In 1980, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker changed film comedy forever with their masterpiece Airplane!, widely regarded to be the funniest movie ever made. There are few comedies with quite as many jokes, with the film cramming as many into each scene as possible, and even fewer comedies whose jokes have a hit rate as high as Airplane!’s.
Although Airplane! is the reigning champ and probably always will be (as the comedy genre is slowly dying with duds like Holmes & Watson), there are a handful of great comedies — from the groundbreaking classics of the Marx Brothers to the improv-heavy efforts of the Apatow era — that have come close to matching its greatness.
10 Airplane! Is The Best: There Isn’t A Dull Moment
Judd Apatow’s This is 40, a prime example of an overlong comedy, is 133 minutes long and has maybe five big laughs — and that’s being generous. Airplane!, on the other hand, is 87 minutes long and has a big laugh every couple of seconds.
There isn’t a dull moment in the entire movie. There’s no appropriate time to go to the bathroom and no one will say, “Oh, this bit’s really good,” because every bit is really good.
9 Closest Contender: Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy
After honing their uniquely absurdist comic stylings on Saturday Night Live, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell took that style to the big screen with Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, one of the wackiest and most inspired comedies ever made.
McKay and Ferrell have delivered a ton of hilarious comedies over the years — from Talladega Nights to Step Brothers — but none have felt as much like a breath of fresh air as their game-changing debut.
8 Airplane! Is The Best: ZAZ Spent Six Years Perfecting The Script
ZAZ accidentally stumbled upon the perfect framework for their feature debut while taping commercials for sketch material. Six years later, the movie actually went into production. The comedy dream team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker watched and rewatched Zero Hour!, the movie’s satirical basis, until it was imprinted on their brains. The trio hammered out the script until every single line was laugh-out-loud funny and there was no dead weight.
7 Closest Contender: This Is Spinal Tap
Rob Reiner revolutionized the mockumentary with This is Spinal Tap, a parody of rockumentaries like Gimme Shelter and The Last Waltz that were popular at the time. Spinal Tap follows the satirical exploits of a fictional hair metal band (played by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer).
With mostly improvised dialogue and scenes whose accuracy has been confirmed by real-life rockers, This is Spinal Tap captured the music industry so perfectly that some viewers thought it was a genuine documentary.
6 Airplane! Is The Best: Dramatic Actors Play Comedic Dialogue Completely Straight
Since a lot of Airplane!’s dialogue was taken verbatim from Zero Hour!, where it’s supposed to be genuinely dramatic, and the rest of the dialogue maintains that spirit, Abrahams and the Zucker brothers decided not to cast comedians in the movie.
Instead, they chose dramatic actors who could play the comedic dialogue completely straight. Ironically, this is how Leslie Nielsen ended up becoming one of the greatest comedy actors of all time.
5 Closest Contender: Shaun Of The Dead
Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s airtight screenplay for Shaun of the Dead brought the tropes and conventions of the zombie genre to the streets of London and layered it on top of a typical romantic comedy with the kind of well-rounded characters, brilliantly structured plotting, and masterfully crafted dialogue that aren’t usually seen in zombie movies or rom-coms.
It’s a movie that can be watched a million times and still be enjoyed. The same can be said for Wright’s follow-up, Hot Fuzz, but Shaun is ever-so-slightly more perfect.
4 Airplane! Is The Best: Every Scene Has Jokes, And Every Joke Lands
The average Hollywood comedy that hits theaters these days will have around three or four big set pieces, with seven or eight scenes leading up to each one, relying on the anticipation of the set pieces to keep audiences hooked.
In Airplane!, every scene is filled to the brim with jokes. And more importantly, every one of those jokes land. Joke-heavy comedy tends to be hit-and-miss. It doesn’t matter if there are a dozen jokes a minute when only one of them works. In Airplane!, they all land — no pun intended.
3 Closest Contender: When Harry Met Sally
What makes When Harry Met Sally the greatest rom-com of all time is that it’s every rom-com rolled into one. Everything that’s funny about love and relationships and romance is packed into this movie.
Director Rob Reiner, screenwriter Nora Ephron, and perfectly-matched leads Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan brought something hilarious, poignant, beautiful, or otherwise notable to every single scene.
2 Airplane! Is The Best: The Spoof Targets Are Dated, But The Humor Is Timeless
Hardly anybody these days has seen or even heard of Zero Hour!, the schlocky disaster movie that provided the plot, characters, and even some dialogue for Airplane!, and the celebrity cameos, from Ethel Merman to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, have been replaced in the public consciousness by more current stars, but that doesn’t matter.
The spoof targets of Airplane! might be dated, but the humor is timeless. In a hundred years, when every copy of Zero Hour! might cease to exist, Airplane! will still be as funny as it is today — and as funny as it was in 1980.
1 Closest Contender: Monty Python And The Holy Grail
On the surface, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a spoof of the Arthurian legend, but that barely scrapes the surface of the layers of comedy that this movie has to offer. It uses film language, meta-ness, and creative editing to parody cinema itself.
Holy Grail is as wildly unpredictable as an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, culminating in a hilariously anticlimactic ending that gives the whole movie a punchline.
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