The 10 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, Ranked

Our TML Score is a 0 to 100 rating built from critical standing, audience response, and lasting influence, and when you run comedy through it, something interesting happens: craft outlasts hype. Chaplin ends up on top instead of whatever multiplex hit topped the charts last month, and a handful of international films crash the party alongside the usual studio names. If the list skews classic, that's the point: these are the movies that have stayed funny, or at least stayed sharp, for decades instead of one opening weekend.

One more thing worth flagging before you scroll: two entries here, Parasite and Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, function more as pitch-black satire and wartime tragicomedy than as anything you'd call a laugh riot. That's not a labeling slip. Comedy has always had room for dark, uneasy humor alongside the pratfalls, and leaving those films off a ranking like this would mean pretending the genre only works in one register.

The 10 best comedy movies, ranked

1. City Lights (1931), Charles Chaplin. Chaplin insisted on shooting silent four years after sound had already taken over Hollywood, betting that pantomime could still hit harder than dialogue, and the finale, where the blind flower girl recognizes the tramp by the touch of his hand, remains one of the most quietly devastating endings in American film. It tops our TML Score at 95. Watch on Amazon
2. Dr. Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick. Peter Sellers plays three separate roles, a mild British officer, an ineffectual American president, and an ex-Nazi scientist who can't control his own arm, and Kubrick shot a full pie fight for the War Room finale before cutting it in the edit. TML Score: 93. Watch on Amazon
3. Modern Times (1936), Charles Chaplin. This was the Tramp's last outing in a Chaplin feature, made as the Depression sharpened public anxiety about machines replacing workers, and the sequence where he's swallowed whole by the gears of an assembly line is still the most literal man-versus-machine gag ever filmed. It matches Strangelove's TML Score of 93, and where two films land on the same number like this, the order below reflects our own sense of which one has aged sharper, not a hidden fractional gap the score doesn't show, a call we'll make again for the four-way tie at 90 further down this list. Modern Times earns third place by staying pointed instead of just nostalgic. Watch on Amazon
4. The Chaos Class (1975), Ertem Eğilmez. Released in Turkey as Hababam Sınıfı, it follows a group of misfit students running circles around their teachers, a setup simple enough that the plot needs no footnotes anywhere it plays. It clearly struck a nerve at home, spawning several sequels that kept the same cast returning to the same classroom. A TML Score of 92 puts it ahead of plenty of Hollywood names most American readers would recognize faster, and that's exactly why it belongs here. Watch on Amazon
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Ernst Lubitsch. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan play bickering coworkers who don't realize they're also each other's anonymous pen pals, a setup so durable it got remade decades later as You've Got Mail. TML Score 91, earned by the way Lubitsch lets the irony sit in plain sight without ever winking at the camera about it. Watch on Amazon
6. The Rules of the Game (1939), Jean Renoir. Aristocrats and servants converge on a country estate for a hunting weekend, and the affairs unfolding upstairs mirror the ones downstairs so precisely that Renoir uses the symmetry to needle French society right on the eve of a war it didn't see coming. The French government banned the film in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed when Allied bombing hit a warehouse during World War II, so what survives today comes from prints painstakingly reassembled and restored decades later. That slow rehabilitation into one of the form's essential films is reflected in the 91 it carries here. Watch on Amazon
7. The Philadelphia Story (1940), George Cukor. Katharine Hepburn plays a socialite juggling an ex-husband and a fiance on the eve of her wedding, in a role she developed specifically to shake off the "box office poison" label that had been following her around, and James Stewart took home the Best Actor Oscar for playing the reporter caught in the middle of it all. Dialogue this fast rarely ages well, but here it still outpaces most comedies made since. That's the biggest reason it opens the four-way tie at 90. Watch on Amazon
8. Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019), Bong Joon Ho. A poor family cons their way into working for a wealthy household one lie at a time, and Bong plays the early scenes for pure, squirming comedy before the film pivots hard into something much darker, which is part of the point of including it on a comedy list at all. It became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, an unprecedented sweep that also included Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. That tonal high-wire act, one almost nobody else has pulled off, is worth its share of the 90. Watch on Amazon
9. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996), Srdjan Dragojevic. This Serbian production follows childhood friends from opposite sides of the Bosnian war who end up trapped together in a tunnel, and Dragojevic cuts between the siege and flashbacks to the two of them as kids, leaning on gallows humor to make the tragedy land harder rather than soften it. It's the other film here that earns "comedy" only in the broadest, darkest sense, sitting in that same cluster of films tied at a TML Score of 90. Watch on Amazon
10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. King Arthur's knights get menaced by a homicidal rabbit, stopped at a bridge by a guard demanding trivia answers, and reduced to clip-clopping coconut shells together because the production couldn't afford real horses. It closes out the four-way tie at 90 and is still the film most people quote first when British comedy comes up. Watch on Amazon

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