(no subject)

[apocalypsos]

Okay, for some ungodly reason I'm watching the 100 Funniest Movies list, and it's still pissing me off.

So name me your favorite funny movies. Not the best comedies, but the movies that make you laugh hysterically every time you see them.

My favorites?

The Princess Bride, which is one of my three favorite movies of all time, if we're counting the Terminator series and the "Irwin Allen's Attempt to Destroy The Planet in the '70s In Three Crappy Disaster Movies" trio of death and destruction as one movie each.

Arthur, because that movie keeps me laughing for two straight hours without fail.

A Fish Called Wanda, because Kevin Kline in that movie is the best thing on the planet after maple walnut ice cream.

Airplane!, because that's my dad's influence at work.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because ... well, REALLY.

And an honorable mention to the scene in While You Were Sleeping where the paperboy goes to throw the newspaper from the icy sidewalk and his bike goes flying out from under him, if only because that scene never fails to KILL ME DEAD.

Comments

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

A big fat WORD in re: A Fish Called Wanda, Airplane! and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I would add:

Young Frankenstein, which I saw before I watched any of the black and white Frankenstein movies from Universal Pictures, so I can vouch that it is hilarious both as a standalone and as a parody. The scene in which Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frankenstein (“That’s Frahnk-en-steen”) and Peter Boyle’s monster perform “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is one of the greatest things ever.

The Great Race, starring Tony Curtis as the Great Leslie (all in white with gleaming teeth), Jack Lemmon as the moustache-twirling Professor Fate, Natalie Wood as a spunky suffragette/reporter, and Peter Falk as the Professor’s hapless assistant, Max. Among other joys, this movie has the biggest pie fight ever filmed.

Some Like It Hot, the last word in cross-dressing comedies, starring Curtis and Lemmon again, plus Marilyn Monroe poking fun at her sexpot image and Joe E. Brown as the apotheosis of the dirty old man. I have a particular fondness for Curtis’s imitation of Cary Grant while he’s posing as an oil heir.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, because although the later installments of the series fell prey to the law of diminishing returns, the first movie still kills. My favorite joke is one of the subtlest: Austin tells Vanessa Kensington that back in the day he really dug her mother, Mrs. Kensington, “But unfortunately for yours truly, that train had sailed.”

Our Hospitality, starring my sekrit silent film boyfriend, Buster Keaton. He plays a young man, born in the South and raised in New York, who takes a train down to the old homestead when he comes of age and inherits, unaware that he’s the last scion of a family embroiled in a Hatfield-McCoy-style feud. Naturally he winds up a houseguest of the very family that wants him dead, which leads to action/comedy setpieces unsurpassed to this day.

Honorable mentions: The Mask, Kung Fu Hustle

[sabra-n.livejournal.com]

I recently went to a middle school recital in which the chorus sang "Putting on the Ritz". Trying to keep from laughing the entire time was one of the hardest things I've had to do in a while.

-blue