The 40 best comedy films of all time – ranked
No type of cinema is more subjective than comedy. If you’re laughing, no one is going to be able to persuade you that if you think about it, you’re actually not.
That makes coming up with a list of the genre’s 40 greatest hits an unavoidably personal exercise – though if you zoom out a bit, some hidden patterns start to emerge. The most obvious are the clearly defined golden periods and dead zones, when the prevailing sense of humour of the day either dated well or didn’t. The 1930s and 1970s are still hilarious; the 1990s and 2010s, not so much. As for the 2020s – ie now – Hollywood has seemingly given up on the form, or rather folded it into its franchises along with fantasy, action and sci-fi – though it may yet break free from the omnigenre as what tickles us continues to shift.
Another is the seeming xenophobic skew, since only four of the entries below count as foreign-language – and even then, the highest-ranking of the lot is virtually dialogue-free. Perhaps it’s just easier to be amused in your own language than in one you don’t speak.
And what about all that old stuff? All there on merit, and arguably underrepresented: in their own completely different ways, the comedy of the silent and screwball eras pinned down the human condition with a precision that I’m not sure can ever be beat. You could, I think, fill out a credible top 40 containing nothing made after the Second World War – but that would be unfair on everyone who came later. So here’s a broad selection, complete with justifications – though for any/all of them, feel free to read “I LOLed”.
40. Airplane! (1980)
Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker’s raucous debut was far from the first film to send up a current Hollywood trend – in this case, the increasingly bloated disaster films of the studios’ postwar years. But it was the one that turned the parody movie into a recognisable and (until relatively recently) bankable genre in itself.
There’s no secret to it beyond the sheer quantity and speed of its gags, but its masterstroke was the casting of Leslie Nielsen – then a primarily serious actor – who would become a staple of future Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoofs. Read our Airplane! review
39. Mean Girls (2004)
The high-school comedy enjoyed a mini-renaissance in the noughties, with cult classics like Whip It!, Superbad and Easy A finding fresh millennial angles on classic coming-of-age concerns.
And we probably had Tina Fey to thank for it, after her inspired (and supremely quotable) adaptation of a self-help book about schoolgirl cliques opened the floodgates. Two decades on, it remains the pick of the bunch. Read our Mean Girls review
38. L.A. Story (1991)
Los Angeles is an obvious target for satire, but to simultaneously tease out and tease the peculiar magic of the place – as so many comedies have done for New York – requires a special touch.
Enter Steve Martin, who spent seven years writing the screenplay for this gorgeously funny cross-cultural romance, in which his novelty weatherman falls for both Sarah Jessica Parker’s ebullient valley girl and Victoria Tennant’s harder-headed British journalist.
37. Bridesmaids (2011)
It might have appeared at the tail end of the Judd Apatow regency and Hollywood’s deeply uneven Noughties chick-flick phase, but Paul Feig’s breakthrough feature redefined how women were allowed to be funny on screen.
A demolition of contemporary wedding etiquette, it made stars of Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy – respectively for getting mortally drunk on a flight and defecating into a sink, which must have been firsts. Read our Bridesmaids review
36. Team America: World Police (2004)
For years, Hollywood wasn’t quite sure to make of the Iraq War – with one notable, hilarious exception. In fact, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone broke ground on their Thunderbirds-channelling military satire a good six months before the conflict even started.
But during production, its script was reshaped around unfolding events – as well as the unique comic possibilities of working with an all-puppet cast. The gore and carnage still shocks, but it was the marionette-on-marionette sex scene – eventually cut down from 90 to 50 seconds – that proved a sticking point with US censors.
35. The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
Surrealist cinema started with Luis Bu?uel. The Spanish master’s early collaborations with Salvador Dalí revealed film’s knack for the uncanny and subversive – and this late-period deep cut proved that even in his 70s, he was still pushing boundaries most directors would never even reach.
A string of bizarre parables poking fun at sexual mores and social conventions, its highlights include a bourgeois dinner party in which the guests are seated round the table on toilets: a waitress serves tissue paper, as one attendee sheepishly makes his excuses in order to go to a small room down the hallway and eat a lamb chop.
34. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
The genius of Edgar Wright’s first professional feature, in which zombies run – or rather shuffle – amok in North London, is that despite its numerous homages to the likes of Romero and Raimi, it isn’t a spoof.
The living dead themselves are no joke: the punchlines come instead from their human prey, as Simon Pegg’s directionless Gen X shop assistant tries to navigate the apocalypse with the same head-down-and-let’s-just-get-through-it attitude he brought to ordinary adult life. Read our Shaun of the Dead review
33. Daisies (1966)
Between the easing of Soviet censorship in the early 1960s and the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, the Czech New Wave struck – and this surrealist masterwork from Věra Chytilová is arguably its most iconic and definitely its funniest work. Two young women, both called Marie, lay waste to the era’s political and bourgeois mores, via sabotaged dates, crazy dancing and food fights. Read our Daisies review
32. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
In the move from small screen to big, too many comedy acts lose the very thing that made them special. Arguably, Monty Python found it.
This Arthurian mock-epic – the troupe’s first “proper” feature, not counting a 1971 sketch compilation – was vast in scope but made on a shoestring, bankrolled in the main by music industry pals, including Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The result gave us that signature Python look of grandeur on the cheap: wildly funny in itself, but also a perfect match for their material’s hairpin swerves from high-flown to lowbrow and back.
31. His Girl Friday (1940)
Howard Hawks pits Cary Grant against Rosalind Russell in perhaps the best-loved pure screwball comedy of them all, and the result is a mutual knockout. Grant is a hard-bitten newspaper editor, and Russell his ex-wife and former star reporter, whom he coaxes into covering one last exclusive.
Their repartee starts as merely frenetic, but cranks its way up to a 240-words-per-minute cadenza as the two jointly hammer out their scoop.
30. Bowfinger (1999)
Frank Oz’s merciless show-business satire centres on a dream double – or perhaps triple – act. Steve Martin plays an unscrupulous movie producer, and Eddie Murphy is a Scientology-addled Hollywood diva and his dimwit twin brother – both of whom end up starring in Martin’s latest (awful) picture with varying degrees of awareness.
29. You, the Living (2007)
Picture Jacques Tati trapped in Ingmar Bergman’s spare room. That’s the deadpan vibe of Roy Andersson’s Living trilogy – and this second, warmest instalment is the best place for newcomers to start. A series of loosely linked absurdist vignettes of something approximating everyday Swedish life, each scene is comedy as watchmaking: intricate, ingenious, and precision-timed.
28. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The greatest of the postwar Ealing comedies puts Alec Guinness through his paces: he plays eight members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne clan, all bumped off by a ninth (a tremendous Dennis Price) who has designs on the family title and estate. This was cosy crime avant la lettre: a comedy of class and manners with a deliciously nasty streak. Read our Kind Hearts and Coronets review
27. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Comedy often dates poorly, and the shelf life of teen movies in particular – concerned as they often are with the procuring of sex at all costs – can be wince-inducingly brief.
But this John Hughes classic, starring Matthew Broderick as a smart-mouthed virtuoso truant at large with his friends in Chicago, is the exception: it remains effortlessly amusing and cool, with a stealthy philosophical kick. Read our Ferris Bueller’s Day Off review
26. Four Lions (2010)
Goodness knows the 2020s miss Chris Morris: the fearless British satirist has all but vanished since the release of his middling second feature, The Day Shall Come, in 2019. Nine years earlier, though, he first ventured onto what many thought untouchable terrain for comedy – the adventures of a Sheffield-based Islamic terror cell – and gave us this sickeningly funny Dad’s Army de nos jours. Read our Four Lions review
25. To Be or Not to Be (1942)
By the time he satirised the Nazis – in the middle of the Second World War, no less – Ernst Lubitsch had been getting away with the unspeakable for years. The German-Jewish émigrés films of the 20s and 30s sparkled with innuendo – but this caper about a theatre troupe outsmarting the Gestapo in Warsaw, starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, took his daring to another level. Mel Brooks was such a fan – understandable – he would later remake it.
24. Young Frankenstein (1974)
Picking Brooks’s own best film is tricky. Do you plump for The Producers, his own immortal swipe at Nazi pageantry? His still-outrageous spoof western, Blazing Saddles? Or this note-perfect burlesque of classical Hollywood horror, starring a never-wilder Gene Wilder on the form of his life?
Let’s go with the third, for its punchlines’ extraordinary hit rate (even the groaners are bullseyes on their own terms), and the sublime contrast between its refined black and white photography and the prevailing mood of forehead-smacking silliness.
23. What’s Up, Doc? (1972)
“A screwball comedy,” read the poster. “Remember them?” By the early 1970s, Hollywood had all but forgotten, having moved on to the less subversive, more heartwarming sex comedy; a precursor of the modern romcom. But Peter Bogdanovich, 32 years old and riding high on the success of The Last Picture Show, staged a madcap revival. Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal co-star as the mismatched couple whom fate and an inept criminal conspiracy decide to pair off, via a string of irresistible hijinks.
22. The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Sublime and ridiculous: why pick between the two? You get both, prepared to a gourmet standard, in Preston Sturges’s whirlwind comedy of remarriage – in which a skint New York couple, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert’s Tom and Gerry, split and zip down to Florida, where romantic overtures from millionaire socialites drive them back into one another’s arms.
21. The Big Lebowski (1998)
Joel and Ethan Coen’s films are often exquisitely funny, but few if any fit neatly into the comedy bracket. There are just too many oppositional energies bubbling away in there: film noir, western, golden-age pastiche. Their first film after Fargo’s breakthrough success – in which Jeff Bridges plays a Los Angeles slacker who’s enlisted by his millionaire namesake to find his missing trophy wife – is no exception.
It’s intensely noirish, made in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, albeit gently poached rather than hard-boiled. But it’s also by far the brothers’ easiest film to laugh at and with: for once, they let their audience in on the big cosmic joke. Read our The Big Lebowski review
20. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953)
This sublime collection of sketches, set in a sleepy Breton resort town, was how the world was introduced to Monsieur Hulot, the hilariously unassuming clown alter ego of France’s Jacques Tati. Each scene runs with the quietly engineered perfection of clockwork, and deploys the particular tools of cinema, from camera angles to sound, in countless ingenious ways.
The jokes are often so subtle as to be almost oblique – and Tati would go on to further refine and elaborate his approach in more ambitious future works like Mon Oncle and Playtime. Truly, though, he already had it mastered here.
19. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
There’s funny – and then there’s funny enough to destroy an entire Hollywood genre. For the sheer cultural devastation it continues to wreak, Jake Kasdan’s dagger-sharp spoof, starring John C Reilly and produced by a then-high-flying Judd Apatow, has to place highly on this list.
Reilly plays the titular 60s/70s rock icon hybrid: a ludicrous mélange of Johnny Cash, Jim Morrison, Ray Charles, Brian Wilson and others, many of whom had already been mythologised in Oscar-grabbing musical biopics. But Cox sent up the form with such merciless accuracy, it’s been impossible to take seriously since.
18. It Happened One Night (1934)
Comedies are often overlooked at the Academy Awards, but here is a blazing exception. Frank Capra’s romantic road trip, starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable as a runaway heiress and the rakish reporter on her tail, was the first of only three films to date to win the so-called Big Five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – in this instance adapted, from a risqué short story in Cosmopolitan.
Both comedically and romantically, Colbert and Gable’s chemistry is glorious, and made pyjamas – specifically, the changing in and out of them – as sexy as they’ve ever been on screen. Read our It Happened One Night review
17. Duck Soup (1933)
At a lean 68 minutes, this is the shortest of the Marx Brothers’ features, but it contains enough material to fill all three parts of The Lord of The Rings. Jokes may have never flown faster on screen than in this riotous nose-tweaking satire, in which Groucho’s Rufus T Firefly, the president of the fictional nation of Freedonia, foments war with a neighbouring country on a whim.
Shot as fascism was regrouping in Europe, it sent up the climate of the day by reframing all that sabre-rattling as so much vaudeville – with many of its greatest scenes, including Groucho, Harpo and Chico’s iconic encounter with a broken mirror, drawing inspiration from that comic tradition.
16. Step Brothers (2008)
Another Apatow – and despite the super-producer having lately slipped out of fashion, he and his repertory posse set the agenda for Hollywood comedy in the late Noughties. This was one of the group’s most puerile works, which is saying something, but it also turned out to be their greatest triumph: something like a fantasy collaboration between the Marx Brothers and Samuel Beckett.
Directed by Adam McKay, it stars Will Ferrell and John C Reilly as two bone-brained stay-at-home manchildren, and involved so much improvisation that McKay ended up burning through over 1.5 million feet of film on set – as much as Francis Ford Coppola used on Apocalypse Now.
15. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
It’s regularly argued – eight entries down, for instance – that a certain 1970s Woody Allen film devised the recipe for the modern-day rom-com. But we should note more often that by the end of the following decade, Rob Reiner, Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan had essentially perfected it. This irresistible tale of an on-off romantic entanglement remains to this day the genre’s high point – an emotional labyrinth, navigated with wit, warmth and breezy finesse.
14. The Apartment (1960)
After needling the censors with a certain gender-twisting 1959 classic – coming up below – Billy Wilder went back on the attack with this thrillingly improper comic romance, in which Jack Lemmon’s lowly insurance-biz drone turns his Manhattan flat into the office love nest.
Modern urban life – professional, romantic, and the growing grey area between the two – was captured here in all its loneliness and mischief.
13. Life of Brian (1979)
Much of Monty Python’s Flying Circus now feels dated – the curse of all revolutionary comedy – but this hallucinatory satire of organised religion is still wincingly sharp. It began as a joke: after the success of The Holy Grail, Eric Idle suggested they should tackle the religious epic next, and proposed the title “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory”.
But the comedic mileage the Pythons extract from their accidental-saviour premise is immense, while leaving the audience dizzy with their constant ironic lurches between epic and humdrum registers. That it provoked nationwide protests on its release is a valuable reminder of comedy’s power. After all, between this and Franco Zeffirelli’s tremblingly sincere Jesus of Nazareth (on whose abandoned sets it was largely shot), which ended up having the more lasting cultural impact?
12. City Lights (1931)
Charlie Chaplin made comedy look so natural, it often feels as if his Little Tramp alter ego is making the film up as he goes along. But a pivotal sequence in this – the last and greatest of his silent features – was the work of months, even though it runs on screen for barely three minutes.
It was the scene in which Virginia Cherrill’s blind flower girl had to somehow mistakenly take the penniless Chaplin for a millionaire: after countless stressful on-set improvisations and experiments, he came up with the idea of having her hear a limousine drive off shortly after their interaction and wrongly assume the vehicle must be his. (In Chaplin’s world, sound was not to be trusted.)
Cherrill, a 20-something newcomer, was driven to distraction by the process: Chaplin even harangued her over her delivery of the line, “Flower, sir?”, because the intonation wasn’t quite right. (Again: this was for a silent film.) In the end, nailing the scene down took 342 takes, shot in five distinct stretches over the course of two years. The result is the fruit of its maker’s perfectionism – and of course, it looks effortless.
11. The Lady Eve (1941)
This was Preston Sturges’s Vertigo – 17 entire years before the thought of a double seduction first beaded Hitchcock’s brow with sweat. The master of screwball sent Henry Fonda’s strait-laced brewery heir on a cruise with Barbara Stanwyck’s alluring card-sharp – who seduces her mark twice over, first as herself and then in the glittering guise of an English blue-blood. It’s wildly sexy and smart, and contains enough snake symbolism to make Freud fall off his couch.
10. Groundhog Day (1993)
Like Frank Capra by way of Franz Kafka, Harold Ramis’s time-looping moral tale (co-written with Danny Rubin) balances classical Hollywood uplift with a rare and brutal existential starkness. The film is dazzlingly conceived, but it simply wouldn’t have worked without Bill Murray, who must be the only male star other than James Stewart who could have played the story’s warm and despairing notes with equal aplomb.
As the weather reporter doomed to infinitely relive February 2nd, Murray plays an everyman who’s granted enough time to try being every man he can, revealing all the possibilities and limits of human endeavour in the process. It’s a film that exposes life as an absurd and meaningless churn – before pointing out that’s all the reason we need to embrace it.
9. Paper Moon (1973)
Here’s Peter Bogdanovich, with a preposterously charming and witty tale of (surrogate?) father-daughter bonding, set (and, by the astonishing look of it, shot) in the Depression-era American midwest. Ryan O’Neal stars as Moses Pray, a smooth-tongued conman who informally adopts a tomboyish young orphan to help him sell Bibles to gullible widows.
That the girl is played by O’Neal’s real-life daughter, Tatum O’Neal, is a casting masterstroke: not only is the two’s filial chemistry a scream, but the viewer’s knowledge that the two are related off-screen aids the script’s hints at a possible equivalent on-screen connection, which stirs a plaintiveness into the caper. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s Madeline Kahn too, as fading showgirl Trixie Delight. One of those rare films you can recommend to everyone you meet.
8. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
If a great comedy is a film with no unfunny scenes, how do you describe one with no unfunny lines? Rob Reiner’s rowdy rock-world spoof, co-written with stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, must be the most relentlessly hilarious film on this list, with huge laughs elicited by even minor interactions and throwaway asides.
Its secret is its wonderfully worn-in characters: guitarists David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel and bassist Derek Smalls are entirely plausible as lifelong bandmates, no matter how ludicrous their latest album launch and tour becomes. Everyone who discovered this film as a teenager had a friend who thought they were watching a real documentary, and every parodic element is so perfectly pitched it’s hard to blame them.
7. Annie Hall (1977)
The greatest film Woody Allen ever made was also the Woodiest of them all: a New York-set romance full of agony and yearning and a wrenching awareness of life’s brevity, all expressed through a barrage of immaculately turned jokes. It opens in post-mortem mode, with Allen’s Alvy Singer telling the audience he can’t figure out why his relationship with Annie ended.
By way of an answer, the following 90 minutes describes the contours of a precious and mutually formative relationship that dies for the same reasons it came to life in the first place – the friction between its two parties – and also because, more broadly, all beautiful things eventually must.
With her quirky manner and perkily androgynous outfits, Diane Keaton’s Annie could hardly be less of a clichéd dream woman. But their chemistry – which is also the chemistry of New York City itself – makes their romance irresistible, and sets out the winning formula for the modern rom-com as we know it. Read our Annie Hall review
6. Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Often wrongly and limitingly described as satire, Sacha Baron Cohen’s work cuts a lot deeper than Have I Got News for You. In fact – as evinced by his first feature-length outing as his Kazakh roving reporter alter ego, directed by Larry Charles – the British comedian’s speciality is clowning, albeit of a dark, grotesque sort that corners the audience with their own laughter, turning us into the butt of the joke.
Borat isn’t a send-up of central Asian TV journalists, or non-westerners in general. Rather, he’s every absurd and unexamined first-world fear about foreigners, wrapped up in an ill-fitting, cement-coloured suit. As such, while travelling across the United States, this impossible figure is able to effortlessly break through the locals’ rational defences, hauling their fears, neuroses and prejudices (and, occasionally, unsung kindness and tolerance too) into the sunlight.
Baron Cohen’s near-suicidal nerve as a performer – seen again in 2009’s underrated Brüno – adds yet another layer to the comedy: it’s impossible to watch him at work without constantly wondering how he isn’t being arrested and/or beaten up. As a document of America on the brink of post-Bush Jr meltdown, the resulting film is invaluable; as a comedy it leaves you reeling on the ropes.
5. The Music Box (1932)
Over the course of their 30-year collaboration, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made 106 films together: 27 features and 79 shorts. Lists like this typically only permit full-length films, but more than any other silent comics, Laurel and Hardy’s brilliance was most evident in their peerless run of two-reeler talkies made for Hal Roach Studios in the late 1920s and 30s.
This Sisyphean mini-masterpiece, in which the pair repeatedly fail to transport a piano up a flight of steps, boiled down their work’s underlying message to its purest and most existentially crushing form: all human endeavour is absurd, self-defeating and futile, and screamingly funny because of it.
4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
The brink of nuclear war understood as male-posturing farce, this is Stanley Kubrick’s funniest, tightest and most gleefully cynical picture. The director initially planned to tackle the subject as a melodrama, but was struck that the prospect of mutually assured destruction was such a hideous joke that only comedy was properly equipped for the task.
Enter Peter Sellers, times three: as RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, US President Merkin Muffley, and Strangelove himself, a paraplegic ex-Nazi now serving as a scientific advisor to the American government. (The studio wanted Sellers to play the bomber pilot Major “King” Kong too – but a mixture of accent anxiety and a mid-shoot injury led to him being replaced by the seasoned western character actor Slim Pickens.)
The film was popular enough to make Columbia twitchy. A “zany novelty” was how the studio’s publicity department sold it – and definitely not anti-military, even though it mercilessly exposed the West’s national security regime at the time as the willy-waving-with-airs that it was. Read our Dr Strangelove review
3. The Awful Truth (1937)
There are two groups of people in this world: those who consider this first of three collaborations between Cary Grant and Irene Dunne to be the greatest romantic comedy ever made, and those who haven’t yet got around to watching it. Leo McCarey’s raucously steamy divorce farce stars the duo as a separating couple bent on sabotaging one another’s rebound flings – only to realise in the process that the two are better suited than anyone else they’re ever likely to meet.
Not only is it outrageously funny, it’s also a wonderful film about what it means to make someone laugh. Grant and Dunne’s amusement at each other’s ploys often has an orgasmic quality: the two leave each other helpless in ways rival lovers simply can’t match. (Witness the absurdly sexy tickling scene, in which Grant, hiding behind the apartment door, stimulates Dunne with a pen as she listens to a gentleman caller’s dreadful poetry.)
Adapted from a stage play, the film’s script was written by the racy former lit-girl sensation Vi?a Delmar – but it was largely torn up on set by McCarey, a veteran of Laurel and Hardy and Marx Brothers films, who encouraged the cast to improvise as much as possible. Grant, who was used to the far more regimented methods at Paramount, initially panicked and begged the head of Columbia Pictures to get him off the film – but within a week, he was doing some of the funniest work of his life.
2. Some Like It Hot (1959)
If comedy is what happens when pleasure collides with surprise, it’s surely impossible to argue with this list’s top two. Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing screwball escapade provides the first of those in giddy abundance: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dodge the mob in drag with mostly unwitting assistance from an incandescent Marilyn Monroe – who wasn’t merely the hot that some like, but boundlessly warm and witty too, with an underplayed ache of sadness that gives the film its rare spiritual lift.
Wilder may have often been decried as a misanthrope, but what’s striking today is how generous this particular film is: both to its viewers, who are pounded with perfectly tuned zingers and scrapes from the off, and its characters, all of whom the film is besotted with, flaws and all. Hence the power of the script’s immortal last line, dreamt up on the day by Wilder’s co-writer IAL Diamond.
At its time, the whole thing was a provocation, since the depiction of men in women’s clothing was still forbidden by the Motion Picture Association of America’s Production Code. The script’s numerous double entendres were too – so when it came to the business of certification, the MPAA sniffily told Wilder they weren’t going to give him one. No problem: his film thrived regardless, throwing open the doors of a new era of comedic freedom as it did so.
1. Sherlock Jr. (1924)
It’s possible that someone will eventually make a funnier film than Buster Keaton did, but considering it hasn’t happened in the past 100 years, it’s probably not worth holding your breath. A veteran of the vaudeville circuit with an unparalleled feel for slapstick’s poetry, recklessness and craft, Keaton took to moving images like a natural. From Steamboat Bill Jr’s collapsing house to the skew-whiff prefab of One Week, his gags knock you sideways like carelessly carried planks of wood, and any number of his films could arguably top this list. (For Orson Welles, 1926’s The General was unbeatable.)
But the sheer range of this 1924 masterwork is hard to argue with, from the outrageous climactic motorcycle chase (Keaton on the handlebars, oblivious to the driver having fallen off miles ago) to the uproariously tense booby-trapped pool game, to the still-eye-popping dream sequence in which Keaton’s hapless projectionist finds himself trapped inside a movie, and snapping from one shot to the next at the editor’s whim. The ingenuity is unparalleled; the laughs unstoppable. “You couldn’t make this now” is something it’s easy to feel about favourite comedies of the past. But really and truly, no one could make this now.
