70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century

Judd Apatow had already made a name for himself with small-screen sketch comedy (he co-created The Ben Stiller Show), peerless cringe-comedy (The Larry Sander Show) and sensitive character-based comedy (R.I.P., Freaks and Geeks). For his big-screen directorial debut, he took a bit from all three and concocted what’s become a modern-comic urtext: the heavily improvised, ensemble-cast manchild farce. A post-Daily Show/pre-The Office Steve Carell is the title character, a geek-culture lifer who’s never had a real relationship; a crack team of supporting players including Romany Malco, Jane Lynch, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd offer horrible romantic advice and off-the-cuff riffs about everything from soft rock to skin-mag stashes. (Seen today, the Rudd/Rogen volley of absurd “you’re gay” playground taunts is somehow both a highlight and a low point.) The talent bench is deep here — blink and you’ll miss Kat Dennings, Mindy Kaling, Jonah Hill and Kevin Hart in small parts — while Apatow’s knack for connecting outrageous set pieces with a surprisingly overall sweetness would become his signature. But it starts here, and as everyone knows, you never forget your first time. DF

Best spoof of the century? Director Edgar Wright’s breakthrough film takes the piss out of horror movies, zombie flicks and post-apocalyptic dramas — and then, because he’s such a clever lad, still delivers a pretty riveting mash-up of those styles on top of it. Shaun of the Dead is really funny and really frightening, with each tone enhancing the other; co-writer Simon Pegg’s ordinary bloke is so bored by modern life that he doesn’t initially realize that the walking dead have invaded his town. You can see the early stages of the cheeky, stylish irreverence that would become the British filmmaker’s trademark, as well as generating tons of laughs from the dim-bulb rapport of Pegg and Nick Frost’s clueless characters. It’s so hilarious, in fact, that it takes a moment to realize how weirdly emotional it can be, too. The end of the world — somehow sidesplitting and touching. TG

Unlikely as it may seem, one of the greatest comedies of the last two decades is a 162-minute movie from Germany. Writer-director Maren Ade spends most of that runtime testing the fragile bond between the two leads: corporate drone Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller) and her incorrigible-prankster dad, Winifred (Peter Simonischek), who follows her on a business trip to Bucharest. When they inevitably fall out, he puts on a bad wig and re-enters her life as a boorish life coach named Toni Erdmann. Awkward exchanges, sweet father-daughter bonding and scenes that suggest serious undertones of feminist workplace frustration follow. The ending is legitimately profound, but Ade doesn’t just traffic in droll European humor. The triple whammy of karaoke, comic nudity and costumed lunacy that dominate the final hour is on par with anything in the Apatow universe. JBe

What did Paul Thomas Anderson see in Adam Sandler that nobody else had when he cast him as a lonely Los Angeleno? The answer: A rage that was never far from the surface of the comedian’s manchild characters. The filmmaker teases Sandler’s sound and fury out via a love story in which San Fernando Valley businessman Barry Egan falls for Lena (Emily Watson), a friend of one of his many sisters. They’re two misfit people who clearly belong together, even if his habit of bottling his ire until it explodes threatens both their relationship and the bathrooms of local restaurants. Also, did we mention the Provo, Utah phone-sex operators and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vengeful mattress king? The film served as a kind of coming out for Anderson, who shook off the influences of his first films to get looser, stranger, more heartfelt and way funnier than he’d ever dared be before. KP

“You’re gonna have to give him a moment, son. Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays.” Jake Kasdan’s merciless takedown of the modern music-biopic formula remains the final parodic word on the subject; you picture him and producer/cowriter Judd Apatow compiling a genre checklist and just skewering each entry one by one. The childhood trauma (“The wrong kid died!”), the do-or-die discovery of a hit single in the recording studio, the rocky marriages, the muse, the rise, the fall, the sex, the drugs, the experiments with theremins, the pet monkeys and the phoenix-like comeback — it’s a roll call of 20th century musical-genius clichés taken to sublimely ridiculous extremes. The fact that John C. Reilly nails a host of hard-singin’, hard-playin’ styles from early rock ‘n’ roll to outlaw country & western to Pet Sounds-level excess — we personally have a soft spot for Dewey Cox’s brief but unforgettable Dylanesque phase — only sweetens the deal. (Not to mention that the particular way he says “cu-caiine” is the icing on the fake-superstar cake.) Everybody from The Office‘s Jenna Fisher to Tim Meadows hits their beats perfectly, though a hearty shout out goes to the Cox superfan who we’re told moonlights as musician himself.—D.F.

It took approximately six million years for humans to evolve from their apelike ancestors, but only about a decade for them to devolve more or less as Mike Judge’s satire predicted. Idiocracy takes place 500 years into the future, when colossal dumbasses have their lard-greased paws on all the levers of power and farms are irrigated by a popular sports drink. (“Brawndo: It’s What Plants Crave!”) Fox left the film for dead in theaters – it had no trailer, didn’t screen for critics and made less than half a million at the box office — but now it’s the go-to comedy of the Trump Era, a fun place to laugh about the dystopic trash pile that currently engulfs us. (If the current Secretary of Agriculture starting pumping Gatorade in fields throughout the Heartland, would he even lose his job?) ST

Will Ferrell is at his funniest when he’s got a tag-team partner (see: Anchorman, The Other Guys) – but Step Brothers is, hands down, his best double act. Working alongside Talladega Nights chum John C. Reilly, the duo play stunted adults forced into the same family when their single parents (Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen) remarry. They’re are the extreme edge of the bozo manchildren that made Ferrell a superstar and Reilly his goofball screen soul mate — it’s their back-and-forth idiocy that makes this a modern classic. And once you’ve fully absorbed the brilliance of their interplay, be sure to spend a little time marveling at the movie’s murderers’ row of ensemble players, including a perfectly repugnant Adam Scott and Kathryn Hahn as a horribly horny wife. You’ll never hear “Sweet Child o’ Mine” the same way again. TG

Champagne and cupcakes and party favor puppies wrapped up with string — Kristen Wiig throwing tantrums is our favorite thing. Decades from now, it’ll be clear that this story about a thirtysomething stuck in a rut and her fellow bridesmaids (the XX-chromosome counterparts to Judd Apatow’s stable of male kooks and losers) was a magic bean sprouting the future of studio comedies. Fresh faces like Rebel Wilson, Ellie Kemper, Chris O’Dowd and shock Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy get plenty of room to make an impact; Wiig, fellow SNL vet Maya Rudolph and sly comic MVP Rose Byrne prove they’re superstar material. Proudly feminine and patently successful, this ensemble raunch-com celebrates the inner paranoia and outer politeness of best frenemies, all hugs with fingernails filed to a shiv. (And the there’s the instantly classic food-poisoning scene – who didn’t snort so hard their popcorn went flying?) Every studio wanted to copy it. None of them dared, which gave director Paul Feig years to dominate the no-fuck’s-given female blockbuster lane. Thanks to the seed Bridesmaids planted, now that turf is more crowded. AN

Armando Ianucci’s bitter, foul-mouthed political satire about the Byzantine backroom back-and-forth between the U.S. and the U.K. in the run-up to a new war had a bitter ring of truth about it when it was released: The conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan were raging; the Bush administration was sword-rattling about Iran; and the future Veep creator’s distressingly plausible comedy demonstrated how terrible decisions could be made through a combination of ineptitude, spite and cover-your-ass cowardice. (The writer-director did his homework for this movie; he even famously broke into the U.S. State Department for research, which may have prompted new security protocols.) Seen now, this portrait of bureaucracy and institutional loyalty seems almost quaint – and yet, somewhere in there, amid the madness and nonstop motormouthed insults, Ianucci also gets at a powerful, prophetic truth: That in a world of rampant spinelessness, the cruelest man is king. BE

The greatest comedy of the 21st century directly descended from one of the best of the 20th. Some 16 years after co-writing and starring in This Is Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest made this other milestone mockumentary — a flawless and deliriously executed work that transforms spoofery into something sublime. From Eugene Levy’s buck-toothed, two-left footed cuckold to Jane Lynch’s super-competitive trainer, every caricature miraculously becomes a sympathetic character, one deadpan line at a time. On the way to a competitive dog show, canines play straight men while their handlers run amuck. And then, halfway to the end, Fred Willard shows up and steals the show as a borscht belt TV commentator, delivering hoary one-liners so rapidly that you can barely catch your breath. No matter how ridiculous it all was, you walk away from Best in Show feeling that you’ve spent 90 minutes watching real people — and that comedy can carry the weight of our truly absurd lives. EH