Besides being an international sensation with this funny email website, I’m also a huge movie buff and have watched thousands and thousands of movies over my lifetime–old, new, big budget Hollywood blockbusters and small independent and rare foreign films. I love them all and consider myself a connoisseur that can talk film with even the hardest nosed critic or savage movie geek.
Since this is a REALLY funny blog, I wanted to put together a Top Ten list of what I considered to be some of the funniest and most under rated comedy films of all time. We all know Caddyshack, Young Frankenstein and American Pie and all those classics, but this list is about the films that either never got the proper recognition they deserved or have simply faded from the collective conscious. These are movies that I have in my collection and try to get to at least once a year. These are films that I try to recommend to people when they want something different and I never get complaints at the suggestions.
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
Released in 1980, this movie actually didn’t gain popularity in the United States until a few years later. An international sensation directed by South African Filmmaker Jamie Uys, this brilliant movie is actually three stories in one that mesh together at the end. The first is the story of a group of African Bushmen who find their new gift from God, a Coke bottle, to be an extremely effective tool but to be disruptive to the flow of their harmonious way of life. They send one of the tribesmen, played by actual Bushman, N!xau on a mission to throw the bottle off the end of the Earth. Along the way, he runs into an African elephant dung researcher and the new schoolteacher that the researcher’s become enamored with. They eventually get involved with a group of dangerous rebels who are fleeing from the government. This all climaxes with a hilarious conclusion where the bushman helps a kidnapped group of schoolchildren escape the rebel captors.
This low budget film is poorly dubbed with an exaggerated fast-motion shooting style and choppy editing, but what makes this film great is the simplistic charm and hilarious quirkiness in which all these styles come together and work. Critics from all over the world consider this a genuine classic and was even a favorite of my grandfather. It has the slapstick cleverness of the Marx Brothers, the social commentary of a documentary and the grace and subtly of a children’s film. It all makes for an incredibly charming movie that should be seen by everyone young and old.
Funny Bones (1995)
Virtually unseen by everyone on the planet, this gem of a movie is not only a funny movie, it’s a fantastically entertaining film as well. Although the movie is not fall down, knee-slapping funny, it’s definitely odd and will have you smiling and giggling the whole time.
After a stand-up comedian named Tommy (Oliver Platt) bombs on a Las Vegas stage in front of his family, friends and insider big wigs, he disappears and heads to the place that solidified his father’s comedy career—Blackpool, England. While visiting his family’s old stomping ground, he tries to find the roots of comedy and discover what makes people like his famous father (Jerry Lewis), truly funny. What he finds is a forgotten world and discovers that comedy is more about taking risks in life and concurring fears than anything else. The movie is about the art of comedy itself and the way it’s told in this film is absolutely brilliant. How this film never received more attention is beyond me but should be seen by comedy and film buffs alike.
Kingpin (1996)
This is easily the Farrelly Brother’s best comedy and it’s not even close. For some reason the world has gone gaga over the very funny, There’s Something About Mary, but this movie, made before Mary is better and has more laughs per minute than all their movies combined.
Bowling protégé Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson) tries to make a comeback from a decades-long drunken stupor after losing his hand in a gambling tragedy and picks up Amish wunderkind Ismail (Randy Quaid) as his next bowling cash cow. They hit the road in order to win the million dollar prize at a Las Vegas bowling tournament and pick up beauty Vanessa Angel along the way. Just about every scene and line in this movie is outrageous and the gross-out site gags are the best of the genre. This may also be Bill Murray’s finest comedy moment as the despicable Ernie ‘Big Ern’ McCraken. The final bowling shootout at end with both Harrelson and Murray’s hair going to tatters is worth the price alone. An absolute classic!
Just One Of The Guys (1985)
Looking back, the 80’s were sort of a golden age of teen comedy flicks that many consider classics today. Just One Of The Guys should be high on the list because it’s a great comedy movie. The premise is a bit of a stretch, where knockout Terry (Joyce Hyser) goes undercover as a boy at a different high school because she’s convinced her term paper would be better received if she were a male, but the premise works because the cast makes it work.
Along the way, Terry learns all about life from looking at things from a different perspective; She befriends the school punching bag and turns him into a stylish hunk so he can ask the most popular girl to the prom, all the while battling the bully played famously by ‘bully expert’ William Zabka. Terry falls for her new friend and mayhem ensues, but the whole process is hilarious and Hyser really carries the film. And although Hyser is convincing, it’s actually Billy Jayne who plays her brother, Buddy that secretly steals the film with his wise cracks and desperate horny maneuvering. It’s such a great performance that it should go down in the annals of film as a classic comedy supporting role.
Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986)
This is easily the best T&A flick of the eighties, and like a lot of others on this list, has never really been seen. It’s about a handsome, oversexed and directionless guy (Leigh McCloskey) who is forced by his parents to make something of himself, get a degree and eventually collect his trust fund, so they force him to go to the Buster Burger hamburger academy to get a diploma. He and the other riffraff recruits, while not making mayhem, are being brow beaten by the drill sergeant of the school, played brilliantly by football legend Dick Butkus. The slapstick comedy mixed with almost x-rated sex material make for a classic Tits & Ass comedy. Forget all the other bad 80’s sex comedies. This one goes for the bad gold and gets it.
The Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy (1996)
You either like Canadian comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall or you don’t. I personally find them very funny. Their sketch comedy shows, which ran on both CBS and HBO for years was a combination of stupidity and absolute brilliance. Their only venture into film was the 1996 comedy Brain Candy. Again, like all their TV shows and live performances, the guys play most of the characters (including the women) and in this film they showcase most of the absurd and twisted characters in society that they like to hold a mirror up to—the stupid cops, the ditzy women, the douchy CEOs and their lackeys, the clueless and fabulous homosexuals—no one, not even the totally un-PC “cancer boy” escapes their wrath.
The movie is about a scientist who discovers an anti-depressant drug that takes the patient to their most pleasant memory and helps ease their suffering. When the drug company decides to release the drug without proper testing, havoc ensues when people begin to freeze in their happy memory. What makes this movie so funny is the characters are so outrageous that they constantly take the absurdity level up a notch. Mixed with some brilliant writing and an easy storyline to make a mockery of, Brain Candy will have you rolling on the floor with laughter. A cult classic!
Jekyll and Hyde, Together Again (1982)
Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the cocaine culture was running rampant through the country and this film is a direct homage to that seedy duplicity.
Mark Blankfield, a sort of low rate Gene Wilder, plays a doctor working on a wonder drug that would help people avoid surgery. While experimenting one night with a particular batch of his special white powder, he accidentally snorts some of it and turns into a wild party maniac that sprouts wild hair, crazy gold teeth and even gold rings and chains. He causes mayhem on the city and turns into a sex-crazed animal, which begins to destroy his life with his fiancé (Beth Armstrong).
This is an outrageous comedy that brilliantly merges the Jekyll and Hyde classic with the swanky Studio 55 drug subculture into a slapstick laugher. A must see!
Top Secret! (1984)
The Airplane And Naked Gun movies have overshadowed this Zucker Brothers & Jim Abrahams classic starring a young Val Kilmer. The movie is a spoof on those cheesy Elvis Presley movie musicals mixed with old WWII films and the results are fantastic.
Val Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, an American Rock star who’s asked to play a cultural event in East Germany and ends up helping break a scientist out of prison with the French Resistance. This film was given a big budget and that is evident on screen with some big-time set pieces and large site gags. They all work! Val Kilmer nails his deadpan role and the site gags are the best out of all their films. The songs are funny and the whole French Resistance crew (Chocolate Mousse, et all) and prison break scene are priceless. It’s strange that this film didn’t make a big splash at the box office because it’ a non-stop joke fest.
Murder By Death (1976)
If you’ve ever seen the movie Clue, eliminate it from your memory, because that piece of junk was directly ripped off from this comedy classic.
An eccentric millionaire named Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) personally invites the best detectives from around the world to come and solve a murder mystery of his doing. Each detective is a veiled reference to the famous detectives made famous by literature and film. Trapped inside his mansion of tricks and illusion, the detectives sweat out a night of crazed lunacy while the clues, and even the victim of the case, change from minute to minute.
Headed by an all-star cast featuring Alec Guiness and Peter Sellars, this is a masterpiece of comedy that should be revisited by the modern audience because it’s sure to become a favorite once again.
Idiocracy (2006)
If you blinked, there’s a good chance you completely missed this film. In fact this movie was only released in a limited amount of theaters and for only a few days. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons. Mainly legal ones, and probably involving the big corporations that are skewered in the film, but there are probably many others that we don’t know about. One thing is for sure and that is that FOX did not promote this film and probably wanted to kill it, but did the bare minimum required to fulfill its contract.
This is Mike Judge’s follow up film to his brilliant cult classic Office Space, and it’s even more of a cult classic because many people STILL haven’t heard of this film. Office Space is now widely known, but Idiocracy takes his quirky social commentary to a new level. Luke Wilson plays Joe, a Soldier who wakes 500 years in the future to find he’s the smartest man on the planet. The world has been dumbed-down to the point of near destruction and Wilson saves man-kind from its dreaded irrigation problems. He eventually becomes the President of the United States and has 3 children with co-star Maya Rudolph. This brilliant movie is not for every taste and has a bit of a dark side to it as well. This movie was also plagued by production problems and apparently filmmaker Robert Rodriquez helped with some of the special effects and the movie has an amazing look to it. The film is really funny and deserves to be seen because it’s quite clever in its stupidity.
Any film that has Terry Crews as an ex-pro wrestler turned President has to be good on some level, but Idiocracy isn’t just good, it’s fantastic and it’s a cult classic that may soon be on top of the list.
SPECIAL MENTIONS:
Grandma’s Boy (2006) – After some financial difficulties, a man moves in with his grandmother and her friends. Somehow, the seemingly less talented friends of Adam Sandler (Allen Covet, Peter Dante & Nick Swardson) made a better Adam Sandler Movie than Adam Sandler himself.
The Man With Two Brains (1983) – A doctor falls in love with a brain while married to a deadly shrew. This Steve Martin film may actually be funnier than The Jerk.
The Rutles: All you need is cash (1978) – A great mockumentary about a Beatles-like band, the Rutles. In the hands of Monty Python alum, Eric Idle, it has a ton of hilarious scenes and funny songs.
The Nude Bomb (AKA The Return Of Maxwell Smart) (1980) – A madman tries to detonate a bomb that eliminates clothing. Although an Airplane rip-off, (Airplane was a ripoff of the original Get Smart show’s style) this comedy gag fest is pretty damn funny.
Tapeheads (1988) – Another great John Cusack comedy! This time he and his buddy (Tim Robbins) try and make music videos with inspiration from their favorite soul duo, the Swanky Modes.
UHF (1989) – ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic is put in charge of running a small television company and all the airplay. Known for Michael Richards early lunacy as Stanley the janitor.
Johnny Stechino (1991) – Roberto Benini solidified his comic genius with this comedy about a bus driver who subs for a wanted gangster.
Seems like Old Times (1980) – Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn are fantastic as former lovers who meet again after he’s on the run for bank robbery and secretly hiding out with her and her DA husband.
Up the Creek (1983)- Tim Mathison and Stephen Furst, basically reprising their roles from Animal House, take part in an outrageous college river rafting competition.
Head (1968) – Essentially a Beatles film knockoff, this goofy movie, written by Jack Nicholson (!) and starring the group The Monkees is a series of pointless gags that stream through an LSD like dream state. It’s pretty funny and weird.
The Magic Christian (1969)– Peter Sellars takes in a vagrant (Ringo Starr) so he can inherit his wealth and in the process, skewer the rich and greedy. Watchable in every way.
Used Cars (1980) - Kurt Russell plays a used cars salesman trying to do anything to run for state senate while battling his competition Roy played by Jack Warden. A lost comedy classic.
Since this is a REALLY funny blog, I wanted to put together a Top Ten list of what I considered to be some of the funniest and most under rated comedy films of all time. We all know Caddyshack, Young Frankenstein and American Pie and all those classics, but this list is about the films that either never got the proper recognition they deserved or have simply faded from the collective conscious. These are movies that I have in my collection and try to get to at least once a year. These are films that I try to recommend to people when they want something different and I never get complaints at the suggestions.
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
Released in 1980, this movie actually didn’t gain popularity in the United States until a few years later. An international sensation directed by South African Filmmaker Jamie Uys, this brilliant movie is actually three stories in one that mesh together at the end. The first is the story of a group of African Bushmen who find their new gift from God, a Coke bottle, to be an extremely effective tool but to be disruptive to the flow of their harmonious way of life. They send one of the tribesmen, played by actual Bushman, N!xau on a mission to throw the bottle off the end of the Earth. Along the way, he runs into an African elephant dung researcher and the new schoolteacher that the researcher’s become enamored with. They eventually get involved with a group of dangerous rebels who are fleeing from the government. This all climaxes with a hilarious conclusion where the bushman helps a kidnapped group of schoolchildren escape the rebel captors.
This low budget film is poorly dubbed with an exaggerated fast-motion shooting style and choppy editing, but what makes this film great is the simplistic charm and hilarious quirkiness in which all these styles come together and work. Critics from all over the world consider this a genuine classic and was even a favorite of my grandfather. It has the slapstick cleverness of the Marx Brothers, the social commentary of a documentary and the grace and subtly of a children’s film. It all makes for an incredibly charming movie that should be seen by everyone young and old.
Funny Bones (1995)
Virtually unseen by everyone on the planet, this gem of a movie is not only a funny movie, it’s a fantastically entertaining film as well. Although the movie is not fall down, knee-slapping funny, it’s definitely odd and will have you smiling and giggling the whole time.
After a stand-up comedian named Tommy (Oliver Platt) bombs on a Las Vegas stage in front of his family, friends and insider big wigs, he disappears and heads to the place that solidified his father’s comedy career—Blackpool, England. While visiting his family’s old stomping ground, he tries to find the roots of comedy and discover what makes people like his famous father (Jerry Lewis), truly funny. What he finds is a forgotten world and discovers that comedy is more about taking risks in life and concurring fears than anything else. The movie is about the art of comedy itself and the way it’s told in this film is absolutely brilliant. How this film never received more attention is beyond me but should be seen by comedy and film buffs alike.
Kingpin (1996)
This is easily the Farrelly Brother’s best comedy and it’s not even close. For some reason the world has gone gaga over the very funny, There’s Something About Mary, but this movie, made before Mary is better and has more laughs per minute than all their movies combined.
Bowling protégé Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson) tries to make a comeback from a decades-long drunken stupor after losing his hand in a gambling tragedy and picks up Amish wunderkind Ismail (Randy Quaid) as his next bowling cash cow. They hit the road in order to win the million dollar prize at a Las Vegas bowling tournament and pick up beauty Vanessa Angel along the way. Just about every scene and line in this movie is outrageous and the gross-out site gags are the best of the genre. This may also be Bill Murray’s finest comedy moment as the despicable Ernie ‘Big Ern’ McCraken. The final bowling shootout at end with both Harrelson and Murray’s hair going to tatters is worth the price alone. An absolute classic!
Just One Of The Guys (1985)
Looking back, the 80’s were sort of a golden age of teen comedy flicks that many consider classics today. Just One Of The Guys should be high on the list because it’s a great comedy movie. The premise is a bit of a stretch, where knockout Terry (Joyce Hyser) goes undercover as a boy at a different high school because she’s convinced her term paper would be better received if she were a male, but the premise works because the cast makes it work.
Along the way, Terry learns all about life from looking at things from a different perspective; She befriends the school punching bag and turns him into a stylish hunk so he can ask the most popular girl to the prom, all the while battling the bully played famously by ‘bully expert’ William Zabka. Terry falls for her new friend and mayhem ensues, but the whole process is hilarious and Hyser really carries the film. And although Hyser is convincing, it’s actually Billy Jayne who plays her brother, Buddy that secretly steals the film with his wise cracks and desperate horny maneuvering. It’s such a great performance that it should go down in the annals of film as a classic comedy supporting role.
Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986)
This is easily the best T&A flick of the eighties, and like a lot of others on this list, has never really been seen. It’s about a handsome, oversexed and directionless guy (Leigh McCloskey) who is forced by his parents to make something of himself, get a degree and eventually collect his trust fund, so they force him to go to the Buster Burger hamburger academy to get a diploma. He and the other riffraff recruits, while not making mayhem, are being brow beaten by the drill sergeant of the school, played brilliantly by football legend Dick Butkus. The slapstick comedy mixed with almost x-rated sex material make for a classic Tits & Ass comedy. Forget all the other bad 80’s sex comedies. This one goes for the bad gold and gets it.
The Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy (1996)
You either like Canadian comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall or you don’t. I personally find them very funny. Their sketch comedy shows, which ran on both CBS and HBO for years was a combination of stupidity and absolute brilliance. Their only venture into film was the 1996 comedy Brain Candy. Again, like all their TV shows and live performances, the guys play most of the characters (including the women) and in this film they showcase most of the absurd and twisted characters in society that they like to hold a mirror up to—the stupid cops, the ditzy women, the douchy CEOs and their lackeys, the clueless and fabulous homosexuals—no one, not even the totally un-PC “cancer boy” escapes their wrath.
The movie is about a scientist who discovers an anti-depressant drug that takes the patient to their most pleasant memory and helps ease their suffering. When the drug company decides to release the drug without proper testing, havoc ensues when people begin to freeze in their happy memory. What makes this movie so funny is the characters are so outrageous that they constantly take the absurdity level up a notch. Mixed with some brilliant writing and an easy storyline to make a mockery of, Brain Candy will have you rolling on the floor with laughter. A cult classic!
Jekyll and Hyde, Together Again (1982)
Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the cocaine culture was running rampant through the country and this film is a direct homage to that seedy duplicity.
Mark Blankfield, a sort of low rate Gene Wilder, plays a doctor working on a wonder drug that would help people avoid surgery. While experimenting one night with a particular batch of his special white powder, he accidentally snorts some of it and turns into a wild party maniac that sprouts wild hair, crazy gold teeth and even gold rings and chains. He causes mayhem on the city and turns into a sex-crazed animal, which begins to destroy his life with his fiancé (Beth Armstrong).
This is an outrageous comedy that brilliantly merges the Jekyll and Hyde classic with the swanky Studio 55 drug subculture into a slapstick laugher. A must see!
Top Secret! (1984)
The Airplane And Naked Gun movies have overshadowed this Zucker Brothers & Jim Abrahams classic starring a young Val Kilmer. The movie is a spoof on those cheesy Elvis Presley movie musicals mixed with old WWII films and the results are fantastic.
Val Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, an American Rock star who’s asked to play a cultural event in East Germany and ends up helping break a scientist out of prison with the French Resistance. This film was given a big budget and that is evident on screen with some big-time set pieces and large site gags. They all work! Val Kilmer nails his deadpan role and the site gags are the best out of all their films. The songs are funny and the whole French Resistance crew (Chocolate Mousse, et all) and prison break scene are priceless. It’s strange that this film didn’t make a big splash at the box office because it’ a non-stop joke fest.
Murder By Death (1976)
If you’ve ever seen the movie Clue, eliminate it from your memory, because that piece of junk was directly ripped off from this comedy classic.
An eccentric millionaire named Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) personally invites the best detectives from around the world to come and solve a murder mystery of his doing. Each detective is a veiled reference to the famous detectives made famous by literature and film. Trapped inside his mansion of tricks and illusion, the detectives sweat out a night of crazed lunacy while the clues, and even the victim of the case, change from minute to minute.
Headed by an all-star cast featuring Alec Guiness and Peter Sellars, this is a masterpiece of comedy that should be revisited by the modern audience because it’s sure to become a favorite once again.
Idiocracy (2006)
If you blinked, there’s a good chance you completely missed this film. In fact this movie was only released in a limited amount of theaters and for only a few days. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons. Mainly legal ones, and probably involving the big corporations that are skewered in the film, but there are probably many others that we don’t know about. One thing is for sure and that is that FOX did not promote this film and probably wanted to kill it, but did the bare minimum required to fulfill its contract.
This is Mike Judge’s follow up film to his brilliant cult classic Office Space, and it’s even more of a cult classic because many people STILL haven’t heard of this film. Office Space is now widely known, but Idiocracy takes his quirky social commentary to a new level. Luke Wilson plays Joe, a Soldier who wakes 500 years in the future to find he’s the smartest man on the planet. The world has been dumbed-down to the point of near destruction and Wilson saves man-kind from its dreaded irrigation problems. He eventually becomes the President of the United States and has 3 children with co-star Maya Rudolph. This brilliant movie is not for every taste and has a bit of a dark side to it as well. This movie was also plagued by production problems and apparently filmmaker Robert Rodriquez helped with some of the special effects and the movie has an amazing look to it. The film is really funny and deserves to be seen because it’s quite clever in its stupidity.
Any film that has Terry Crews as an ex-pro wrestler turned President has to be good on some level, but Idiocracy isn’t just good, it’s fantastic and it’s a cult classic that may soon be on top of the list.
SPECIAL MENTIONS:
Grandma’s Boy (2006) – After some financial difficulties, a man moves in with his grandmother and her friends. Somehow, the seemingly less talented friends of Adam Sandler (Allen Covet, Peter Dante & Nick Swardson) made a better Adam Sandler Movie than Adam Sandler himself.
The Man With Two Brains (1983) – A doctor falls in love with a brain while married to a deadly shrew. This Steve Martin film may actually be funnier than The Jerk.
The Rutles: All you need is cash (1978) – A great mockumentary about a Beatles-like band, the Rutles. In the hands of Monty Python alum, Eric Idle, it has a ton of hilarious scenes and funny songs.
The Nude Bomb (AKA The Return Of Maxwell Smart) (1980) – A madman tries to detonate a bomb that eliminates clothing. Although an Airplane rip-off, (Airplane was a ripoff of the original Get Smart show’s style) this comedy gag fest is pretty damn funny.
Tapeheads (1988) – Another great John Cusack comedy! This time he and his buddy (Tim Robbins) try and make music videos with inspiration from their favorite soul duo, the Swanky Modes.
UHF (1989) – ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic is put in charge of running a small television company and all the airplay. Known for Michael Richards early lunacy as Stanley the janitor.
Johnny Stechino (1991) – Roberto Benini solidified his comic genius with this comedy about a bus driver who subs for a wanted gangster.
Seems like Old Times (1980) – Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn are fantastic as former lovers who meet again after he’s on the run for bank robbery and secretly hiding out with her and her DA husband.
Up the Creek (1983)- Tim Mathison and Stephen Furst, basically reprising their roles from Animal House, take part in an outrageous college river rafting competition.
Head (1968) – Essentially a Beatles film knockoff, this goofy movie, written by Jack Nicholson (!) and starring the group The Monkees is a series of pointless gags that stream through an LSD like dream state. It’s pretty funny and weird.
The Magic Christian (1969)– Peter Sellars takes in a vagrant (Ringo Starr) so he can inherit his wealth and in the process, skewer the rich and greedy. Watchable in every way.
Used Cars (1980) - Kurt Russell plays a used cars salesman trying to do anything to run for state senate while battling his competition Roy played by Jack Warden. A lost comedy classic.
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