This is for general discussion of comedy movies. Let's unearth what PW actually likes, dislikes, etc.

Specifically though I'm thinking let's focus on hyping up lesser known, less hyped comedies we love and wish got more love... Or comedies that others seem to hate on for WRONG reasons (Zoolander, Step Brothers, Dodgeball, Office Space apparently).

Can also bash movies too, I suppose... Or admit we don't understand the (over)hype: Caddyshack, Animal House, Life of Brian, Groundhog Day, etc.

It's a shame Wife only posts once a year, as I think she'd dig this topic considering some of her favorites.

I'll get the ball rolling with some comedies we love but don't hear mentioned much less hyped or praised often:
- Masterminds
- Dinner for Schmucks

Shit, had a third but can't remember. Anyway... Go!

I don't see them getting love despite likely my #2/3 on the decade list, but Joe Dirt and Napoleon Dynamite.

If you sat me down and told me to pick 20 movies on a desert island sorta deal... these two along with Step Brothers and D&D would be the first few rounds of draft picks. In fact, that should be a future draft but the 100 movie will likely cover most of it. I just fear PW is a little too stuck up it's own ass to give anything real consideration besides the fluff it usually likes.

GIMME MY BO STAFF LOVE DAMMIT.

Lesser known comedies, huh? How about this hidden gem?

The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human

You know those nature shows where you have a narrator talking about how animals behave? The concept of this movie is just that, but with an alien species observing the human species and how they mate. I don't remember how I discovered this movie. I think I saw it on some obscure cable channel when I was a teenager and it amused me. It's not the greatest thing ever, but it's a cool concept and it's executed pretty well in my opinion.

I recall watching Dinner For Shmucks when it came out and quite enjoying it.

Comedy is most subjective genre of all , that’s what there will always be a wide array of hot takes whenever a comedy movie comes up. Hell even myself don’t have a specific taste in comedies as I will love some stupid ones and hate others for the same style of stupidity delivered in a different way.

I love Step Brothers , hate Napoleon Dynamite.

Love Popstar for its absurdity but fucking hate a Borat with passion.

It transcends into other things as well , even wrestling. I think some guys R-Truth are hilarious but find the New Day comedy stupid.

I love Kevin Hart and his stand up but find someone like Louis CK not funny at all.

Its comedy. It’s always going to be divisive.

I will say and no offense to Brits but I generally find their sensibility for humor most different from mine. They just have a different style and I can’t connect with 99% of it. I’ve tried.

Australians are funny fuckers though. Especially Emperor.

Yeah our the British humour is a strange beast indeed. We do have that silly, Monty Python-esque brand of humour, but also a lot of weird subtle deadpan stuff that non-British people don't understand.

See and I don't enjoy any of the Monty Pythons really , granted I only gave one a shot but I wasn't feeling it at all. Same for a more recent and popular one in Shaun of the Dead.

It's why I love Scrubs because TO ME it hits all the marks of comedy I enjoy. The stupid , the sarcastic , the dry , the angry type comedy. It also rewards you the more you watch it and gets the different characters and their sense of humor or character.

Yet I never found Seinfeld funny in the least , but I enjoy Larry David when I've seen clips of him on Curb.


I don't even know how I'd rate funniest or my favorite comedy actors. Sandler and Ferrell would have to be on the top , but then you have Robin Williams and Bill Murray who are right up there as well despite being completely different.

I hate Austin Powers and don't love Waynes World so Myers has never been great to me.

Farley movies (well two plus some cameos) always hit me despite me not always loving. Love Vince Vaughn's dry delivery in the same vein as Murray and Carrell when cast correctly is amazing as well. Same with Seth Rogen and the dry delivery and sarcasm that he brings.

It's not an exact science. I would say that Ferrell and Sandler get the man child love and their physical comedy gets me every time. Not just the gags but expressions and deliveries as well. Farley falls in the boat. Robin Williams certainly is the king of it.

Vince Vaughn , Seth Rogen , Bill Murray hit the dry sense of humor and sarcasm that I love.


I'm just rambling but there really isn't an exact science. I can't tell you why Popstar kills me but Austin Powers just irritates the fuck out of me. It's weird.

Then you have a weird one like Hemsworth in the recent MCU run who I find to have some of the best comedic timing out there today. Or Batista too. Their delivery of lines and jokes is as on point as anyone and they seem to get it.

Taika Waititi seems to be one of the best out there at writing amazing jokes for characters like that. Thor: Ragnarok is one of the funniest movies to come out in a long time IMO.

Those are my disorganized thoughts for now.

Also to 🤯's original post , I laughed my ass off at some scenes in Masterminds but found others really stupid. Uneven movie for me and not one I'll go back to.

Other movies I'll pimp:

Popstar: Never Stop Stoppin
Role Models (shit I forgot Rudd in my ramble)
Dirty Work

Fuck I forgot Ryan Reynolds too.

The Proposal is amazing IMO and doesn't get enough love.
Waiting is juvenile but really great.

Ryan Reynolds deserves to be mentioned in my favorite comedic actors list. He nails it always.

I absolutely adore Monty Python but am not a huge Mr. Bean fan. Rowan Atkinson's best stuff was easily Black Adder


Also Eddie Murphy in  the 80's is probably the funniest actor of all-time.   The 90's?  Not so much.

Can't seem to get into Brit humor. I really liked the Holy Grail, but the actual TV show never did much for me. I remember not finding a single thing funny when they would air those Timelife DVD sets for Monty Python. Like the only thing that got a reaction out of me was blood coming from a dude's eye after a baseball. And I think every 5 years I try and watch AbFab and same deal.

Jun 6, 2020 19:16:37 GMT thereallt said:

I absolutely adore Monty Python but am not a huge Mr. Bean fan. Rowan Atkinson's best stuff was easily Black Adder


Also Eddie Murphy in  the 80's is probably the funniest actor of all-time.   The 90's?  Not so much.

I'm the opposite, love Bean but never got into Python. Plus for the most part I like British stand-up but other than Bean I can't get into proper British comedies.

Blackadder is awful. Mr. Bean is very funny. Silly physical comedy.

I like some Monty Python but it's definitely more miss than hit.

My favourite British sitcom is Peep Show, but it is undoubtedly one of the most "British-humour" shows out there. I've shown it to a couple of American friends and they don't get it at all. It wittily pokes fun at the weird unspoken social rules and conventions that have developd as a nation of ultra-reserved and closed citizens tries to coexist. It achieves this most notably by voicing the character's thoughts during conversations, and how they differ from what they actually say. A lot of the time it's genuinely funny, in an observational humour kinda way, but sometimes makes us cringe-laugh. "What he's doing is so tragically hilarious, but I would do the exact same thing in his position". That kinda reaction.

A lot of British sitcoms are based on cringe humour, going for that reaction, but they also tend to be very over-the-top or have some other outlandish gimmick to avoid making the audience face the bleak reality of their awkwardness.

Peep Show sometimes goes to comical extremes, but most of the time it's a pretty brutal reflection of our worst traits. I'm not making it sound very appealing, but it is hilarious.

I loved Bean as a kid. Not sure if I still would today, but it was a guilty pleasure late Saturday nights for me growing up.

Napoleon Dynamite is the poster child for this discussion. That movie is all about perception; if you go into it with the mindset "the entire point of this is to be pointless and stupid and that's why it's funny" then you're most likely going to laugh. I think people were expecting a point to be made? More structure?.... something??? Not sure why.

I don't even know where to begin...

Step Brothers is a fucking classic but there are movies with Ferrell and Reilley that I actually like better: Talladega Nights, Walk Hard andOld School, namely.

Don't Be a Menace was recently mentioned on my FF "life" project. It was my first stoner movie I ever watched high, and I still quote it often to this day: "DO... WE... HAVE... A... PROBLEMMM!?", "HURRY UP AND BUY!!!"

Observe and Report  w/Seth Rogen is criminally underrated. It still annoys me that more people know about Paul Blart Mall Fart than the original movie it ripped off. The scene where Ronnie and his co-worker ride golf carts through the mall parking lot beating up teenagers with their own skateboards is a top 10 all-time comedy scene for me.

Seinfeld fucking sucks outside of a few key episodes like the Soup Nazi and George's pool dick. It's always been overrated.

That 70's Show  was the much funnier Happy Days of my generation and I can watch that show whenever, wherever. There's A LOT more than all that but this reply is long enough. 
 
Though since it was mentioned, I'm kind of picky about Brit humor but I do have some exceptions:
- Monty Python (of course)
- Shaun of the Dead
- The Mighty Boosh
- Garth Marenghi's Dark Place

Funny enough, I never got into IT Crowd even though I love Richard Ayoade in Darkplace, and some of my friends have always told me I need to watch it. One of these days....

Jun 7, 2020 7:05:18 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

Did someone mention Napoleon Dynamite?!?

Now THAT is a comedy movie. Absolutely love it. Watch it twice a year.

What is D&D, @ness ?

Dumb and Dumber, obviously NOT an unbeloved comedy but it was a favorite on debut and will be until I die.

Jun 7, 2020 7:05:18 GMT jTjohncenaGOAT said:

Did someone mention Napoleon Dynamite?!?

Now THAT is a comedy movie. Absolutely love it. Watch it twice a year.

What is D&D, @ness?

Dumb & Dumber

Glad this caught fire 🔥 🔥 🔥

Need to catch up. And comment more myself. But first, off to listen to yesterday's PW News!

Down Under Political Thread Summed Up

That 70's Show is a great shout rad , that show was brilliant for a solid 5 or 6 seasons. It fell off a cliff but criminally underrated in terms of great sitcoms.

Observe and Report is a solid shout too.

Still need to pimp Longshot , it's gotten good reviews but not sure it's hit the rounds yet. Love that fucking movie.

I haven't watched Peep Show in years, but I really enjoyed an entire show based on characters having inner monologues and just all the comedy that comes from that.

I reviewed Observe and Report a few months ago in the Movie thread and really enjoyed it. I feel you could put it together on a list with Joker, King of Comedy, Taxidriver etc. Very dark humour but it's probably my favourite Rogan role.

I've seen a few Jared Hess movies getting a shout out, I thought Gentleman Broncos had it's moments. It's a Sam Rockwell/Jermaine Clements jaunt about this famous sci-fi author who under pressure from his publisher steals a story from this socially awkward kid and takes credit for it. My favourite aspect of it is we get to see Sam Rockwell play out both versions of the story - the original serious sci-fi Dune-like story, then the incredibly campy story. You get some Flight of the Conchords style humour, you get this fun satire of sci-fi novels and then you get the extremely dry Hess humour.

Critics hated it, I thought it was Hess' best movie and a pretty enjoyable romp.

Speaking of movies that the critics hated, I loved Kung Pow the first time I saw it. I was watching a clip the other night of the woman in that and it still caught me off guard. It's just a really bad Miss Piggy impression where she just says weu weu weu a lot, but then they throw a random waaaaaaaaaa in there and I was gone.

I think 🤯 gave me a secondary high.

Inbetweeners was another great British show that Emperor probably hates. I loved the first two seasons of the Boosh as well, but I can't specifically point to any sequence I loved and the Old Greg meme got played to death.

Summer Heights High is always my go to when it comes to Australian comedies. It's a ridiculous accurate portrayal of high school culture growing up and as funny as it is, it does know when to be serious as well. A well written show and it seemed like Lilley actually liked his characters. He made a lot of other shows, but they were pretty hit and miss, this and his first series We Can Be Heroes were his two strongest.

Review with Myles Barlow was another favourite. I believe it was adapted over there by Andrew Daly but it was like Kath and Kim, it just didn't translate over there. It takes the piss out of movie reviews and Myles will review things like being a dickhead, starting a cult, murder etc. and it always takes a hard left.

I loved Inbetweeners at the time it aired. It was the perfect sitcom for an early 20-something who was not too far removed from the college years during which the show was set. I think of it as Peep Show for teenagers, minus the internal monologues. Again it deconstructs the comical awkwardness of school kids who claim they know how all about sex and "picking up chicks" but really don't have the faintest clue. Even more cringey than Peep Show, it's pretty relentless.

I tried rewatching it maybe a year ago because I felt like a laugh, but I've matured beyond the show's fairly one-dimensional juvenile humour and didn't find it very funny. There was no cringe-laughter, only cringe. Peep Show holds up better.

Mighty Boosh is absolute trash, and I never got the hype for Shaun of the Dead or any of the Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright brand of comedy.

rad gave a shoutout to Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Even in the UK this show is ultra-obscure, yet I come across a surprising number of foreigners who are aware of the show. No idea how. Maybe it's the Richard Ayoade link from IT Crowd, a much more popular show. Anyway, great show.

Speaking of ultra-obscure, Look Around You.



I feel like this is one of those quirky British comedies that can be appreciated by the masses. It parodies these weird science education videos they used to play in schools decades ago.

My favorite British Comedy is Fawlty Towers. I ADORE John Cleese. Also a fan of Ab/Fab and Are You Being Served?

I mostly enjoy comedies over anything else. I like to laugh. I like things that make me laugh. We just finished Season 6 of Mom with Anna Farris.

Grown men acting like children is not funny. It's sad.

I always pop when rad returns to PW. I've viewed him as our Terry Funk for a long time. He's not around much, but he always delivers the goods when he is here. Then I saw this....

Jun 7, 2020 8:42:36 GMT rad said:

Seinfeld fucking sucks outside of a few key episodes like the Soup Nazi and George's pool dick. It's always been overrated.

And now Rad is dead to me.

To further heat up this burgeoning blood feud, I can't stand That 70s Show. 0/10. Would not watch again.

*Will cover the rest tomorrow. I get the feeling you're all going to be glad when I go on break :lol:  I'm going out heel, baby!
 

The IT Crowd.
Richard Ayoade, Chris O'Dowd a little bit of Noel Fielding. Among others.

The Inbetweeners.
Avoid the movies. The series captures that awkwardness of highschool better than most. The banter, the bullshit in Jay's case. This gets a binge every now and then.

There is a wide breadth to "Brit humour", so I am not totally sure what people mean when they say it. I assume they are talking about the more subtle, nuanced stuff, when there is just as much broad, mass appeal, laugh track stuff.

Peep Show is up there for British comedy series', especially ones that went as long as they did. I watched the pilot of the US attempt (with the main guy from the Big Bang Theory) and it was abysmal. They were trying to transplant jokes that just don't cross over culturally. I haven't watched the US Office (I will one day), but from people I've spoken to, it sounds like that's what they started doing in season 1 before realising "hey, maybe we should make a show that is like an American office instead". The US Inbetweeners also made the hilarious call to cast a Disney boy star as their Will. Your average British high school is going to be very different from your average American one and trying to use the same jokes is just bizarre laziness. Just use the concept and create characters/jokes that make sense within the setting.

Fawlty Towers is still elite and I'm glad Cleese/Booth stopped at the 12 eps. You'd swear there were more because pretty much every ep is a classic and features so many great moments. I am hit and miss on some of the Python stuff. Holy Grail is great overall, but has some really weak points (I still don't like the Knights Who Say Ni). Life of Brian is their clear peak.

I still like season 1 of The Mighty Boosh. It doesn't all hold up but it was material they had done on stage and radio and was the polished, best stuff. It is like how band's often have a great debut album and never reach those heights again. Every cool riff or neat idea from when they picked up their instrument can end up used on that debut or at least the best of them. Then they are told "alright, give us another album in a year" and they are starting from scratch.

Black Books is still funny and the 3-season, 18-episode run was the ideal length.

I love Alan Partridge, specifically the show I'm Alan Partridge. Coogan's best work.

Chris Morris' stuff is typically great. The Day Today, parodying current affair/news shows. The incredible Brass Eye was a follow-up of sorts, but was geared towards satirising the sensationalism, moralisation and panic inducement of the media. The final episode, Paedogeddon, received the most complaints of any TV show ever and is still a fantastic, hilarious watch. One of the best parts was getting celebrities, under the guise of it being a genuine campaign, to say patently absurd things. Clearly they were not thinking about what they were saying. Was this because they thought they were doing a good thing? Because they thought it would make them look good? They feared that the media could find out they'd turned down a chance to speak against these things? The show, while lampooning media hysteria, still does reference genuine, horrible issues such as the prevalence of underagers involved with pop/rock stars in the past and the institutional incompetence and cover-ups that have allowed so much abuse to go on.

His show Jam, a combination of dark sketches and ambient music, was hit and miss and is not something I have returned to. His film on terrorism Four Lions is probably my favourite comedy of the 10s. Morris and Charlie Brooker's Nathan Barley (starring Nicholas Burns, Julian Barratt, Richard Ayoade & Ben Whishaw) was an overlooked, underappreciated and prophetic show.

Father Ted is still great, but I wonder if yanks would like it? Even though almost everyone involved is someone I like, The IT Crowd has never really worked for me, despite being beloved.

It would never be that high on my list, but Only Fools and Horses (probably Britain's most beloved sitcom) has some great laughs and just gives me a warm, nostalgic, comforting feeling. It was designed for the masses, but in a great way, unlike the horrendous Mrs. Brown's Boys, which Gervais predicted with his fictional "When the Whistle Blows" in his great show Extras.

Lesser but similar shows in the sense that I could happily watch episodes of them and chuckle a few times, while having a comforting old school nostalgic feel to them are things like One Foot in the Grave and Keeping Up Appearances (which, shockingly to me, has been purchased by overseas broadcasters more than any other British show).

Since we are just talking about all comedies, the original run (1-3) of Arrested Development might still be my favourite show of all time, above even The Wire and The Simpsons (seasons 3-8). Genuinely must have gone through it close to 20 times. Can basically have it running in the background and smash through it in a weekend. Even on the 20th watch/background watch, you still pick up on missed jokes, such was the density. I am a big defender of season 4, which was a bold approach and has some really weak early eps around specific characters, especially without the tight pacing of the original run (being forced to be under 25 mins for TV), but the way it all comes together with the intertwining stories at the end of the season is fantastic. Season 5 was so outrageously forgettable that I cannot remember a single thing about it. Neither can my work colleagues who also watched. We've even all discussed if we were sure we'd actually watched the second half of the season that was released later, but then we figured out we had. TV shows are often in a time and a place. A creative flow, with great writers and actors playing off each other. You can't just pause and then come back 5, 10, 15 years later. Remember that the next time you want a show to come back. Firefly was great and it clearly could've had a great 4-5 season run if it continued at the time. But if it had been brought back in 2010 or 2015, would it have worked? Probably not.

Curb Your Enthusiasm would be top 5 for me. I adore it and adore Larry David in it. One of my all-time favourite TV characters, but sorry Baker , I don't get Seinfeld. Part of it is that I don't find Jerry Seinfeld and his delivery funny at all, but just the whole style of the show does nothing for me. The disconnect that I feel between Curb/Larry David and Seinfeld is something I still expect to fix itself magically one day, but it hasn't happened yet.

-----------------------------------

That ended going on too long, so let me actually get to the thread title.

Kingpin is the least regarded (lowest IMDb score, lowest tomatometer rating) of the first three Farrellys film behind Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary, but I think it is clearly the best (and I like those other two films) and the best roles for both Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson. It is crude and some of the jokes don't quite work, but overall it is one of my absolute favourite comedies.



Remember that period where every comedy seemed to be a Judd Apatow film? Either written or produced by him. 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Funny People, Get Him to the Greek and others. All those films seems to get brought up from time to time. The one that doesn't is his best film: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. A tremendous parody of music biopics and full of nice references for those even minorly aware of rock 'n' roll history. What takes it over the top is that the songs are genuinely good - I especially love the Orbison song and the SMiLE-era Beach Boys song, where they got Brian Wilson's lyricist from that time Van Dyke Parks to contribute. Jack White as Elvis is fabulous as well.



I wouldn't call this underrated as it has great critical reviews, but I don't think it is all that well known: Best in Show.



Another that I don't think is underrated, as I know no one who has seen it who did not love it, is Kung Fu Hustle. More in the overlooked/lesser known category. It is an incredible comedy and it is an incredible action film.

Strobe Kung Fu Hustle is getting some frequent play on SBS World Movies for the Aussies, if you haven’t seen it.


Eurotrip
Another so bad, it’s good movie. It’s awful really, but enjoyable. It’s where the very briefly popular reference “ Scotty doesn’t know “ came from.

Hotrod
You need a strong tolerance for Adam Samberg to get through this, it’s a geeky story of small town stuntman.

Great shout for Kingpin. I think it's easily the Farrely Bros funniest movie. So many times I had to pause it because I was laughing too hard.

Jun 6, 2020 17:41:46 GMT Emperor said:

Yeah our the British humour is a strange beast indeed. We do have that silly, Monty Python-esque brand of humour, but also a lot of weird subtle deadpan stuff that non-British people don't understand.

God Black Books did this to perfection.

I had no idea the US tried to recreate Peep Show, but I'm not too surprised since they like to pinch a lot of our best comedies. Not surprised it fell flat on its face. They did the same thing with Inbetweeners, more or less a word-for-word copy which as Strobe mentioned does not translate at all.

Not watched many classic British sitcoms. Fawlty Towers and Father Ted appeal to me, most of the rest do not. I've seen snippets of Only Fool and Horses. It's alright but it's never made me want to go and watch a full episode. I'm also irrationally resistant to the show because everyone of a certain generation goes on about it being the greatest sitcom ever, nothing will ever top this, blah blah blah. Overhype is tiring.

Curb Your Enthusiasm also sounds like my cup of tea, but I don't know when I'll get round to watching it.

Right now my comedy viewing is limited to Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 and Impractical Jokers.

Parks and Recreation overtook Peep Show as my favourite sitcom. I'm on the final season now;. It's just brilliant, practically flawless, and every character is amazing. Lionheart thinks it's a poor man's The Office. Never seen that, so I wouldn't know. Brooklyn 99 has that goofy SNL-vibe to it which I normally find off-putting, but for me reason I quite like this particular show.

Impractical Jokers is guaranteed hilarity, my go-to form of entertainment when I'm in a shitty mood. I find it pretty incredible how four random improv comedy friends had this idea to make a hidden camera show some years after the huge boom of amateur hidden camera TV (Jackass, Punk'd...) was dying out, and just became this national phenomenon. Good for them.

The UK tried to rip off Impractical Jokers, but they tried it with a bunch of third rate comedians who, to my knowledge, were not friends and perhaps had never worked together before. The show works mainly because the guys are best friends and thus have an incredible chemistry and rapport. Anyway, I watched three minutes of the first episode of UK Jokers and I was tapping out like a a chickenshit heel. Dear god, it was so so bad. Worse than Americans doing Peep Show or Inbetweeners. I'm getting PTSD flashbacks now. Why did I bring this up? Fuck.

Another I forgot to mention is Not Another Teen Movie. There was a sea of terrible parody films later on in the 00s and I feel this unfairly gets lumped in with all of those. Like many comedies of this type, and most comedies really, certain jokes don't land but the best stuff is fantastic and still reference worthy between me and some of my pals back home.