'There's a lotta things about me you don't know anything about, Dottie.’Ĭast: Paul Reubens, Elizabeth Daily, Mark Holton Grodin and Shepherd do wonders in making their shallow characters believable, and the fact that charming Ben Stiller and Michelle Monaghan couldn’t do the same in the Farrelly Brothers’ ill-conceived remake is a testament to the tightrope walked by May in her underseen classic. In a masterpiece of awkward tension, Grodin stars as an aloof salesman who suddenly – as in, en route to the honeymoon – realises his new bride (Jeannie Berlin, May’s real daughter) is the absolute worst, then promptly falls for another guest (Cybil Shepherd) while his unsuspecting spouse heals from a bad sunburn. In a just world, her Heartbreak Kid would be her calling card – a proto cringe comedy from the pen of Neil Simon that features one of the best jittery performances of Charles Grodin’s career. Improv pioneer Elaine May completely changed comedy through her influential stage work with Mike Nichols, yet as a director she’s mostly associated with the unfairly maligned mega-bomb Ishtar. ‘They should have warned us that there was a danger of running out of pecan pie.’Ĭast: Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin If it had been a bigger hit, it might have spared us Bohemian Rhapsody – just out of sheer embarrassment. While plenty absurd, Walk Hard lacks the anarchic zaniness of its parodic forebears but makes up for it with direct-hit explosions of its chosen target, from the reductive portrayal of the creative process (the title song shoots to number 1 half an hour after its recorded) and questionable casting (‘I’m Dewey’s 12-year-old girlfriend!’ yells a full-grown Kristen Wiig) to the cradle-to-grave structure. He’s a well-meaning rube turned rock’n’roll pioneer who never quite sheds his dopey innocence, even while getting hooked on stronger and stronger drugs and writing increasingly indulgent songs featuring ‘an army of didgeridoos’. Arriving on the heels of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning Ray Charles impression and the Carter-Cash box-office phenomenon Walk the Line, co-writers Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow superimpose elements of both – along with not-at-all subtle bits of Elvis, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson – into the lumpy form of Reilly’s Dewey Cox. Spoofs of the grandly silly Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker variety were decades out of style in 2007, but the genre almost had to be resurrected in order to deliver an all-out roasting of an ascendant brand of awards bait: the prestige musical biopic. ‘Goddamnit, this is a dark fucking period!’Ĭast: John C Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig But if you’re not in the mood for a good chuckle right now, allow us to point you towards a few classic horrors, thrillers and action movies that might hit the spot instead. Every taste and sense of humour is catered for here, no matter how silly or sophisticated. With the help of comedies like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors (thank you John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker, among others), directors like Richard Curtis and a small army of Time Out writers, we’ve painstaking scoured the genre’s history to cherry-pick the finest laugh machines in existence.
There’s a reason Top Secret!, Airplane and The Naked Gun all make our list of the 100 Greatest Comedy Movies of all time.īut it’s not just high-gag-rate spoofs that fill this list – there are great romcoms, satires, gross-out and teen comedies (there’s overlap there), screwballs… you name it, it’s here.
Sometimes, it’s about volume: throwing so many ridiculous gags at the screen that the overall effect leaves you gasping for air in between the belly laughs.
Equally, it could be a sense of fearlessness, of noting the likely scruples of audiences and critics and just telling their subversive jokes anyway (see: Mel Brooks’ entire CV). It might be the way they’ve aged, deepening in pathos with every passing decade in ways their creators never imagined (see: Chaplin’s The Great Dictator ). What makes a great comedy? It could be the joke-laden script (obvs), performances that have comic timing down to a fine art, or the perfect chemistry of a vintage double act.
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