The All-Time Top Five Movie Comedies

With so much pop culture in the world, it’s hard to know what’s best. Fortunately, Media Magpies has you covered, as one of our writers will occasionally share what they have determined to be The All-Time Top Five. 

Well well well, it’s not so easy to find a pop culture list that doesn’t suck shit, huh? Variety recently released its choices for the top 100 “comedy movies” and was roundly disparaged — the list is English-language-centric, it has stand-up sets along with narrative films, it includes any number of bad choices (Everything Everywhere All At Once?), it is loaded with movies that may be funny or have funny parts but do not actually make the viewer laugh. There is nothing funny about such a poor set of rankings!. That’s why it’s imperative to read and propagate this correct list of The All-Time Top Five Comedies (although you can also suggest your own in the comments). 

Un Chien Andalou — Comedy lives in the collision of order and chaos, and chaos does not hit harder or weirder than Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 1929 short. Demanding men invade rooms, ants crawl out of holes in hands, a sexual assault is interrupted, in the funniest if not keenest cut of the movie, by the need to drag two dead donkeys on pianos. But the often-violent punchlines (a woman getting clocked by a car is pretty great) and shocking images are interspersed among scenes of near-normality, or normality asserting itself without regard to the insanity around it, and this unease and confusion creates the tension that snaps in baffled and apprehensive laughter. As Athena sprang from the forehead of Zeus, Adult Swim oozed from this sliced-up eyeball.

Only God Forgives — the logical conclusion of deadpan comedy. Ryan Gosling’s stonefaced protagonist moves through a world of heightened violence, what separates him from forerunners like Chaplin and Keaton is that he is a total moron without their wit or knack for escape. Instead he stoically blunders his way toward Vithaya Pansringarm, who matches impassive countenance with focused brutality. Nicholas Winding Refn knows comedy lives in the wide and (durationally) long shots, following Gosling on his misguided journey all the way back to his mother’s womb, never blinking as his foolish hero makes one mistake after another and gets his ass handed to him. It’s no joke to Gosling, but that’s exactly what makes it funny.

The Birds — sly pervert Albert Hitchcock brings multiple comedic stylings together, starting with the rom-com. While Daphne du Maurier’s short story is a savage story of one family’s survival, Hitchcock and Evan Hunter open it up with a lengthy beginning of Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor flirting with each other in a love-hate meet-cute with amusingly cruel undertones. This extends to further meetings where the ostensibly fun times are given a jaggedly funny and sinister edge (sure, that’s Taylor’s “sister,” uh huh). But the twisted relationship shenanigans are blasted aside for the real humor — the titular avians’ takeover of the movie after ominously lurking throughout, their assault provoking blithering recriminations and idiot windbaggery that leads to chaos and carnage. The film becomes the blackest form of zany madcap, and the great joke is how fast society breaks down because of a bunch of damn seagulls — it’s a bird, bird, bird, bird world.

Drug War — a man must play two opposing roles for two opposing groups, and the more successful his fakery the more disastrous his potential failure. This is farce, and director Johnnie To even stages near-misses via opening and closing (elevator) doors as mid-level drug dealer Louis Koo tries to save his skin by helping cop Sun Honglei nab the rest of his meth-dealing gang. Koo works both sides, meeting with confederates and feeding information to cops, leading to one incredible sequence where he coaches Sun to impersonate another drug supplier in order to meet with a distributor, and then to impersonate the distributor when it comes time to meet with the supplier. Koo’s plate-spinning leads to an army of cops getting murked by a pair of mute brothers and a goof-up with a recording device, among other comedic setpieces, but it can only last so long and Koo eventually smashes the two groups that would control him together. To’s precise understanding of objects in motion makes him a perfect director of escalating intensity and the final firefight is Heat-level destruction with nearly every character getting a bullet’s final punchline. Except for Koo, who dies screaming by lethal injection as the credits roll. It’s a grim ending, but as Michael O’Donaghue said, making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.

The Sound Of Music — on the other hand, sometimes the people make their own fun. The good people and robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have made a career out of finding the humor in movies full of unwatchable garbage, and no garbage is less watchable — yet with so many minutes to watch — than The Sound Of Music. But the film’s bloat is its undoing, as it offers endless opportunities for mockery. Singing your own lyrics to the tedious songs, making running gags about Nazi complicity, disparaging the acting and very appearance of the many foul children — for the engaged viewer, the potential for humor is endless and indeed the only way to bear the film. For whatever a movie’s intentions, comedy is in the eye of the beholder, and the audience has the last laugh.