Summary

• Underrated comedies often miss mass audiences due to being too abstract, surreal, or lacking star power.
• Comedy is subjective, with broad appeal needed for popularity, but niche genres deserve more attention.
• From bizarre road trips to dark comedies, lesser-known films like "An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn" and "Technoboss" offer unique laughs.

Lots of great comedy movies don't reach the audiences that they deserve, and there have been plenty of underrated comedies in recent years. Some comedies are just too weird or too surreal to ever reach a mass audience. Others don't have the budget or the star power to make much of an impact, but this doesn't mean that they aren't as good as many other more successful comedies.

More so than other genres, comedy is extremely subjective. Comedy movies often come down to a matter of taste, so only those with broad appeal will ever reach the highest levels of popularity. Still, there are plenty of dark comedies, road trip movies, political satires and crime capers which deserve much more attention than they have gotten in the last ten years.

10 Quiz Lady (2023)

Two mismatched sisters take part in a quiz show to pay off their mother's gambling debts

The movie subverts what would typically be expected of a comedy duo between the two, as Awkwafina plays the pragmatic and straight-laced sister, while Oh is given the role as the maladjusted wildcard.

Sandra Oh and Awkwafina play two sisters who must reunite and embark upon a bizarre road trip to repay their mother's gambling debts and retrieve their kidnapped dog in Quiz Lady. The movie subverts what would typically be expected of a comedy duo between the two, as Awkwafina plays the pragmatic and straight-laced sister, while Oh is given the role as the maladjusted wildcard.

Quiz Lady packs a lot of laughs into the cross-country road trip, and the destination, a glamorous quiz show is just as funny, with Will Ferrell and Jason Schwartzman playing two particularly memorable ing roles. Quiz Lady's great casting makes the most of a fun script. The humor ranges from heartwarming to R-rated and raunchy, but it's sure to leave audiences smiling, especially for anyone who can relate to the trials of having difficult family they can't help but love.

9 Swiss Army Man (2016)

A man befriends a dead body which he finds on a beach

The story of a man lost in the wilderness who uses a corpse as a multitool to aid him in his survival was never going to have mass appeal.

Swiss Army Man has amassed a cult following in the years since its release, but it still hasn't reached an audience that's commensurate with its quality. The story of a man lost in the wilderness who uses a corpse as a multitool to aid him in his survival was never going to have mass appeal, especially not with the corpse half-reanimated and talking in a low-pitched, groaning voice.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directing duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once, infuse Swiss Army Man with pitch-black comedic beats, and these are sold with stone-faced solemnity by Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano. More than just a survival movie, Swiss Army Man is about learning how to live, even if one of the characters has been dead for quite some time.

8 An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

An enigmatic performer brings chaos to a small town

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is a thoroughly unusual movie which blends elements of a crime caper with a separate story about love and deceit.

Aubrey Plaza anchors a brilliant ensemble cast including Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement and Craig Robinson in An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn. Robinson plays the enigmatic Beverly, a performer of some kind who has managed to attract a frenzied cult following despite only communicating in low grunts. ments for his show become the talk of the town, even though nobody with tickets even knows what he's going to do on stage.

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is a thoroughly unusual movie which blends elements of a crime caper with a separate story about love and deceit. The answers that it comes up with are entirely, intentionally unsatisfying. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn certainly isn't for everyone, but there will be many dedicated fans who can appreciate its obscure charms, even while it toys with its audience.

7 The French Dispatch (2021)

Writers submit their pieces for the final edition of a literary magazine

In many ways, it is the quintessential Wes Anderson movie, the one in which he indulges all of his unique tastes without compromise.

The French Dispatch has a huge cast, bold stylistic choices, and a penchant for idiosyncratic dialogue that frequently tips over into the absurd. In many ways, it is the quintessential Wes Anderson movie, the one in which he indulges all of his unique tastes without compromise. While this makes it a treat for his most ardent irers, The French Dispatch failed to reach the same level of success as some of his crowdpleasers, like The Grand Budapest Hotel or Rushmore.

The French Dispatch is broken into different segments, each of which represents a different writer's submission to the final issue of a fictional magazine. Each author's style bleeds into the narrative, the dialogue, and even the visuals of the segment. This makes The French Dispatch a fascinating meditation on the art of writing, as if Anderson is adapting several of his own stories in different styles. The voices of the authors are reminiscent of the many pseudonyms of Fernando Pessoa.

6 The Duke (2022)

An elderly British man steals a valuable artwork to draw attention to his political cause

Based on a true story, The Duke is a great showcase for Jim Broadbent's affability and comedic timing.

Like The Lady in the Van and The Phantom of the Open, The Duke continues the recent trend of lighthearted British comedies about elderly people who shun society's expectations and show young people how to live. It's a peculiar subgenre that's been developing over the past decade, but with so many great comedic actors aging out of younger roles, it makes sense that now is the time.

The Duke stars Jim Broadbent as a man who steals a painting from the National Gallery in protest at the government's decision to invest so much money into buying it rather than taking care of its own people. Based on a true story, The Duke is a great showcase for Broadbent's affability and comedic timing. Helen Mirren is also outstanding as his long-suffering wife who is content to put up with most of his hare-brained schemes but draws the line at grand larceny.

5 Technoboss (2019)

A Portugues technician drives around the countryside, absorbed by his own internal fantasies

Technoboss is a road trip movie with no destination, and nobody in the enger seat.

Technoboss is a Portuguese musical comedy which is as dark as they come. Miguel Lobo Antunes plays a listless security systems technician who is creeping toward retirement. His job consists of traveling to different hotels, resorts and care homes dotted around the Portuguese countryside, but this really amounts to endless hours on the road, which he uses to write mournful songs.

Technoboss is a road trip movie with no destination, and nobody in the enger seat. Luìs pines for a receptionist at a hotel, but he lacks the self-belief to pursue anything that he thinks could make him happy. Instead, he lets life's niggling injustices wash over him. The stylized set design and the lo-fi musical elements all contribute to the feeling of artifice, as if Luìs is constructing a different world for himself, but whenever he steps out of his car the reality hits him like a ton of bricks.

4 Toni Erdmann (2016)

A man adopts a strange persona to try and reconnect with his daughter

The entire plot is like an embarrassing dad joke that goes too far, although there are plenty of reasons why this isn't a typical father-daughter relationship.

Sandra Hüller has recently been propelled to international stardom for her roles in two Oscar-nominated movies, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, but she has been making brilliant movies in Europe for decades. Toni Erdmann lets her flex her comedy muscles, as she plays a business consultant whose life is disrupted when her unreliable father re-enters the picture and tries to insert himself into her business dealings.

Peter Simonischek plays the father, a man who adapts the bizarre persona of "Toni Erdmann" with an ill-fitting wig and a ridiculous set of false teeth. The entire plot is like an embarrassing dad joke that goes too far, although there are plenty of reasons why this isn't a typical father-daughter relationship. Toni Erdmann won several awards when it was released, but it's difficult for comedies to find substantial audiences in countries with other languages.

An American remake of Toni Erdmann with Kristen Wiig and Jack Nicholson was reportedly in the works, but progress seems to have stalled long ago.

3 Mindhorn (2016)

A washed-up actor is pulled into a murder investigation

Julian Barratt stars as Richard Thorncroft, a washed-up actor most famous for playing a TV detective in the 1980s with a bionic eye that can detect lies.

Julian Barratt has been a key figure in some of the best British sitcoms of the last 20 years, including The Mighty Boosh, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Nathan Barley. He doesn't have as many film credits to his name, but he wrote and starred in Mindhorn with Simon Farnaby, another British comedic actor with an impressive list of cult comedies under his belt.

Barratt stars as Richard Thorncroft, a washed-up actor most famous for playing a TV detective in the 1980s with a bionic eye that can detect lies. Thorncroft is invited back to the Isle of Man, where his detective show took place, to assist the police in tracking down an escaped mental patient who is wanted for murder. As the man is convinced that Detective Mindhorn is the only one who can help him, Thorncroft also falls into the delusion that he is a gifted detective.

2 Logan Lucky (2017)

Two brothers team up for an ambitious heist on a motor speedway

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver strike up a wonderful comedic balance in Logan Lucky, and they are assisted by Daniel Craig with a delightfully ludicrous Southern accent.

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver strike up a wonderful comedic balance in Logan Lucky, and they are assisted by Daniel Craig with a delightfully ludicrous Southern accent, two years before he starred in Knives Out. Tatum and Driver play two brothers in West Virginia who are down on their luck and running out of options to keep their heads above water. They decide to stick it to the system by pulling a heist on a motor speedway during the biggest race of the year.

Logan Lucky is a brilliant heist movie, which can be expected considering it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the mastermind behind the Ocean's trilogy. The fun and games of pulling off the audacious heist are as thrilling as they are funny, but the second half of the movie cranks up the tension as an FBI agent comes in to solve the mystery. Many heist movies would end earlier, with the heroes riding off into the sunset, but Logan Lucky is just as interested in the fallout.

1 The Death Of Stalin (2017)

Soviet politicians rush to fill the power vacuum after Stalin's death

The Death of Stalin is a timeless political farce about a specific moment in history.

The Death of Stalin reinforces Armando Iannucci's reputation as one of the sharpest political satirists in the business, but instead of dissecting contemporary political systems as he did in The Thick of It and Veep, he casts his eye back to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. In doing so, he reveals the uncanny similarities between Stalinist Russia and 21st century Western democracies. The atmosphere is decidedly more authoritarian, but the political jostling and relentless spin is largely the same.

The Death of Stalin's cast is packed with comedy greats, from Steve Buscemi to Michael Palin, but it's Jason Isaacs who steals the show as Soviet Marshall Gregory Zhukov. The stern military man gets the lion's share of the most outrageous insults and curse words, and he imposes his will with the full backing of the army. The Death of Stalin is a timeless political farce about a specific moment in history.