People love to laugh. People love to watch film comedies and recite their favorite lines with their friends and laugh all over again. But here’s a surprising stat: despite our love of laughter, the highest grossing comedy of all time – we’re talking adult comedy, no animated children’s movies or hybrids like Ted and it’s not in the top 10 highest grossing films of all time, not in the top 50, not even in the top 100. It’s 132nd.
Now that's funny. But we’re going to celebrate the best of those funny flicks. Of course the other side of comedy is tragedy, and what’s tragic here are the movies we couldn’t fit in the top 20: Airplane, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, just to name a few. But we think we’ve found 20 of the most hilariously distasteful, absurd, offensive, clever, and goofy scenes in the history of film.
Get ready to bust your guts with the 20 Funniest Movie Scenes Of All Time.
20. SUPERBAD: MCLOVIN IS BORN
Back in 2007, Superbad was a surprise hit and it featured a just as surprising scene-stealer, Christopher Mintze-Plasse in his very first screen role as Fogell. Produced by Judd “Everything He Touches Turns to Gold” Apatow and written by a team of childhood friends in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (they wrote it as teenagers, though it was produced years later), the film revolves around two high-schoolers (Jonah Hill as Seth and Michael Cera as Evan) desperate to lose their virginity.
In this great scene, a phenomenon was born: McLovin. The boy's geeky friend Fogell gets a fake ID, a teen movie staple. But Fogell’s goes horribly wrong in the eyes of Seth and Evan. He can choose any name on Earth for his fake ID and he chooses McLovin. Evan asks, “What, are you trying to be an Irish R&B singer?” Bizarrely for this scrawny white kid, he claims his second choice would’ve been Muhammed. And it was just McLovin, no first name. Again, Evan comes back at him with, “Who are you, Seal?” Hill, in his breakthrough role, loses his cool in hilarious fashion as Evan and Seth walk off, disgusted with their buddy’s ID fiasco.
19. THE PARTY: BIRDIE NUM NUM
Right off the top we’re going to address the elephant in the room (pun intended, but you’ll have to have seen the movie to get it): there’s definitely a political correctness factor to this scene, and the whole movie for that matter. The Party was released in 1968 and this might not have been a big deal to most moviegoers back then, but immortal comic actor Peter Sellers, a white English actor, portrays a brown-skinned Indian man named Hrundi V. Bakshi, complete with Indian accent and brown makeup. That certainly wouldn’t fly today, and we get that it can be viewed as insensitive, but the film is funny if you can get past that.
In this so ‘60s scene, Bakshi, a bit of an awkward loner at this Hollywood party, wanders the room and encounters a bird in a cage. “Would you like some food, Polly?” he asks it. He sees its food bowl, labeled “BIRDIE NUM NUM” and repeats the phrase over and over again while he feeds it. Every move Bakshi makes is inadvertently awkward, from throwing a bunch of food and making a mess to spilling the food and making a bigger mess to finding some weird intercom that inadvertently transmits all his weird sounds and chants of “Birdie num num” for all the party-goers ears to hear.
18. THE HANGOVER: END CREDITS
Hang on a minute, you might be saying… you’re claiming the The Hangover, the breakout movie of 2009, is side-splittingly funny literally from top to bottom, featuring breakout performances from Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, an insane cameo by Mike Tyson, a maniacally insane and naked Ken Jeong, and one unforgettable night in Las Vegas.
The whole plot of the movie centers around the guys trying to find their lost friend, retracing their steps from a crazy night, which they can’t because they blacked out. But the end credits piece it all together, as they find a camera that documented everything, in all its ridiculous and graphic glory. Notably insane moments: Helms’ character happily yanks out a tooth, the gang parties with Carrot Top, Galifianakis’ beer belly gets pierced, Helms punches Wayne Newton, and Cooper pretends to punch Tyson. It’s the perfect hilarious button on a great comedy.
17. OFFICE SPACE: PRINTER MURDER
In 1999, director Mike Judge emerged from Office Space. A world where ive-aggressive middle managers are weirdly obsessed with the cover sheets on TPS reports, and where the strange quiet guy isn’t noticed when he threatens to set the building on fire over a stapler.
And then there are the simple frustrations, like when that stupid printer jams and says weird, indecipherable things like “PC load letter.” This movie takes those frustrations one step further, to a place we’d all like to go in our secret desires. And that would be a place where you drag the printer out into a secluded area and beat it like a mob rat. That’s exactly what our heroes do, with hilarious results, as three office workers take turns kicking, stomping and beating the printer with a baseball bat, until one of them gets personal with it, gets in close and punches away at it, while his partners pull him away as though he’s gone too far in beating that mob rat’s head to a bloody pulp. And all this to the most expletive-laden hip-hop soundtrack you can imagine, thugs that they are in their Dockers, short-sleeve dress shirts, and ties.
16. THE BIG LEBOWSKI: INTRO TO JESUS
No, we’re not talking about the Jesus, with the whole son of God, miracle worker, risen from the dead thing. This Jesus, from The Big Lebowski (1995), is an entirely different cat. The Cohen Brothers film is filled with unique characters, but with John Turturro’s Jesus Quintana character, they really hit the oddball pin (bowling pun intended) on the head.
When we’re first introduced to Jesus, he’s dressed in head to toe lavender, from the shoes to his jumpsuit, as he prepares to bowl a strike, unhindered by his plethora of huge rings and oddly long pinky fingernail. He suggestively licks his ball (yeah, he does), bowls his strike, and does a strange victory dance, all to the soundtrack of a Spanish version of “Hotel California.” Then it’s bizarrely revealed that Jesus is a convicted pedophile and we’re shown how he had to go door to door to “tell everyone he was a pederast.”
15. AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME: JOHNSON WORDPLAY
In 1997, Mike Myers banked on his Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. He wrote it and starred in it as the titular ‘60s spy who was frozen and awakened in the ‘90s, as well as his nemesis, Dr. Evil. Its combination of satire, potty humor, slapstick, and sight gags spawned two sequels and this brilliantly silly scene from the sequel, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
The long and short of it (pun intended) is it’s a two-minute long phallic joke. Dr. Evil’s rocket launches out of his island lair, clearly looking like a long shaft with two spheres toward the bottom. When it shows up on government radar, the radar tech named Johnson (Clint Howard) points it out to his colonel and Johnson says, “It looks like a giant --” and the scene cuts to a pilot gasping, “Dick!” But he’s actually talking to his co-pilot, named Dick, who says, “Oh my God, it looks like a huge --” and cut to a new scene with a birdwatcher exclaiming, “Pecker!” And so on. You get it. It’s repetitive but ingeniously funny the way Myers has written each line to flow into the next synonym for the male member and each new scene flows into a description of the same rocket flying across the sky.
14. THIS IS SPINAL TAP: STONEHENGE
This is Spinal Tap is pure comedy gold. And part of the reason for that is because the 1984 rock and roll mockumentary was almost entirely ad-libbed by side-splitting actors Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer. Guest, of course, went on to direct and star in a string of mesmerizingly funny mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.
The classic Stonehenge scene combines some staged funny business during a concert, followed by some nutty improved dialogue backstage. On stage, the guys in fictional rock band Spinal Tap have set up a pretentiously overwrought “showstopper” surrounding their song, “Stonehenge.” Guitarist Nigel (Guest) wanted to have a gigantic recreation of Stonehenge’s stone triptychs dramatically revealed on stage. But it turned out Nigel’s diagram specified 18 inches rather than the intended 18 feet – he used a quotation mark signifying inches instead of an apostrophe signifying feet. Punctuation is important, people! So, onstage two little people wind up dancing around an underwhelmingly tiny triptych. Backstage, the band and their manager discuss the fiasco. McKean sarcastically claims, “The problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” When their manager says he’s making too big a deal of it, Shearer steals it off camera with the line, “Making a big deal of it would’ve been a good idea.”
13. BORAT: NAKED FIGHT
First off, we’ll slap a little “viewer discretion advised” label on this one. If you don’t want to see wet, hairy, overweight, and fully nude men wrestling and chasing each other in public, do not watch this scene. But just know that you’ll be depriving yourself of one of the most shockingly hilarious scenes in the history of cinema.
If you’re unfamiliar with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), it’s a mockumentary starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat, a television journalist from Kazakhstan exploring America. Many scenes were filmed guerilla-style, as Borat interacts with real people who are unaware that he’s a character. In this scene, Borat, fresh out of a bath in his hotel room, stumbles upon his decidedly unathletic producer Azamat pleasuring himself, fully nude, to a picture of Borat’s beloved Pamela Anderson. Offended, Borat picks a fight and the rest is cringingly hilarious history as their fight spills out into the hallway, elevator and even a crowded conference hall, all the while Borat’s “member” is flatteringly blacked out by an exaggeratedly-long bar.
12. TROPIC THUNDER: HOSTAGE NEGOTIATION
There’s not much that isn’t funny about the 2008 action comedy Interview with the Vampire and Magnolia. But his take on studio executive Les Grossman, almost unrecognizable with male-pattern baldness, excess body hair, and a few extra pounds, was pure, intentionally over-the-top comic perfection, as illustrated in this clip.
Stiller’s character, Tugg, an actor making an action movie, has been kidnapped by a dastardly Vietnamese heroine-producing gang, Flaming Dragon. Not knowing this, his agent, played by Matthew McConaughey, has come to Grossman trivially trying to get his client a TiVo. Grossman pounds him with some scathing f-bombs. Cruise’s shocking profanity is only part of the joke. There’s also McConaughey’s profoundly cheesy ringtone (“Sometimes When We Touch,” by Dan Hill), the agent thinking he’s talking to Tugg only to be interrupted by Flaming Dragon, Grossman verbally berating the Dragons (“I will massacre you. I will f--- you up!”), and then there’s Grossman’s offer to send the kidnappers a particularly disgusting bodily excretion from a hobo in lieu of a $100-million ransom.
11. THE JERK: “ALL I NEED IS…”
The Jerk (1979) is peak Steve Martin, emerging from his explosively popular stand-up career, which sold out arenas, as both writer and star in this film directed by comedy legend Carl Reiner. It couldn’t go wrong, and it certainly did not. In fact, it was so hilariously right. Martin plays a dimwitted precursor to the Dumb and Dumber guys, Navin Johnson, who ultimately means well but isn’t quite in on his own joke.
After striking it rich by inventing glasses that aren’t prone to slipping off one’s nose, he just as quickly loses his fortune, and the love of his life, then embarks on a drunken rant about how he doesn’t need her, or any of his possessions. He picks up an ashtray and says, “Except this.” He doesn’t need anything except that. Well, he also wants a paddle game that’s lying on the floor, he says. And a remote control. And matches. And a lamp. He sadly stumbles through his mansion in his robe, pants around his ankles, repeating over and over that he needs just those things. Oh, but he needs a chair, too. And a magazine. That’s all he needs.