15 of the Greatest Dumb Comedies Ever Made

CM NewsMarch 19, 202505 views

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There really is no such thing as a dumb comedy. Making people laugh isn’t easy. There are tricks you can use, but no proven formula. The things we laugh at often reach us in a place beyond language, which is why talking or writing about comedy is so difficult. To explain why a gag is funny is to crush its soufflé evanescence.

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Because our taste in humor is as specific as our taste in clothes or food or fragrance, people often express distaste for jokes about bodily functions. Even so, sometimes those same people laugh at toilet humor: it’s about all the things that unite us as humans, as Chaucer knew. We laugh at things—a play on words, a gesture, a guy falling into a hole—for reasons that we ourselves often don’t understand. That’s the mystery, and the glory, of what we call, only for lack of a better term, dumb comedy. To laugh at something we can’t articulately defend is freeing, reminding us that not everything needs to be overthought, fretted over, justified. It sets us free, if just for a moment, from both ourselves and the often overwhelming challenges of the world around us.

What, exactly, constitutes a dumb comedy? In all honesty, your guess is as good as mine. In drawing up this list of 15 of my favorites, I automatically tossed out two of the greatest comedies ever made, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, only because for every elemental, dumb gag these movies contain (Gene Hackman’s blind hermit setting the thumb of Peter Boyle’s monster on fire—bliss!) there are at least two more that are dazzlingly cerebral: I’m thinking of Blazing Saddles’ Cleavon Little leading his fellow railroad workers in a smooth-as-silk version of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” a gag so exquisite, and so brilliant within its context, that it’s on a plane of its own. Similarly, Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap is hilarious and sometimes gorgeously dumb, but in its unalloyed greatness, it’s also a movie no one is embarrassed to like.

So in drawing up this list, I focused on movies that have over the years caused friends and acquaintances to say, “Really?” when I profess my love for them. Some contain diarrhea jokes. Others are lewd and crude and yet, against my better judgment—because who needs any more self-judgment?—I laugh. Some are kind of dorky; others are raunchy. Two of them feature made-up languages, each with their own lustrous logic. If you watch all of these 15 films, here and there you’ll come across a gag or a word that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we now deem inappropriate or offensive—but please allow that we can’t divorce any work from the context of its time, and it can’t hurt to be reminded of how the culture changes around us, only because we change it. Basically, these are 15 movies that, in their sensational, dazzling dumbness, make me laugh for reasons I can’t explain. Your favorites will be different—but maybe you’ll find something here that has thus far eluded your dumb-movie radar. If not, please don’t set my thumb on fire.

Duck Soup (1933)

Again, there’s no hard and fast definition for what constitutes a dumb comedy. Maybe all it really means is a movie with a supreme sense of the absurd, whose jokes and physical gags reach us in a place beyond rational thought. Duck Soup may not be the first real dumb comedy, but it’s a superb early example of sustained, unhinged genius, from a family comedy act that, by the time of the movie’s release, were already superstars who had been honing their brilliantly cracked aesthetic for decades. In Duck Soup, Groucho Marx plays Rufus T. Firefly, a wily wisecracker who suddenly becomes installed as the leader of a tiny and very broke nation, Freedonia. Chico and Harpo Marx appear, respectively, as Chicolini and Pinky, spies from the neighboring country of Sylvania; they’re part of plan to take over the struggling country. Zeppo Marx also appears, in a straight-man role, as Rufus’ secretary. Though Duck Soup is often lauded as a satire of the vagaries of international geopolitics, its greatness doesn’t depend on justification from serious beard-strokers. In the film’s extraordinary mirror sequence, Groucho, dressed in a nightgown-and-tasseled-nightcap combo, struts, squints, and twirls in front of a mirror he knows is broken, amazed to see his own reflection looking back at him—only it’s really Harpo, in an identical getup, mimicking his every move with gonzo-balletic precision. If you’re looking for one scene to show how so-called dumb comedy demands precision and creativity, not to mention a love of the ridiculous, this is it.

Caveman (1981)

Writer-director Carl Gottlieb’s Caveman is one of the hidden treasures of the dumb-comedy genre, lesser-known but beyond exquisite in its prehistoric dumbness. Ringo Starr is Atouk, a scrawny cave-guy striving to win the heart of buxom cave lady Lana (Barbara Bach—she and Ringo met and fell in love on set), who already belongs to the hulking bully Tonda (played by onetime pro football player John Matuszak). Atouk’s pal Lar (a young, hunky Dennis Quaid) tries to help; meanwhile, Shelley Long’s sweet cavegirl next door, Tala, pines away, longing for Atouk to notice her. The dumb gags in Caveman are nearly as ingenious as the invention of fire: Atouk and Lar figure out the secret to walking upright by cracking each other’s backs—who knew? (Delighted with their chiropractic discovery, they mock the still-stooped Tonda behind his back, with nothing but a series of grunts and gestures.) The “Colonel Bogey March”—also known as the theme from Bridge on the River Kwai—tootles as a group of cavedudes try to roll a giant dinosaur egg down a ridge. Gottlieb (also a co-writer on The Jerk, another great dumb comedy) devised a brilliant made-up cave language, used throughout the movie (you’ll have to watch to find out what zugzug means). It also features a great assortment of goofy-scary stop-motion prehistoric creatures. Gottlieb and his cast sustain the proceedings beautifully—Caveman is a delight from start to finish.

Step Brothers (2008)

Before Adam McKay took a swerve, for the worse, to make instructional comedies about capitalist greed and climate disaster—pictures that, though their heart might have been in the right place, were just preaching to the converted—he gave us the glorious dumb classic Step Brothers. John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell star as Dale and Brennan, two fortyish dudes, both still living at home, who become part of a blended family when Dale’s dad (Richard Jenkins) and Brennan’s mom (Mary Steenburgen) marry and move in together. For Dale and Brennan, it’s hatred at first sight. Dale forbids Brennan to touch his beloved drum kit; Brennan responds by rubbing a NSFW part of his anatomy along the skins. Eventually, these two discover they have more in common than they thought. (Both, it turns out, are longtime somnambulists, leading to a chaotic sleepwalking episode that feels like a nod to the sublime insanity of Dr. Seuss’ The Sleep Book.) Somehow McKay keeps the movie spinning even after Dale and Brennan stop bickering and start sticking together: Adam Scott, as Brennan’s snobby, overachieving brother, makes a terrific common enemy. An unhinged work that endures.

Pootie Tang (2001)

In this spinoff of a sketch from The Chris Rock Show, written and directed by Louis C.K., Lance Crouther plays rapper, Blaxploitation luminary, ladykiller, and all-around cool guy Pootie Tang, a laid-back superstar who has built his fortune from speaking a gibberish language that may not make literal sense, though as one character says, even when you have no idea what he’s saying, you always know what he means. As he promotes his sure-to-be-a-hit action movie Sine Your Pitty on the Runny Kine—in which he shows his prowess at repelling bullets with both his belt buckle and his hair braid—Pootie runs afoul of evil white multi-industrialist Dick Lecter (Robert Vaughn). Pootie has used his massive influence to get kids to eat vegetables instead of junk food, taking a bite out of Lecter’s fast-food enterprise. White-devil seductress Ireenie (Jennifer Coolidge) is sent in to trick Pootie into signing a contract that will weaken his wholesome influence over America’s children. In the end, Pootie prevails, and it all makes a certain kind of sense. Crouther, largely a writer and producer, is superb—it’s a shame he hasn’t spent more time on the other side of the camera. Rock plays multiple roles; J.B. Smoove and Wanda Sykes round out a fantastic supporting cast. Louis C.K. may have fallen from grace, but don’t let that keep you from this dumb-comedy gem. Sadatay, my brothers and sisters.

Bad Teacher (2011)

Cameron Diaz plays wily golddigger Elizabeth Halsey, marking time as a middle-school teacher until she can marry her rich-guy fiancé. When he picks up on her avariciousness and gives her the gate, she’s forced to return to her old job—but it doesn’t pay well enough to finance the boob job she desperately wants. (She’s sure bigger breasts are the path to landing a rich husband.) Elizabeth routinely shows up for class hungover and bleary-eyed; her pedagogy consists of turning on an inspirational-teacher movie—one week it’s Stand and Deliver, the next, Dangerous Minds—and plunking her head down on the desk. Diaz makes a great bad-gal educator, a deadpan, checked-out chick strutting around the school halls in her Louboutins until she can land something better. This isn’t one of those characters, so common in woman-centric comedies, who’s made relatable via some pathetic backstory, like a failed baking business or a sob-story divorce. Elizabeth stands tall in those skyscraper heels, and if she’s moderately redeemed in the end, she apologizes for nothing.

Read more: Thank God Cameron Diaz Is Back

Dumb and Dumber (1994)

At the time of its release, fancy people who considered themselves film aficionados moaned that Dumb and Dumber was the beginning of the end of civilization. Far from it: it takes balls and brains to make a movie this soulfully, unrelentingly crass—as well as, ultimately, sweet—and Peter and Bobby Farrelly did it. Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey play Harry and Lloyd, two numbnuts losers stuck in a crappy apartment in Providence, R.I. (whence the Farrellys themselves hail). Though Harry and Lloyd are broke, they dream of opening a pet store together. (They’ve already got the name: I Got Worms, because one of its chief offerings will be worm farms.) As these two bumble toward their future, Lloyd confidently dispenses misinformation—asserting, for instance, that the Monkees were a huge influence on the Beatles—and Harry dopily puts the moves on Lloyd’s crush (played by ace straightwoman Lauren Holly). What everyone remembers most from Dumb and Dumber is the climactic explosive-diarrhea scene. But the affection the Farrellys have for their flawed protagonists gives the movie a kind of cracked sweetness, and sometimes a movie’s tone counts for just as much as its accomplished use of poop jokes.

Undercover Brother (2002)

Malcolm D. Lee’s Undercover Brother—written by John Ridley, who also created the Internet series on which the movie is based, and who would go on to win an Oscar for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay—is almost too smart to be considered dumb. This is a Trojan Horse movie: its gags are so recklessly, joyously ridiculous that it might occur to you only later how effectively they skewer all sorts of racial stereotypes and assumptions. Eddie Griffin is marvelous as Undercover Brother, a sharp and utterly groovy detective who, with his precisely manicured Afro and meticulously tailored snakeskin threads, is a sight to behold in early-21st-century America. But he’s got a mission: to help the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D, a secret network of Black operatives fighting for justice, bring down a nefarious underground group led by The Man, who seeks to control the minds of all citizens. The gags are both ingenious and hilarious: At one point, two cheerful, robotic white newscasters evaluate a Black presidential hopeful (Billy Dee Williams) by praising his attributes. “He’s so well spoken!” one says. The other notes how well he’s doing in the polls—“And not just in the urban areas!” The supporting cast includes Denise Richards, Chris Kattan, and the ever-fabulous Aunjanue Ellis, as Sistah Girl, the most efficient spy in the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. It doesn’t hurt that Danielle Hollowell’s costumes, a riot of supple leather jackets and voluminous bellbottoms, are exaggerated and chic at once. Undercover Brother has style to burn.

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)

A comedy about enduring friendship between women that ends with its two ditzy heroines cheerfully folding scarves in their own newly opened boutique: what’s not to love? Mira Sorvino’s Romy and Lisa Kudrow’s Michele are Los Angeles roommates and longtime friends who have reached their late twenties with little to show for the 10 years since they’ve graduated from high school in Tucson. Before going back for the reunion, knowing they’ll have to face the girls who bullied them, they scheme to make themselves look more successful than they are. (On the drive from L.A. to Arizona, they stop at a diner in their chic black jacket-and-mini-skirt suit combos and ask the incredulous waitress if she has a “businesswoman’s special.”) Kudrow and Sorvino’s BFF chemistry and superb, loopy timing are the movie’s secret weapons. When Kudrow’s Michele boils over with anger at the now-married-and-pregnant mean girls who made her and Romy so miserable in high school, it’s not what she says but how she says it that matters. She looks them squarely in the eyes and levels her deadpan curse: “I hope your babies look like monkeys!” It’s nuts. And hilarious.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

Few movies have blended toilet and stoner humor as deftly as Danny Leiner’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The gags here are perhaps best appreciated as Zen koans, jokes that hit you sideways rather than head on. But Harold & Kumar is about something else, too: the experience of kids of immigrants who are expected to do well and make their parents proud, even as they assimilate within American culture. No, wait: make that even as they help shape American culture, of the stoner variety or otherwise. John Cho’s Harold, an analyst with a big investment firm, and his roommate, Kal Penn’s Kumar, a potential med student, are both bright enough to more than get by—which is how they manage to spend most of their time hanging out and getting high in their Nowheresville, N.J., apartment. A commercial for White Castle’s irresistibly greasy sliders inspires a road trip that involves an encounter with a crazed raccoon, a trip to the Princeton campus to buy more pot, and a jail stint. Harold & Kumar was hilarious upon its release, and it still is—though in an America that seems to have forgotten its genesis as a nation built by immigrants and outsiders, even the movie’s loosest, goofiest jokes carry a slight sting. A lot can change in 20 years.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

From the late 1970s through to the 1990s, the team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker put their stamp on a distinctively zany type of movie comedy, pictures that sat right at the Venn diagram center of surrealist logic and inane humor. Of the best of them, it’s hard to choose between Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun—but for the purpose of this list, The Naked Gun won in an admittedly unscientific coin toss. Leslie Nielsen is dimwitted but sexy cop Lt. Frank Drebin; Priscilla Presley is luxe bombshell Jane Spencer, assigned by the villainous Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) to lure Frank into a trap. She falls for Frank instead; they go on a daylong date, capped off by a movie that sends them out of the theater laughing their heads off—a pan to the theater marquee reveals that it’s Platoon. That’s just one example of the ZAZ mystique, a way of taking the dumbest possible jokes, the ones that really shouldn’t work, and making them soar.

The House Bunny (2008)

Anna Faris plays Shelley, a saucer-eyed Playboy bunny banished from Hef’s mansion for turning an unforgivable 27. With no place to go, she stumbles onto a college campus and, having just come from living in a community of women, thinks a sorority might be just the place to land. The first one she approaches snobbily rejects her. But the far less together young women at a much less glamorous house, Zeta Alpha Zeta (might those ZAZ initials be a subtle Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker tribute?), adopt her as their house mother. She gives them makeup tips—“The eyes are the nipples of the face!”—and advises them on how to attract boys. (One of the sweet ZAZ sisters is played by an unsurprisingly charming Emma Stone.) If that sounds retrograde, note that the young women of The House Bunny, including Shelley, eventually come to acknowledge that what’s inside matters more than the package it’s wrapped in. But the movie’s lesson goes down easy, thanks largely to Faris, who breezes through the movie like the spiritual heir to Marilyn Monroe, with a little Brigitte Bardot and Dolly Parton tossed in. The House Bunny came and went in late summer 2008, but it deserves a place with the dumb-comedy classics.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1988)

Two supremely adorable slacker-metalheads are close to flunking out of high school in 1988 San Dimas, Calif. They’re saved by a messenger from the future (played by George Carlin), who takes them on a time-travel journey that will not only help them pass history class, but also save their band, Wyld Stallyns, which is the key to a future utopia. Admittedly, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is probably sweeter than it is dumb: William “Bill” S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are such naively winning characters—played by charming actors with wonderfully elastic timing—that audiences at the time fell in love with them instantly, and their appeal has only grown over the years. How could anyone not love the way they commune with Socrates by serving up top-40 radio philosophy? (“All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”) Wyld Stallyns forever.

The Jerk (1979)

As the simpleton Navin Johnson, Steve Martin sets the tone for Carl Reiner’s The Jerk in the movie’s opening minutes, beginning the sad, sorry saga of his life with the words “I was born a poor Black child…” Few movies open with so great a blurt of dumbness. We see the whiter-than-white Navin at home with his family, a brood of Mississippi sharecroppers who love him as if he were their own. When his mother (played brilliantly by Mabel King—the family is all straightforward warmth, with no irony in sight) breaks the news to him that he’s adopted, his eyes register shock and dismay. “You mean I’m going to stay this color?” he blurts out, before bursting into tears. Navin’s dumbness only escalates: he leaves home, reluctantly, to make his way in the world, getting a job with a gas-station owner (Jackie Mason) who takes Navin’s idiocy in stride and even seems to appreciate it. Navin becomes the boy-toy of a motorcycle daredevil (Catlin Adams), only to have to break free when he falls in love with the winsome Marie, played by the almost criminally adorable Bernadette Peters. As the two dine at a fancy restaurant (an unequivocally dumb invention has made him a millionaire), he calls the server over to register a complaint about the meal Marie has ordered. “Waiter!” he hisses, “There are snails on her plate!” It’s idiotic. It’s sublime.

EuroTrip (2004)

A broken-hearted teenager (Scott Mechlowicz), his not-so-vaguely sleazy yet still mildly charming best friend (Jacob Pitts), and a set of twins so dissimilar they’ve been dubbed the “worst twins ever” (Michelle Trachtenberg and Travis Wester) trek from Ohio to Europe the summer after their high school graduation and raise holy hell at the Vatican and elsewhere. EuroTrip is in many ways your standard 2000s raunchy teen comedy, rife with hormonal ribaldry and topless cuties. But there’s still something innocently silly about it—you might be tempted to take offense at its clumsily stereotypical American’s-eye-view of Europeans, but it’s all in good fun, and no one is more guileless or doofier than its four midwestern protagonists. The gags include some mild incest jokes, a pope’s mitre set aflame, and Fred Armisen as an Italian gent who can’t keep his hands to himself but also can’t stop apologizing (“Mi scusi, mi scusi!”). EuroTrip may be dumb as hell, and occasionally tasteless to boot, but few teen comedies are this endearing.

Hollywood or Bust (1956)

It has become a cottage industry among self-proclaimed tasteful people to declare how un-funny they find Jerry Lewis. But sorry, not sorry: I’m with the French. If his persona could sometimes be annoying, he was also an outright genius, both a rubbery master of physical comedy and a walking treasury of squeaky, inventive voices. The years of his partnership with Dean Martin was perhaps his finest era—they made a sensational team, and at the height of their popularity, from 1946 to 1956, they were essentially the Beatles of their day. Hollywood or Bust was directed by ’50s madman Frank Tashlin, whose comedies were like ebullient clashing plaids. Martin, a straight man nonpareil, plays Steve, a slick gambler on the run from his bookie; Lewis is Malcolm, a nerdy movie fan who has just won a convertible in a raffle. The problem is that Steve thinks he’s won the car. They end up sharing it on a madcap road trip to Hollywood, along with a hamburger-chomping Great Dane named Mr. Bascomb—with his slurpy lips and regal A-frame ears, he’s one of the greatest canine sight gags ever. The mournful footnote to Hollywood or Bust is that off-set, the friendship between Martin and Lewis had already broken down irrevocably. They were barely speaking to each other during filming, and the movie was released four months after they permanently ended their partnership. Lewis never saw the completed film; he couldn’t bear to watch it. In Dean & Me: A Love Story, Lewis’ remarkable memoir about his and Martin’s time together, Lewis says that long after Martin’s death, in 1995, he continued to dream about him at least twice a week. And until his own death, in 2017, Lewis always referred to Martin as “my partner.” Hollywood or Bust is the comet’s tail of their time together, a great dumb comedy that also reminds us how fleeting our time on this Earth really is. Laugh while you can—and never apologize.

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