Random Comedy Movies

The hardest thing to do on film

Ask a director. You can make a person cry fairly reliably: the tools are known, and grief is much the same in everyone. Making a person laugh, out loud, involuntarily, on purpose, at a moment you chose, is enormously harder, and it fails silently. A joke that does not land does not half-land. It just sits there.

Press Generate and it hands you one that somebody hoped would work. A few of the films in here:

• Knives Out
• Neighbors
• Hot Tub Time Machine 2
• Pitch Perfect 3
• The Bounty Hunter
• My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
• Barbershop: The Next Cut
• Rock the Kasbah

Some of those made a nation laugh in their year and will leave you cold now. That is not because they got worse. It is because comedy has a property no other genre has, and this page is mostly about that.

Drawing a film

1. Press Generate for one film.
2. Ask for a few to find one that suits the room, since comedy is the genre where the room matters most.
3. Type into Contains to search the titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these titles come from

Comedies gathered and checked by hand, across the romantic, the crude, the deadpan and the rest. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The recipe for a laugh, as far as anyone can tell

The best current theory of why anything is funny is disarmingly simple. Two psychologists, Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, called it the benign violation.

A laugh, they argue, needs two things to be true at once. Something must be wrong, a violation of how things ought to be: a rule broken, a dignity punctured, a word misused, a person falling over. And at the same time it must be safe, benign, not actually threatening. Either condition alone fails. A violation that is genuinely threatening is not funny, it is frightening or offensive. A situation that is perfectly fine, with nothing wrong at all, is not funny either, it is just pleasant. Comedy lives in the narrow overlap, where something is wrong but nobody is really hurt.

This is why so much of comedy is about distance. A man slipping on ice is funny if he gets up, and not funny if he does not. A joke about a tragedy is unbearable the week it happens and acceptable years later, because time has made the violation benign. The same event moves in and out of comedy depending on how safe it feels, and everyone has a private line, which is why a joke that destroys one person offends the one beside them.

It also explains the single most reliable fact about comedy: that it is fragile. The overlap is small. Move a joke slightly and it stops being safe, or stops being a violation, and either way it dies. Drama has a wide target. Comedy has a keyhole.

Why comedy dates faster than anything else

Here is the property no other genre has, and it follows directly from the recipe.

For something to register as a violation, you have to know the rule it is breaking. A joke is a small act of rule-breaking, and it only works on somebody who holds the rule. This means comedy is welded to its moment in a way that drama is not.

A tragedy from 1940 still works, because grief has not changed. A comedy from 1940 is often baffling, because it is breaking rules you no longer hold, referring to people you have never heard of, and puncturing a dignity that has already deflated on its own. The violations have gone stale. What was daring is now merely odd, and what was topical is now a footnote.

Watch an old comedy and you can feel yourself doing the work: reconstructing what the rule must have been, in order to see why the breaking of it was funny. By the time you have worked it out, the laugh is gone, because a laugh reconstructed is not a laugh. Explaining a joke and enjoying a joke are different acts, and time forces you to do the first before you can attempt the second.

Drama asks you to feel something humans have always felt. Comedy asks you to hold, effortlessly and in the instant, a specific set of assumptions about the world. When those assumptions expire, the film does too. It is the most perishable thing in cinema, and it is perishable for the same reason it was funny.

Why the funniest films never win the prizes

There is a well-documented pattern at the Academy Awards, and it is stark enough that people in the industry name it openly: comedies almost never win Best Picture.

The show itself is full of jokes. The host does a monologue. And then the award goes, nearly every year, to something sombre. On the rare occasions a comedy does win, it has usually smuggled in a great deal of sadness, or dressed itself in period costume, or is not really a comedy at all once you look closely.

Part of this is the benign violation again, viewed from the other side. The very thing that makes comedy work, keeping everything safe, keeping the stakes light, makes it look effortless, and effortless-looking things are not rewarded as achievements. A film that makes you weep looks like it did something to you. A film that makes you laugh looks like it was just being fun, even though the second is harder to do.

And part of it is a simple prejudice that runs deep in how humans assign seriousness. We mistake solemnity for depth. A thing that is grave feels important, and a thing that is funny feels like a diversion, and this intuition is almost impossible to argue anyone out of, because it operates below argument. The comedy that made ten million people happy is quietly assumed to be lesser than the drama that made a critic thoughtful, and the assumption is rarely examined.

It is worth examining. Making a large number of strangers laugh at the same moment is one of the most difficult and least reliable things a filmmaker can attempt, and it fails in public, instantly, with no hiding place. That we treat it as the lightweight option says more about us than about the films.

The genre that does not travel

Comedy is also the hardest genre to export, and for the same underlying reason.

A rule you have to hold in order to see it broken is usually a local rule. Humour is built out of a specific language, specific manners, specific figures everyone is assumed to know, and specific taboos. Take that across a border and the rules change, so the violations stop being violations. This is why an action film sells identically in forty countries and a beloved national comedy often sells in exactly one.

Wordplay is the extreme case. A pun exists entirely inside one language and cannot survive translation at all, because the two meanings that collide in the original do not collide anywhere else. But even physical comedy, which travels better, carries assumptions about what is embarrassing and what is dignified, and those assumptions are not universal.

So if the generator hands you a comedy from another country and it leaves you puzzled rather than laughing, that is not a failure of the film. You are simply not holding the rules it was built to break. Somewhere, that film is the funniest thing a whole nation has seen, and the border is where the joke stayed behind.

Questions people ask

Why do old comedies feel so slow?

Partly the timing conventions have changed, and partly the violations have expired. Comic rhythm is a moving target: audiences learn the beats and stop being surprised, so each generation's comedy speeds up relative to the last. An older film is playing at a tempo that was once brisk and now feels patient.

Is it me, or is a film I loved not funny anymore?

Both can be true at once. Your own rules have shifted since you first saw it, so some jokes no longer register, and repetition has worn the surprise off the ones that still do. A joke you have heard before is a joke you can no longer be surprised by, and surprise is half of it.

Why is dark comedy so divisive?

Because it deliberately sits right on the edge of the overlap, as close to genuine harm as it can get while still being safe. That edge is in a different place for every person, so a joke one viewer finds bracingly funny lands, for another, on the wrong side of the line entirely.

Does a comedy actually cheer you up?

Often, and reliably enough that people reach for one on a bad day. Laughter is a genuine physical release, and a film that produces it repeatedly does shift a mood. The catch is that it has to actually land, and a comedy watched in the wrong frame of mind can feel like being poked.

References

1. McGraw, A. P., and Warren, C. (2010). Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1141–1149. https://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/mcgraw.warren.2010.pdf
2. British Film Institute (2019). Oscars so serious: why sidelining comedies at the Academy Awards isn't funny. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/oscars-academy-awards-comedies