With the help of comedies like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors (thank you John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker, among others), directors like Richard Curtis and a small army of Time Out writers, we’ve painstaking scoured the genre’s history to cherry-pick the finest laugh machines in existence. There’s a reason Top Secret!, Airplane and The Naked Gun all make our list of the 100 Greatest Comedy Movies of all time.īut it’s not just high-gag-rate spoofs that fill this list – there are great romcoms, satires, gross-out and teen comedies (there’s overlap there), screwballs… you name it, it’s here. Sometimes, it’s about volume: throwing so many ridiculous gags at the screen that the overall effect leaves you gasping for air in between the belly laughs. Equally, it could be a sense of fearlessness, of noting the likely scruples of audiences and critics and just telling their subversive jokes anyway (see: Mel Brooks’ entire CV). It might be the way they’ve aged, deepening in pathos with every passing decade in ways their creators never imagined (see: Chaplin’s The Great Dictator ). What makes a great comedy? It could be the joke-laden script (obvs), performances that have comic timing down to a fine art, or the perfect chemistry of a vintage double act.
