt of the joke, as when his clearly hungover character stumbles back to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe and asks, “Was I in here last night, and did I spend a $20 bill?” When the bartender says, “Yeah,” Egbert looks relieved: “Oh boy, what a load that is off my mind. I thought I’d lost it!”

Is there another coming-of-age comedy as relatable as the gloriously raunchy, surprisingly sweet “Superbad”? After all, most of us weren’t jocks or homecoming queens in high school. We were a lot more like Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill) and Fogell, aka McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), three buddies bound together by their dweeb status and by a desperate desire to lose their virginity. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen wrote the script based on their own memories of growing up, and their depiction of that awkward era is perennial despite its early-aughts setting. And few comedies feel so propulsive. “Superbad” hurtles along, following the trio as they attempt to buy booze and impress girls, and as they endure escalating indignities while trying to top each other with pervy and profane put-downs that sound like a teen version of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” But all the filth and four-letter words can’t mask a gnawing truth: Growing up is hard.

It’s the first of Hollywood’s great screwball romantic comedies (the movie that invented the form), and at the heart of it is a comic perception that feels timeless: When two people are falling in love, they will not just swoon — they will fight, as if this was an essential, almost biological dimension of gradually letting one’s guard down. In this case, the smitten squabblers are Clark Gable as a rogue reporter and Claudette Colbert as the runaway heiress he’s trailing to get a story. In the hands of director Frank Capra, the two actors spike their interplay with a tart-tongued competitive moxie that has never been matched.

“These go to 11.” “This piece is called ‘Lick My Love Pump.’” “It’s such a fine line between stupid and … clever.” It really is a fine line, and no movie ever walked it more splendidly than Rob Reiner’s sublimely daft, lusciously close-to-the-real-thing heavy metal satire. It instantly established the mock documentary as a supreme comedy form, and it did that by re-creating the world it was parodying from the ground up. Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, as Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins, leaders of a colossally mediocre quartet of metalhead wastrels, don’t just lampoon the dazed narcissism of bombastic British rock stars who are legends in their own minds. They inhabit these characters from the inside out, using their wicked deadpan accents to touch the shameless soul of rock ’n’ roll vainglory. Guest went on to become the virtuoso of the mock doc, and in hindsight it’s tempting to view the largely improvised “Spinal Tap” as his unofficial first masterpiece as a comic auteur.

Five years after former improv partner Mike Nichols made “The Graduate,” Elaine May dropped the granddaddy of cringe comedies, which suggests what kind of misery could follow “The Graduate”’s final scene: Charles Grodin plays Lenny Cantrow, a “nice Jewish boy” who gets married on impulse and then, while still on his honeymoon, ditches his bride for a more attractive candidate (Cybill Shepherd). In an inspired stroke — of either cruelty or brilliance, you decide — May cast her own daughter as Lila, the insufferable newlywed Lenny so callously ignores (Jeannie Berlin earned an Oscar nomination for the performance). While Lila suffers from sunburn, Lenny sneaks out behind her back. The only thing more painful than watching this schlemiel try to explain things to his new crush’s parents is sitting through the 2007 Ben Stiller-starring remake.

Ever sat down to watch an old black-and-white movie and found it frustrating that everything moves so slowly? You won’t have that problem with Howard Hawks’ mile-a-minute remake of “The Front Page,” which plows through 191 pages of dialogue in 92 minutes. That means talking twice as fast as most movies, as characters rat-a-tat back and forth faster than the gangsters in Hawks’ earlier picture, “Scarface,” could shoot. “His Girl Friday” set a high bar for screwball comedies to come, hinging on a key change Hawks made to the plot, which concerns a dogged newspaperman trying to convince his star reporter not to leave when he wants to ditch journalism and get hitched. Hawks flipped the latter’s gender, making Hildy a dame — and not just any woman, but the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s no-nonsense editor. What looks like verbal sparring is in fact high-velocity flirtation in Hollywood’s greatest workplace romance, and the model for the fireworks between Clark Kent and Lois Lane.

The actor-director Jacques Tati was known, and beloved, for portraying Monsieur Hulot, a gawky, mute, pipe-smoking, overcoat-wearing middle-aged French geek update of Charlie Chaplin who strolled through Tati’s movies as a passive bystander, observing the cracked rituals of bourgeois life in a way that he barely comprehended. But in “Playtime,” Tati’s visionary metropolitan burlesque, the world that Hulot is observing — the industrialized carnival that is modern Paris — is the film’s true star. It’s a slapstick epic of urban dislocation that, in its wordlessly droll comedy-sketch way, might be the missing link between Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and Altman’s “Nashville.” There are scenes in this movie — a traffic jam, a corporate expo, a long night in a fancy restaurant — that once you’ve giggled through you will never forget.

Miles, the central character of Alexander Payne’s deliciously great tale of creativity and addiction, is the sort of person most movies would portray as a harmless loser. He’s an aspiring fiction writer who gets by as a high school English teacher, waiting for his big break. He’s unlucky in love, in his career, in whatever else he tries — and that bad luck, it’s clear, is a projection of his karma. But Miles, as Paul Giamatti plays him, is anything but harmless. He’s an uproariously caustic and unstable loose cannon; an impassioned oenophile whose attraction to wine is part good taste, part low-down alcoholism; a scoundrel who will steal from his own mother; and the kind of narcissist who keeps cracking us up by tripping over his own delusions. As he and his dumbbell buddy (Thomas Haden Church) embark on a tour of California wine country, “Sideways” never loses its snappishly witty verve. Yet even as the film becomes lit up with romantic hope (by the radiance of Virginia Madsen), there’s an existential darkness at its core that elevates the comedy to a rare pitch of bittersweet life.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we feel … buckled over with belly laughs. Stanley Kubrick’s rollicking sick-joke apocalyptic satire is a movie that dares to imagine the showdown to nuclear Armageddon as if it were a theater-of-the-absurd farce shot like an ominously grand war-room documentary. It’s the first true “Stanley Kubrick movie,” the first to create a heightened spectacle that plays out in a world of its own. The glowing dark black-and-white photography keeps telling you that this is deadly serious business, yet the performances operate according to the logic of controlled psychosis, whether it’s the exuberant myopia of George C. Scott’s Gen. Buck Turgidson or Peter Sellers playing the one-armed ex-Nazi title character as a grinning Machiavellian madman who is always looking to maximize his advantage, even if he has to end civilization to do it.

Long ago, in an age that might have started with Milton Berle, the image of a man in a dress was deemed to be automatically funny. But when Dustin Hoffman, as a monomaniacal New York actor who can’t seem to land a job, puts on a dress, a wig of curls and several pounds of makeup and pretends to be Dorothy Michaels, a dowager with a whiplash tongue, the joke isn’t that he looks funny. It’s that he inhabits the soul of a woman with such obsessive zeal that his transformation is nearly magical in its devotion. He is still every inch an actor, and Sydney Pollack’s splendid farce, co-starring a luminous Jessica Lange, is the most richly humane of “drag” comedies. It’s about showbiz, about Hoffman’s addiction to actorly immersion, about the sexes trying to find a spiritual meeting place.

Hardly breaking a smile, Buster Keaton set the bar high for silent slapstick, specializing in a riskier form of physical comedy, exemplified by the scene in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” where the front of a building crashes around him as Keaton stands unfazed in the open doorway. Fans have long debated which of the acrobatic actor’s films is their favorite, with “Sherlock Jr.” gradually surpassing “The General” in the public’s esteem. Crammed into 45 minutes, the film gives us a tour of several popular genres, as a lovesick projectionist falls asleep in the booth and dreams his way onto the movie screen. The vaudeville-trained entertainer tickled fans with several shockingly dangerous stunts — including an epic motorcycle chase involving a collapsing bridge, an exploding log and a narrowly missed train — that went essentially unmatched until Jackie Chan broke out half a century later in Hong Kong.

Great comedy often emerges from conflict. The making of “Groundhog Day” was, by all accounts, short on laughs. Bill Murray feuded with director Harold Ramis (Murray wanted to make something more philosophical; Ramis refused to compromise the story’s humor and heart), and shooting in Illinois in the middle of winter didn’t lift spirits. Yet what emerged from the misery is one of the most tightly constructed, deliciously twisty and sidesplitting movies ever produced. It’s also easily the greatest film the two longtime collaborators ever made together. Murray as Phil Connors, a shallow weatherman stuck in a time loop, raises snark to a level of divine disaffection. And Ramis perfectly captures both the tedium and liberation that comes after Phil is doomed to repeat the same day, indulging in everything from high-speed chases to binge-eating. At its core, “Groundhog Day” is a fable — the story of a selfish jerk whose déjà vu makes him a better man.

When you hear the name Mel Brooks, you think of comedy that’s broad: over-the-top, wacky, meshuggenah. But his greatest screen comedy, while brimming with that Looney Tunes Borscht Belt spirit, actually works on a different plane. It’s the rare movie parody that totally replicates the object of its satire — in this case the shadows-and-fog mystique of the Universal horror films of the ’30s. The look and feel of the movie is wondrously atmospheric (the soundtrack is close to beautiful), and it’s that highly detailed cornball verisimilitude that allows the comedy to take off into the stratosphere. The actors are all clowns of genius, whether it’s Gene Wilder’s borderline camp hysteric “Dr. Franken-steen,” Teri Garr’s roll-in-the-hay fräulein, or Peter Boyle’s song-and-dance maniac of a monster. “Young Frankenstein” is a demented love letter to Old Hollywood, which is why it remains so delectably funny.

The Coen brothers’ pitch-black comedy begins with a joke — a sly bit of misdirection, really — the point of which kicks in at different times, according to one’s level of skepticism: “This is a true story,” claims the opening screen of the anything-but-true crime story. As the corpses pile up and the case spirals into incredulous territory (William H. Macy plays a used-car salesman so desperate for cash that he arranges to have his own wife kidnapped), it becomes impossible to deny that the siblings are pulling your leg. Meanwhile, the folksy appeal of all those North Dakota accents (“Ya don’t say?” pregnant police chief Frances McDormand asks. “Yer darn tootin’!” replies Macy) stands in direct contrast with how ruthlessly violent things get. By the time we get to the wood-chipper scene, the mischief has gotten so far out of hand, what should play as tragedy has us in stitches instead.

The Marx Brothers came out of vaudeville, but what they brought into the world was an anything-goes verbal and physical madness that was, in its way, as radical a departure from rationality as the art of the surrealists or the invention of the airplane. “Duck Soup,” the last of the five films they made at Paramount, was not the commercial success some of their other movies were, but its reputation grew with the years, to the point that viewers outside the 1930s recognized it as their most unhinged and sustained free-for-all — a gleefully unrelenting piece of Hollywood political Dada in which Groucho, in fourth-wall-breaking hustler mode, plays Rufus T. Firefly, who becomes the leader of Freedonia, and Chico and Harpo are bumbling spies. This is a movie in which a slapping contest leads to war, in which scenes of singing and dancing and fruit-throwing become jubilant assaults on civilization. It’s the Marx Brothers’ crowning masterpiece of craziness.

In their time on the telly, the brains behind “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had always worked in short comedic bits, ranging from a few minutes to single-line non sequiturs. Fifty years ago, determined to try something completely different, John Cleese, Eric Idle and company (including co-director and lone American Terry Gilliam) tested what would happen if they took a single subject — the legend of King Arthur — and dragged it through the mud for 90 minutes. Instead of feeling like disjointed sketches, the jokes assumed epic form, as the troupe impishly undercut respectable ideas with slapstick, silly accents and sometimes drag. The closer Arthur’s knights get to the Grail, the more absurd their obstacles become: There’s the Black Knight, who insists “it’s just a flesh wound” after Arthur hacks off his limbs; the insufferable French, who lob taunts (and livestock) in their general direction; and the bloodthirsty rabbit that awaits them.

Making optimal use of the mockumentary format he’d helped pioneer on “This Is Spinal Tap,” Christopher Guest assembled a dream team of improv comedy talent to poke fun at a small-town theatrical production — the sort of show that’d be hell to sit through if it weren’t so darn hilarious. Set in boring old Blaine, Missouri (“stool capital of the United States”), the movie blends talking-head interviews with the local extroverts (from Eugene Levy’s dad-jokey dentist to a gum-smacking Parker Posey) with the diva-like behavior of Guest’s kookiest caricature, Corky St. Clair, the amateur musical’s obviously closeted and all-around delusional director, who’s convinced his pageant could go all the way to Broadway. Corky’s total absence of taste is as plain as the bowl-cut wig on his head. Tonally, the film applies Errol Morris’ sometimes-cruel eye for provincial eccentrics to fictional characters, anticipating the 21st-century phenom of attention-thirsty nobodies counting on reality-TV cameras to get discovered.

While there’s no hard data to back up this claim, it seems safe to say that no screen actor has delivered so much amusement to so many people over so long a period as Charlie Chaplin. From the Little Tramp’s tender romance with a blind flower vendor in “City Lights” to the iconic scene of him working his way through the gears in “Modern Times,” Chaplin’s career demonstrated the universality of laughter, achieving the most welcome sort of world domination. The ultimate pearl of his oeuvre is 1940’s mostly silent response to the rise of fascism in Europe, made well into the sound era, in which he belittles the likes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (taking comedic advantage of their matching mustaches). Whether climbing the drapes or kicking around an inflatable globe, his petty tyrant makes megalomania look ridiculous. But it’s the moment he gets serious, speaking directly to the audience (for the first time), that makes the satire stick.

When it was released in 1977, Woody Allen’s most divine comedy sat on the fault line between his “early, funny films” and the more cinematically ambitious work that would come to define him as a world-class film artist. The singular beauty of “Annie Hall” is the way that it merges those two worlds. In telling the story of Alvy Singer, a neurotic New York comedian who is so uncomfortable with amorous relationships that it’s as if what he’s really uncomfortable with is love itself, Allen tapped into the fickle, insecure zeitgeist of a new romantic world. The film became a valentine to Diane Keaton’s adorably dithering, thrift-shop-happy Annie Hall, and part of the poignance of that is the way that she eluded Alvy’s grasp. At the same time, “Annie Hall” is consistently and exquisitely hilarious, making it the last of Allen’s early, funny films as well as the bridge to a new maturity, but one that he never topped.

Like sipping Champagne at an illicit speakeasy, watching Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s ebullient Prohibition-set escapade — wherein two guys pass as dolls to evade the Mob — offers the sort of thrill that leaves us feeling like we’ve gotten away with something. Inspired by his mentor Ernst Lubitsch, master director Billy Wilder was the bridge between early-Hollywood innuendo and our more explicit modern era. His brilliant rule-bender falls right in the sweet spot, turning these guys’ extreme disguise into the ultimate romantic hurdle. The men-in-drag gimmick always gets a laugh — especially when the fellas are as woefully unconvincing in dresses as these two — but the film’s enticingly naughty edge comes from how badly its two womanizing impostors covet their female bandmates, as both make moves on the tipsy and far-too-trusting Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe as temptation incarnate). At the same time, Lemmon’s character learns what pests men can be while fending off a rich divorcé (Joe E. Brown), who delivers the film’s final zinger: “Well, nobody’s perfect.” True enough, but this far-from-innocent classic comes awful close.

There’s a God-given right (maybe we should call it Groucho-given) that anyone making a big-screen comedy should have. And that is the right to make fun of. In “The Naked Gun,” the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — ZAZ — took that right to a pitch of high hilarity that remains unequaled. The glory of “The Naked Gun” is that it’s a shamelessly uninhibited, anarchically observational drive-by comedy that will make fun of anything: global autocrats, stodgy film noir dialogue, safe sex, a professional baseball game, food left in the refrigerator for too long. The entire movie is staged with a bombs-away joy, a sense of exaggeration so clever it’s nearly diabolical. At the same time, it’s a loopy satire of po-faced TV cop thrillers, with a warped center of gravity in Leslie Nielsen, who plays the veteran L.A. police detective Frank Drebin as if he were channeling Jack Webb, Ronald Reagan and Moe Howard at the same time. Nielsen is the aging-B-movie-actor-as-inspired-found-object, and his Frank is so clueless about his own cluelessness, and so weirdly unfiltered, that there’s a Zen delirium to him. He’s not trying to be outrageous; the inanity, and insanity, and calamity just drip right off him. In Frank, the destruction of all social norms, not to mention a fair amount of property, mingles with a fearlessly inept bravura. ZAZ first got famous for “Airplane!” (1980), but here, in their genius mélange of deconstructed movie clichés and mad puns, not to mention the mother of all satirical love montages (set to Herman’s Hermits’ “Something Good”), they launched the media-wise parody as big-screen comedy art form of its time, creating a kind of modernistic Marx Brothers movie that tickles us with a spirit so funny it’s timeless.