Comedy ages worse than any other genre. The pure laugh-track comedies of any given era — most of the 1970s sitcom films, most of the 1990s star-comedy vehicles, most of the 2010s broad theatrical comedies — tend to look dated within a decade. The films that hold up are the ones whose comedy is anchored to characters whose interior reality survives the comedic surface.
Our fifteen picks.
The fifteen
- Some Like It Hot (1959) — Billy Wilder. Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis. Widely considered the greatest American comedy.
- Annie Hall (1977) — Woody Allen. Best Picture-winning romantic comedy.
- The Big Lebowski (1998) — The Coens. The cult comedy that became a religion.
- Groundhog Day (1993) — Harold Ramis. Bill Murray's time loop.
- Borat (2006) — Sacha Baron Cohen. The mockumentary that ran on real reactions.
- The Death of Stalin (2017) — Armando Iannucci. The funniest film ever made about totalitarianism.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) — Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. The most-quoted British comedy.
- Bringing Up Baby (1938) — Howard Hawks. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The screwball comedy at its peak.
- His Girl Friday (1940) — Hawks again. Newspaper screwball. The fastest dialogue in classical Hollywood.
- Airplane! (1980) — Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. The disaster-film parody.
- The Princess Bride (1987) — Rob Reiner. Inconceivable.
- Modern Times (1936) — Charlie Chaplin. The factory sequence.
- Duck Soup (1933) — The Marx Brothers. War-comedy at the most absurd.
- Office Space (1999) — Mike Judge. The most-quoted cubicle comedy.
- Barbie (2023) — Greta Gerwig. The most commercially successful original comedy of the 21st century.
What makes a comedy survive
Almost every comedy that survives across decades does so because the central character is a person rather than a comic premise. The Dude in The Big Lebowski is a character; the comedy emerges from his collisions with the world. Annie Hall is a character; the film is structured around her, not around 'jokes.' Murray's Phil in Groundhog Day is a character whose arc is genuine; the comedy is the means to it.
The comedies that don't survive — most of the studio-comedy product of any given decade — tend to be the ones built around premises rather than characters. The premise dates; the character doesn't.