The Greatest Comedies Ever Made
Comedy is the hardest thing to do well and the easiest to do badly, and the gap between the two isn’t talent but precision.
The timing is off by a quarter second and the joke dies. The setup runs one line too long and the audience has already arrived at the punchline without you. The performer breaks (glances at the camera, acknowledges the joke) and the illusion collapses. Drama forgives a multitude of sins. Comedy forgives nothing.
The twenty-five entries here run from Abbott and Costello’s vaudeville-descended physical comedy to Larry David spending twenty-four seasons being wrong about everything while being completely right. Films, TV series, slapstick, satire, gross-out, character comedy, dark comedy, and one film that received a 10+ because no other rating is honest. All of them understand the first rule: the joke has to be funny.
Comedy is the genre I defend hardest and forgive least. A drama can bore me for an hour and redeem itself in the last act, but I give up on a comedy that misses three jokes in a row.
Critics and awards voters who treat funny films as the lesser form, as if nobody sweated over the timing, have it wrong. Every film on this list made me laugh, and every one of them made me respect the work hiding under the laugh.
Writers looking to craft their own comedic fiction will find essential techniques in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
1. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
⭐ 9/10
Charles Barton
“You don’t understand. Every night I turn into a wolf!”
Abbott and Costello were the biggest box office draw in America in the late 1940s, and Universal’s decision to drop their formula into the monster franchise turned out to be the smartest creative decision either party ever made. The film works because it plays both halves completely straight: the monsters are the Universal monsters (Dracula is menacing, the Wolfman is tragic, Frankenstein’s Monster is dangerous) and the comedy comes from Costello encountering them and nobody believing him.
Lou Costello was a physical comedian of the highest order, and the scenes where he sees the monster, turns to find Abbott seeing nothing, and can’t convince anyone of what he witnessed are the template for every straight-man/funny-man monster comedy that followed. The formula is older than cinema. Abbott and Costello found the definitive version of it.
2. Some Like It Hot (1959)
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⭐ 9.5/10
Billy Wilder
“Well, nobody’s perfect.”
Billy Wilder constructed a film that’s at once a gangster picture, a screwball comedy, a farce, and a real love story, and every element serves every other element instead of competing with it. Two musicians witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flee to Florida disguised as women in an all-female band. The mechanics are airtight. The jokes arrive at the correct tempo. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis both do things that shouldn’t work and work completely.
Marilyn Monroe, whose legendary on-set difficulties nearly destroyed the production, delivers the most carefully calibrated comic performance of her career.
The final line is the best closing joke in cinema history, and it works because Wilder earns it across the entire film. Osgood’s response is funny because the character has been established as someone who would respond exactly that way. The joke is the character. That’s how the best comedy ends.
This is as close to a perfect film as I know, and I don’t say that lightly. Lemmon and Curtis commit so hard to the disguises that I stop seeing the gag and start rooting for them, and Wilder’s control of the whole machine is what every comedy director since has been chasing. If it’s been sitting on your someday list, move it to the top.
3. The Nutty Professor (1963)
⭐ 8.5/10
Jerry Lewis
“I’m a friendly fella. Everybody loves the buddy.”
Jerry Lewis was taken seriously as a filmmaker in France decades before America caught up, and The Nutty Professor is the reason. As writer, director, and star, Lewis constructed a film that works at the same time as screwball comedy and as real self-examination: Professor Kelp is the id-suppressed, physically awkward, pathetically sincere version of Lewis himself, and Buddy Love, the transformation, is the cruel, confident, contemptuous entertainer that Kelp wishes he could be. The film is a portrait of Lewis’s own psychology that he was apparently unable to stop himself from making.
Buddy Love is unpleasant (vain, dismissive, treating everyone as an audience) and Lewis commits to that unpleasantness without softening it. The film’s argument is that Kelp’s earnestness is worth more than Buddy’s effortless cool. The physical comedy is extraordinary throughout, but the film belongs on this list for what it’s willing to say about itself.
4. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
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⭐ 9.5/10
Stanley Kubrick
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!”
Kubrick began making Dr. Strangelove as a serious thriller about nuclear war and realized, partway through, that the machinery of mutual assured destruction was so bureaucratically rigid and politically paralyzed that comedy was the only honest response to it.
He was right. The film works as satire because it doesn’t exaggerate the military-industrial complex into caricature, it simply observes it with a straight face and allows the inherent absurdity to surface. The world ends. Kubrick shoots it to Vera Lynn.
Peter Sellers plays three roles with complete distinction. George C. Scott’s General Turgidson is the film’s most dangerous performance: a man whose patriotic enthusiasm for nuclear war is played as comedy while being entirely coherent as character psychology. It remains the most perfectly structured political satire in cinema.
I think this is the bravest comedy ever made. Kubrick looked at the possibility of the world ending and decided the honest reaction was to laugh at the men in charge of it, and he was right. Scott’s Turgidson scares me more than any horror villain, because nothing about him is exaggerated enough to be safe.
5. Blazing Saddles (1974)
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⭐ 9/10
Mel Brooks
“Where the white women at?”
Mel Brooks made Blazing Saddles to destroy the Western.
To use genre parody as a delivery mechanism for saying things about racism that straight drama in 1974 couldn’t have said as effectively. Richard Pryor co-wrote the script and his voice (his willingness to go further than any white comedian would dare) is audible throughout. The film works because it’s funny at every level: slapstick, wordplay, anachronisms, fourth-wall breaks, and underlying racial satire all work at full strength instead of one element propping up the others.
Cleavon Little’s Bart is the film’s moral center: a man smarter than everyone around him who uses that intelligence to survive a situation designed to destroy him, and who does it with grace and humor. Brooks couldn’t make this film today. That’s the film’s most important credential.
6. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
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⭐ 9/10
Gilliam / Jones
“It’s just a flesh wound.”
Python’s most quoted film holds together as a complete work by using the quest structure as a container for sketches operating at different comic tones (absurdism, parody, wordplay, physical comedy, philosophical non sequitur) while maintaining a consistent medieval atmosphere that makes the anachronisms funnier instead of distracting. The cheap production becomes part of the comedy. The Black Knight sequence is the film’s most technically perfect sketch: escalating absurdity in a consistent setting, played by Cleese and Chapman with the absolute conviction that they’re in a serious medieval drama.
The joke depends entirely on both performers refusing to acknowledge the comedy. Arthur’s reasonable attempts to disengage; the Knight’s irrational insistence on continuing. Each stage more ridiculous than the last without breaking the internal logic of the Knight’s position. He’s not going to concede. That’s who he is.
I’ll defend every cheap corner of this production. I laugh hardest at the Black Knight, and the way the Pythons turned a tiny budget into material should embarrass every comedy that spent a fortune to be half as funny. My one small complaint is the ending, which stops more than it finishes, though I suspect the Pythons would call that the joke.
7. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
⭐ 8.5/10
John Landis
“Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”
Landis’s film invented the modern college comedy and set a standard the later forty-five years of imitation have rarely approached. The Lampoon writers (Ramis, Kenney, Miller) understood the comedy had to come from character. John Belushi’s Bluto is pure anarchic id against institutional authority, but the climax works because the film makes it a collective act instead of Bluto’s individual triumph.
Bluto’s speech is factually wrong (the Germans didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor) logically incoherent, and completely effective. It works because it gives the assembled Deltas permission to do what they already wanted to do, delivered with total conviction. The irrationality is the point. Enthusiasm is the argument.
8. Airplane! (1980)
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⭐ 9.5/10
Zucker / Abrahams / Zucker
“Don’t call me Shirley.”
ZAZ invented a comedy syntax with Airplane! that hadn’t previously existed in cinema: joke-per-minute saturation, deadpan commitment from all performers regardless of surrounding absurdity, background gag running alongside foreground gag. The film has been timed at roughly one joke every seven seconds. Most of them work.
The key innovation is casting serious dramatic actors (Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen) who play the material completely straight while the world descends into chaos. Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack didn’t know he was funny before Airplane!. The film discovered that he was by requiring him to deliver lines of absolute absurdity in his natural dramatic tone. After this, Nielsen spent the rest of his career being funny by being serious, the most specific career reinvention in comedy history.
I can’t think of a film I’d sooner put on when I need to laugh. What makes me laugh is Nielsen’s face, dead serious, while the lines coming out of him make no sense at all. The imitators that followed piled on more gags and forgot the one thing ZAZ understood, which is that the actors have to believe they’re in a disaster movie.
9. Caddyshack (1980)
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⭐ 8.5/10
Harold Ramis
“Be the ball.”
Caddyshack is structurally incoherent, at least three different movies occurring at the same time, and it doesn’t matter, because the parts are individually extraordinary. Harold Ramis’s directorial debut feels like a film where the performers arrived with material and Ramis was wise enough to let them use it. Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield: three complete comic creations who happen to exist in the same film without being required to interact in any dramatically meaningful way.
Murray’s Dalai Lama monologue, delivered to a gopher while spreading fertilizer, is the most famous improvised set piece in comedy film history. Carl believes it happened to him, believes the moral. The complete internal consistency makes it funnier with every sentence. Dangerfield delivers his Czervik like someone who has been doing this act for thirty years and knows exactly where the laughs are.
10. National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
⭐ 8/10
Harold Ramis / John Hughes
“This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.”
John Hughes wrote the screenplay from his own Lampoon essay and Harold Ramis directed it, the correct division of labor. Hughes understood the emotional truth of the American family vacation as shared suffering; Ramis understood how to escalate that suffering without losing the warmth that keeps Clark Griswold sympathetic even at his most pathetic.
Chevy Chase’s Clark is among the best comic creations of the 1980s: a man whose real love for his family is expressed through elaborate plans that systematically destroy it, who never learns, who can’t learn, because optimism is the only tool he has.
The dead Aunt Edna sequence, Clark strapping the body to the roof rack and continuing to Walley World, is the film’s moral and comedic center. The finale, in which Clark holds a theme park at gunpoint, is the logical conclusion of the film’s argument about what happens when a man is pushed far enough in the wrong direction.
Clark Griswold is the dad I root for even when I want to shake him. The Aunt Edna stretch is dark enough that I’m amazed a studio let it through, and it’s the reason I rank this above every family road movie that came after it. Hughes and Ramis knew the laughs only work if you believe Clark loves those people.
11. Ghostbusters (1984)
⭐ 9/10
Ivan Reitman
“Back off, man. I’m a scientist.”
Reitman solved the problem that had defeated every previous attempt to blend comedy and supernatural action: he took the supernatural threat seriously while the characters responded with the nonchalance of people treating it as a business problem. The ghosts are real and dangerous; the Ghostbusters treat them as pests. Murray’s Venkman (sardonic, self-interested, reluctantly competent) provides the tonal anchor: no matter how strange things get, Venkman treats it as slightly inconvenient, giving the audience permission to enjoy the spectacle.
The script (Ramis and Aykroyd) is among the best comedy screenplays produced in Hollywood, dense with specific jokes that reward multiple viewings, and a mythology that feels invented. The 2016 version doesn’t exist.
12. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
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⭐ 8.5/10
John Hughes
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Hughes’s film is a comedy structured as a philosophical argument: institutions are enemies of experience, and the only rational response is creative subversion. Ferris isn’t sympathetic because he’s nice; he’s sympathetic because he’s right. Matthew Broderick inhabits the world as if it were designed for his pleasure, because today it is. Cameron is the film’s actual protagonist, the sick friend dragged into aliveness, and his breakdown at the Ferrari is the emotional climax. Ferris gives Cameron a day. Cameron gives Ferris the film’s meaning.
13. Three Amigos (1986)
⭐ 8/10
John Landis
“In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face.”
The most underrated comedy of the 1980s, consistently overlooked because it arrived in the wrong year against strong competition. The Steve Martin / Chevy Chase / Martin Short combination is the best ensemble the decade produced outside the SNL alumni films. Silent movie cowboys hired by a Mexican village who think it’s a performance gig, a perfect fish-out-of-water premise that at once works as a real adventure film.
El Guapo’s soliloquy about what the word “plethora” means, delivered by Alfonso Arau as a man working through a philosophical problem, is one of the funniest villain monologues in comedy history.
14. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
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⭐ 9/10
John Hughes
“Those aren’t pillows!”
Hughes’s best film, showing his range most fully: a comedy about two incompatible people forced together by travel disaster that becomes, in its final ten minutes, heartbreaking. Steve Martin’s Neal Page and John Candy’s Del Griffith are the best odd-couple pairing in the genre, and Hughes is honest about the dynamic.
Neal is often terrible to Del, Del’s warmth is occasionally manipulative, and the film excuses neither. The motel room scene, Neal’s speech cataloging every way Del irritates him, is cruel.
The film justifies the ending by refusing to let Neal off the hook for it automatically.
This is the Hughes film that moved me most. Candy breaks my heart in the last ten minutes, and the motel speech is so mean that I winced for Del the way you wince for a friend. Most comedies would have apologized for that scene right away. Hughes lets it sit, and imitators that want the tearful ending without paying for it with that cruelty are freeloaders.
15. Dumb and Dumber (1994)
⭐ 8/10
Peter Farrelly
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance.”
Jim Carrey at the peak of his physical comedy powers, Jeff Daniels doing something more interesting than the film requires, and the Farrelly Brothers establishing the gross-out comedy syntax that would define the next decade. The film works because Lloyd and Harry are incapable of perceiving the gap between their expectations of the world and the world’s actual response to them. Lloyd believes Mary could love him. He has no structure for understanding that she couldn’t.
That kind of innocence produces different comedy than simple stupidity.
16. The Big Lebowski (1998)
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⭐ 9/10
Joel Coen
“The Dude abides.”
The Coens made a Raymond Chandler detective story in which the detective is a man whose primary concerns are bowling, White Russians, and avoiding inconvenience. The plot is deliberately incomprehensible: but where Chandler’s opacity is a flaw, the Coens’ is the point: the mystery doesn’t matter, the Dude doesn’t matter to anyone with power, and the resolution is that the film resolves everything and nothing at the same time. Jeff Bridges invented a new category of screen presence: the slacker as philosophy.
John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak drives the film: every scene containing both is a collision between someone who can’t be disturbed and someone who can’t stop disturbing everything.
17. Office Space (1999)
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⭐ 8.5/10
Mike Judge
“I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.”
Mike Judge’s film flopped in theaters in 1999 and became a cultural institution within two years as every office worker in America recognized their own workplace in it. The accuracy is the comedy: the TPS report cover sheets, the consultants who can’t understand what anyone does, the printer that can’t be defeated. Judge observed corporate culture with the precision of an anthropologist who found the customs incomprehensible.
Ron Livingston’s Peter achieves enlightenment through accidental hypnosis and spends the rest of the film doing nothing. That turns out to be the most productive approach to his workplace available.
No workplace comedy since has come close for me. The TPS reports and the printer land because they’re funny and true at once, and that combination is rarer than people think.
What I admire most is where Judge aims. He goes after the systems and the consultants and leaves the poor slobs in the cubicles their dignity, so the film stays funny and never turns mean.
18. Superbad (2007)
⭐ 8/10
Greg Mottola / Rogen / Goldberg
“We’re gonna get so much ass.”
Rogen and Goldberg wrote the script at thirteen and it shows, in the best possible sense. The feel of male teenage friendship, the gap between what teenage boys say and what they mean: this has the grain of direct experience. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are perfectly cast against each other, and the film is honest about its central subject: the friendship between Seth and Evan is ending, and the entire film is their unconscious awareness of that fact.
The McLovin subplot runs in parallel as pure comedy, with Bill Hader and Seth Rogen as the cops doing more than the subplot requires.
19. The Hangover (2009)
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⭐ 10+/10
Todd Phillips
“Tigers love pepper. They hate cinnamon.”
Todd Phillips’s film receives a 10+ because it solved a structural problem that’s defeated every imitation: how do you build a comedy around things the audience hasn’t seen yet when the entire premise requires withholding what happened? Phillips calibrates the reverse-engineering structure with such precision that each reveal has more impact than the previous one while the accumulating picture remains coherent. The film plays fair, everything that happened could have happened, and the audience reaches each revelation a beat before or after the characters without the film cheating them.
Zach Galifianakis’s Alan is the finest comic creation of the 2000s: a man operating on a completely different social logic from everyone around him, missing every implicit cue, and occasionally producing insights of terrifying precision by accident. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms provide the necessary credibility. The film is nearly perfect. The sequels don’t exist.
I’ll accept the criticism for the 10+. The plotting is tighter than most thrillers I’ve seen, and Galifianakis makes me laugh at lines that shouldn’t be funny on paper. The sequels are a betrayal, because they took the one thing this film did perfectly and ran it through a copier.
20. Seinfeld (1989-1998)
⭐ 9.5/10
Jerry Seinfeld / Larry David / NBC
“No hugging, no learning.”
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld reinvented television comedy through a single structural innovation: the “show about nothing” description is misleading.
It’s a show about the social contract and four people who are constitutionally unable to honor it. Every sitcom before it reset at the end of each episode. Characters learned, problems were solved. Seinfeld’s characters learned nothing, relationships reverted, the same problems recurred in different forms, and the comedy accumulated because the audience knew exactly who these people were and exactly how they’d fail.
The later seasons’ multi-plot convergences (The Contest, The Marine Biologist) show what can be accomplished in twenty-two minutes when writers trust the audience to track multiple threads.
21. M*A*S*H (1972-1983)
⭐ 9/10
Larry Gelbart / CBS
“War isn’t hell. War is war, and hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.”
Larry Gelbart’s series ran longer than the Korean War it depicted and produced eleven seasons of consistent quality by solving the problem that kills most long-running comedies: how do you sustain a premise indefinitely? M*A*S*H’s answer was to treat it as an inexhaustible source, surgeons in a combat zone using comedy as a coping mechanism, where the humor is the response to horror instead of a distraction from it. The war never ends. That means the dark comedy never exhausts itself. The finale remains the highest-rated single television broadcast in American history.
The evolution from Alan Alda’s Hawkeye to the full ensemble across eleven seasons shows that character-based comedy can sustain nearly infinite variation as long as the characters’ core qualities remain intact. Radar’s innocence, Frank’s pomposity, Klinger’s schemes. The constants produce the comedy even as everything around them changes.
I admire this show more than almost anything else on television. It made me laugh and then made me go quiet, sometimes inside the same scene, and very few series have trusted their audience with that. Comedy that works as armor against something awful is what I’m always hoping to find, and I’ve never seen it done better.
22. Frasier (1993-2004)
⭐ 9/10
Angell / Casey / Lee / NBC
“I’m listening.”
The best-written sitcom in American television history by several technical measures: eleven consecutive Emmy wins for Best Comedy, a cast of five principal characters each with a fully developed comic engine, and a writing staff that understood how to build farce architecture: the precise sequence of misunderstandings, deceptions, and collisions that produces maximum chaos from minimum initial error. Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane is a man whose considerable intelligence and education are in permanent conflict with his emotional immaturity and vanity, and this gap is inexhaustible as a comedy premise.
The relationship between Frasier and Niles (two brothers who are the same person at different stages of self-delusion) produces the finest sustained double act in American sitcom history. Martin Crane’s grounded blue-collar common sense provides the comedic and emotional counterweight that keeps the show from becoming pure snob comedy. The episodes are structured as clockwork: each element introduced in act one returns to produce the act two catastrophe.
23. Arrested Development (2003-2006)
⭐ 9/10
Mitchell Hurwitz / Fox
“I’ve made a huge mistake.”
Mitchell Hurwitz’s series works on a joke density that requires multiple viewings to fully process: background details that become foreground jokes three episodes later, callbacks that span entire seasons, visual gags operating in frames the first-time viewer isn’t watching. Fox canceled it after three seasons for low ratings.
That’s historically accurate to how audiences respond to comedy operating this far above the ambient intelligence level of its network. The three original seasons are as tightly constructed as anything in the comedy canon.
The Bluth family is the most fully realized comic ensemble in American television: each member’s particular form of self-delusion, incompetence, and selfishness is distinct, and the comedy comes from their interaction, not from any individual character in isolation. The narrator’s running commentary provides the audience with the correct interpretation of events that the characters consistently misread.
24. Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-2024)
⭐ 9/10
Larry David / HBO
“That’s pretty, pretty, pretty good.”
Larry David’s twenty-four-year project is the purest expression of a single comic thesis in television history: social conventions exist for reasons, and the person who refuses to observe them will be punished, and the punishments are both deserved and disproportionate and funny in both directions. Larry David (playing Larry David) objects to things other people accept silently, refuses accommodations other people make automatically, and is consistently wrong about what social reality will allow while being consistently correct about the underlying logic.
The improvised dialogue format, scenes constructed from outlines, produces a social friction that scripted comedy can’t replicate. Every awkward pause, every conversational tangent, every moment where two characters talk past each other: these feel real because they’re real, generated in the moment. The discomfort is the comedy.
Curb makes me squirm harder than most horror films, and I’d pick it over almost any sitcom anyway. Larry is right about the rule and wrong about the room, and I find myself on his side right up to the second it blows up in his face. I can’t think of another show that gets me rooting for a man I’d never want to sit next to at dinner.
25. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present)
⭐ 8.5/10
Glenn Howerton / Rob McElhenney / Charlie Day / FX
“I’m going to pop all over your mouth.”
The longest-running live-action comedy series in American television history, and the one most consistently misunderstood as simply being about terrible people doing terrible things. It’s Always Sunny is a Seinfeld-derived model taken to its logical extreme: the gang learns nothing, the situations repeat with variation, the selfishness and stupidity of the characters is inexhaustible as a source of comedy. But the show has lasted because it’s precise about its characters’ specific pathologies: Dennis’s narcissism, Mac’s religious self-delusion, Charlie’s feral competence in the basement, Dee’s desperate ambition, Frank’s gleeful nihilism.
The show started on a $200 camcorder in someone’s apartment and is now in its eighteenth season. It hasn’t gotten less funny. That’s an achievement in a medium where most comedies exhaust their premise by season four. The gang’s willingness to go further than any network comedy would permit (and their creator-performer status. That means nobody can stop them) is the reason the show still has teeth.
What Makes Comedy Last
The entries here span eighty years, three countries, film and television, vaudeville and mockumentary and improv-derived performance. What they share isn’t a style but a commitment: every one of them takes its own comedy seriously. None of them wink at the audience. The characters believe what they believe, want what they want, and pursue it with total conviction.
The comedies that don’t last are the ones that are aware of themselves, that signal to the audience that the comedy knows it’s a comedy, that hold the material at arm’s length instead of committing to it. The comedies on this list last because they forget to be embarrassed. Bluto doesn’t know the Germans didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor. Dr. Strangelove doesn’t know the world is ending. The Dude doesn’t know he should care more.
That conviction, applied to increasingly absurd situations, is the mechanism. It worked in 1948 and it works now and it’ll keep working because it’s always been the mechanism.
The winking is the worst habit in so much modern studio comedy. The actor half-smiles at the camera to show he knows it’s silly, and the laugh dies on the spot.
Every film on this list had the nerve to play it straight. I’d trade a year of smirking comedies for one more picture with that kind of damn conviction.
What Do You Think?
Missing an entry? Disagree with a rating? Drop a comment below, though I’ll treat any defense of the Hangover sequels as a disqualifying position.
Honorable Mentions
4 more reviewed on this site and worth your time, ranked by the same scale as the list above.
26. Rush Hour (1998, 2001, 2007)
Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker across three films, and the combination worked because neither performer was doing what the other was. Chan’s choreography and Tucker’s delivery never compete.
27. Bad Boys (1995, 2003, 2020, 2024)
Four films across twenty-nine years, and the first is Michael Bay’s debut. The buddy dynamic is the only consistent element across a franchise that changes genre repeatedly.
28. Click (2006)
Adam Sandler gets a remote that fast-forwards through his life, and Christopher Walken sells it to him. The last act turns serious and mostly pulls it off, and Henry Winkler as the father is the reason it works.
Winkler and that final act are the only things holding this one up for me. For most of its running time Sandler coasts on a premise that deserved a much sharper script, and I got tired of waiting for the film to match its own idea. Watch it for the ending, and be ready for a letdown getting there.
29. Patch Adams (1998)
Robin Williams as the medical student who thinks laughter belongs in a hospital. Tom Shadyac pushes the sentiment hard, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the roommate who can’t stand him keeps it honest.
