The best How I Met Your Mother episodes show why the sitcom was so beloved and critically successful during its 2005-2014. Across its 9 seasons and 208 episodes, How I Met Your Mother redefined the blueprint of what to expect from sitcoms focusing on the dating exploits of a group of friends in their mid-20s. Starring Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, and Alyson Hannigan, HIMYM managed to juggle being absolutely hilarious and tear-jerkingly emotional when it needed to.

Few sitcoms before or since have been as relatable or well-written, as the best episodes of HIMYM prove. The sitcom continues to stand as an example of how absurd and ridiculous storylines can go hand-in-hand with grounded narrative arcs that almost all viewers can empathize with, all of which are held together by the incredible performances of the core HIMYM cast. There are dozens of stand-out installments from the show’s runs, but the best episodes of How I Met Your Mother stand as examples of the many strengths that ensured it would be ed as one of the highest-quality sitcoms of the last few decades.

10 Tick Tick Tick

Season 7, Episode 10

How I Met Your Mother season 7’s “Tick Tick Tick” is one of the best episodes of the show both from a comedy perspective and because of how well it handles complex emotions. This is the episode of HIMYM that sees Robin and Barney wake up together after they’ve cheated on their respective partners. At the time, Robin was with Kal Penn’s Kevin, while Barney is still in a relationship with Nazanin Boniadi’s Nora.

Barney and Robin decide to break things off with Nora and Kevin while on a cruise. “Tick Tick Tick” comes to an emotional close when Robin can’t bring herself to leave Kevin, which has Barney heartbroken. There’s also a great side story involving Ted, Lily, and Marshall where they go to a concert. Ted and Marshall get high (though, since Ted is telling the story to his kids in the future, he refers to marijuana as “sandwiches”). They end up going on an epic adventure to find the WC which they think takes hours but, hilariously, only took them around 20 minutes.

9 Showdown

HIMYM Season 2, Episode 20

Many of the best How I Met Your Mother episodes focus on Barney Stinson, which is unsurprising given that Neil Patrick Harris’s character is a fan favorite. It’s a running joke throughout the earlier seasons of the show that Barney believes his long-lost father is The Price is Right host Bob Barker. Season 2’s “Showdown” sees this longstanding gag come to a head when, at long last, Barney is selected as a contestant on the show.

Of course, he only applied to get the chance to stand face-to-face with the man who may be his dad, though the many scenes where he and the gang learn to play The Price is Right so well Barney is guaranteed to win are hilarious - though not as funny as the moment Barney finally meets Bob Barker. What’s more, there’s an equally funny Lily and Marshall plot where they try to live separately ahead of their wedding to prove they’re not co-dependant. This fails spectacularly and has some of the funniest (and sweetest) Lily and Marshall moments in the entire show.

8 Swarley

HIMYM Season 2, Episode 7

Season 2 contains several of the best How I Met Your Mother episodes, and it’s this strong start that likely ensured the show would gain a devoted fanbase incredibly quickly. One of the highlights of both HIMYM season 2 and the show overall is episode 7, “Swarley”. This takes place during the brief period that Marshall and Lily were on a break, though this isn’t why it ranks among the best episodes of HIMYM (though the emotional aspects of Lily and Marshall navigating their feelings after Marshall manages to get a date with a local barista are strong examples of how the hit sitcom handles dramatic narratives).

The main reason “Swarley” ranks among the best HIMYM episodes is subplot involving Barney which, to this day, stands as one of the most hilarious Stinson storylines. Barney is plagued by teasing throughout the entirety of the episode after a barista mistakes his name for “Swarley”. It’s completely ridiculous, but seeing the ever-suited Barney Stinson driven to near-insanity by the rest of the gang calling him Swarley throughout the episode remains priceless, and “Swarley” remains one of the best examples of both How I Met Your Mother's hilarious writing and Neil Patrick Harris’s superb performance in the sitcom.

7 Blitzgiving

HIMYM Season 6, Episode 10

There were some great How I Met Your Mother’s 9 seasons, though the funniest is undoubtedly season 6’s “Blitzgiving”. It’s come to be regarded as one of the best HIMYM episodes primarily because of the concept it introduces to viewers and then hilariously makes the center of the comedy - that of the “Blitz”. In short, Lily, Marshall, and Ted have a college friend (Jorge Garcia’s Steve) who they refer to as The Blitz. The joke is that The Blitz carries a curse that ensures he’ll always miss out on epic moments due to bad luck or poor timing.

Much to his horror, Ted realizes that he’s inherited the curse from Steve in “Blitzgiving”. Ted continues to miss all sorts of unforgettable moments, though eventually manages to the curse of the Blitz back to its original owner. Like many of the best episodes of How I Met Your Mother, there are plenty of emotional moments as well as funny ones too, and in “Blitzgiving” these all focus on Ted coming to understand why his girlfriend Zoey (Jennifer Morrison) is so upset that her stepdaughter wanted to spend Thanksgiving without her.

6 The Playbook

HIMYM Season 5, Episode 8

Season 5’s “The Playbook” could easily have been one of the How I Met Your Mother episodes that aged poorly given that it focuses on the many ridiculous ways Barney Stinson lies to women to trick them into his bed. However, the emotional arc underpinning the story of “The Playbook”, as well as the fact that the rest of the gang rightly see Barney’s antics as incredibly problematic, ensure that it’s instead come to be regarded as one of the best in the show. In short, “The Playbook” is the episode that forces Barney to finally accept that his approach to romance is sleazy and unacceptable.

However, there are plenty of hilarious moments too. Barney’s final play from his infamous Playbook, “The Scuba-Diver”, is absurd and ridiculous, leading to a laugh-out-loud moment that sees him try to seduce a woman in a bar while wearing a full set of scuba gear. There’s also a heartfelt resolution when Lily manages to get Barney to see that he’s only falling back into old habits because he’s still in love with Robin. It’s an episode with a huge amount of character growth for Barney, and the perfect mix of his character in earlier seasons with the more mature Stinson he became by the end of HIMYM.

5 How Your Mother Met Me

HIMYM Season 9, Episode 16

How I Met Your Mother season 9 was quite divisive among the show’s fanbase. However, this doesn’t stop it from containing one of the best episodes of HIMYM - “How Your Mother Met Me”, the 16th episode of the final chapter of the story. As the title suggests, “How Your Mother Met Me” focuses on Chrsin Miloti’s Tracy, the How I Met Your Mother. It finally lifts a lid on the show’s central mystery, explaining to viewers exactly how the mother of Ted’s children met and fell in love with him.

Like almost every storyline involving Tracy, it’s incredibly emotional, especially when it explores moments in Tracy’s life, like the death of her previous boyfriend. There are also plenty of easter-eggs and references to earlier episodes of HIMYM which reveal all the times Ted and Tracy almost met over the years, cementing the fact that they were more-or-less destined to be together. “How Your Mother Met Me” is perhaps the high point of season 9, and shows that even though the ending of How I Met Your Mother may not have satisfied every single fan, the series hadn’t lost its touch during the final episodes.

4 The Naked Man

HIMYM Season 4, Episode 9

A key reason How I Met Your Mother became so popular was how it combined observations about the minefield of dating with some absurd concepts - and few episodes mixed these two themes better than season 4’s “The Naked Man”. The character arcs for the likes of Ted were fairly standard for the show, in this case showing how he tried to move on from ex-fiance Stella (Sarah Chalke) by dating Vicky (Courtney Ford), it’s one of Robin’s dating revelations that made “The Naked Man” such an unforgettable episode of HIMYM.

Essentially, Robin reveals she went on a date with a man who she ended up sleeping with because of a ridiculous move he pulled - removing all of his clothes while she went to the bathroom so that she’d return to find him naked. Barney and Ted are astounded this worked, and so track down the man in question, Mitch (Adam Paul). They don’t believe him when he explains how his move, from which the episode draws its name, has a high success rate. It’s completely ridiculous, and it’s this ridiculousness that ensures “The Naked Man” stands as the perfect example of How I Met Your Mother at its absurd best.

3 Bad News

HIMYM Season 6, Episode 13

Many of the best How I Met Your Mother episodes are regarded highly by viewers because of how funny they are. However, this isn’t the case with season 6’s “Bad News”. This installment is one of the best episodes of HIMYM for a single reason - “Bad News” is the episode that Marshall’s dad dies. It’s beyond emotional, with the moment that Marshall gets the news from Lily that his father has ed away being one of the most delicately handled depictions of grief and loss not just in How I Met Your Mother, but in any modern sitcom.

The level of thought and planning that went into “Bad News” is astounding. There’s a countdown throughout with numbers appearing in the background which, upon second viewing, leads up to the moment that Marshall finally learns the terrible news. Of course, there’s also some hilarity to be found too, in this case with the gang trying to figure out if Barney’s doppelganger is real or simply Barney pretending to be different people.

2 The Pineapple Incident

HIMYM Season 1, Episode 10

The unique setup of How I Met Your Mother is that every episode is Ted’s recollection of events as he explains the exploits of him and his friends to his kids in the future. This allows the sitcom to play around with perspective using unreliable narration and other narrative tools, often to hilarious effect. Of all the episodes of HIMYM, few have used this creative freedom as well as season 1’s “The Pineapple Incident”. Episode 10 of the first season of the show is still regarded by many as one of the best How I Met Your Mother episodes of all, and it’s easy to see why.

The episode starts with Ted waking up in bed with a woman he doesn’t recognize and, even more confusingly (especially to Marshall, for some reason), a pineapple on his bedside table. The rest of the episode involves Ted, Lily, and Marshall trying to piece together exactly what happened the previous evening, with many conflicting and hilarious s of exactly what Ted got up to. To make things even funnier, the mystery of the pineapple was never solved.

1 Slap Bet

HIMYM Season 2, Episode 9

If season 6’s “Bad News” represents the peak of HIMYM when it comes to emotionally gripping dramatic storylines, then season 2’s “Slap Bet” is the absolute high point of the sitcom's comedic writing. The season 2 installment is still regarded as the best How I Met Your Mother episode by many, and it’s difficult to argue otherwise given that it introduced not one, but two of the show’s best running gags - the titular Slap Bet, and Robin’s former life as Canadian teen pop-star Robin Sparkles.

The comedic timing around the Robin Sparkles arc is absolutely hilarious and impeccably written. Throughout the entire episode, both the gang and viewers are led to believe that Robin’s deep dark secret is some kind of adult video (a theory mainly put forward by Barney). When the final reveal arrives and the music video to the Robin Sparkles’ hit “Let’s Go To The Mall” arrives, it kicks off one of the most hilarious pieces of character development in HIMYM.

However, this isn’t as funny as the slap bet itself, which repeatedly returns in later How I Met Your Mother episodes. Jason Segel and Neil Patrick Harris deliver some of their best HIMYM performances, and nothing the show did before or since has been quite as funny as Marshall’s intensity and Barney’s fear whenever the former raised a hand to the latter. “Slap Bet” is perhaps the episode that defines all the quirkiness and adept handling of recurring jokes that made How I Met Your Mother so great across all nine of its seasons, and it remains the quintessential and best episode of the show out of all 208 installments.