Comedies are a genre that flummoxes the movie industry. They never get nominated for awards, and yet, their cultural retention compared to the best picture winner tends to have much deeper roots. Further complicating matters is how comedies rely heavily on cultural specificity, which can be tied to target audience, a time period, the beats of a joke, etc. The minute a new generation pops up, comedies have a hard time passing that specificity onto the kids, who grow up with an entirely new societal perspective.
Below are 6 comedies widely loved in their time. Let’s see how they’ve aged as time has gone on, and if you should consider watching them even today.
Divorced man tries to woo his ex-wife/co-worker back into his arms via their shared love for the newspaper business, despite the ex getting married tomorrow.
Comedic Style
Screwball comedy
How’s The Comedy Aging?
For the most part, surprisingly well! Many of the screwball romcoms of early moviemaking revolved around a woman with money or a career giving it up for love. Friday flips the script. Rosalind Russell’s Hildy is woo’ed a little by Cary Grant. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t be? However, she’s more sucked into her profession, because of how brilliant she is at finding a great news story. It’s the thrill of the story chase that attracts her, not just the man who does it with her. That chase results in a whirlwind of joke telling that’ll exhaust you in trying to keep up with, because Hildy ain’t slowing down for you.
Two pot smoking dudes, Cheech and Chong, go searching for marijuana across the US Mexico border and back again.
Comedic Style
Stoner comedy
How’s The Comedy Aging?
Pot smoking has certainly become more socially accepted. The comedy in this movie, I would say, gets funnier the higher you get. In fact, the whole movie is clearly recordings of high conversations between Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong that they stitched into a loose story. If you’re sober, you’ll laugh sporadically: a pot covered van is a great idea, and there’s some decent high humor built around the smoke from said van. However, I admire this movie more than laugh at it because no one was gonna make a Cheech and Chong movie unless they wrote it themselves, so props to those guys!
A newspaper reporter, investigating the drug scene at a California beach, gets offered a large sum of money to murder someone.
Comedic Style
Satire/Spoof
How’s The Comedy Aging?
That story hook sounds like a thriller right, not a comedy? But that’s the reason this Chevy Chase vehicle still works really well today. Only Chase’s Fletch knows he’s quipping and screwing around, while the rest of the characters are involved in a detective caper. When zinger meets stone faced people? Makes the joke even funnier. It also helps that Fletch is the perfect Chevy Chase character: charming goofball that’s smarter than everyone and knows it, and also a one liner machine. “Can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.” Classic.
A wacky buffoon becomes president of a feckless country, causing the neighboring country to consider starting a war with said country.
Comedic Style
A kitchen sink of comedy: screwball, spoof, satire, musical farce, romcom.
How’s The Comedy Aging?
The Marx Brothers employ a cornucopia of laughter vehicles on the audience. Duck Soup is VERY Simpson’s esque that way: throw a million jokes on the screen; one of them’s bound to cause a chuckle. As such, the joke aging is simultaneously terrible and wonderful. The best stuff involves the big satire around some of the dumb decision making of powerful people in their choices to go to war, and Harpo’s silent hysterical badgering of a peanut salesman.
Man in south central Los Angeles loses his job on his day off, and gets sucked into the shenanigans of the neighborhood throughout the day.
Comedic Style
African American stoner comedy
How’s The Comedy Aging?
Ice Cube wrote and starred in this comedy. Having already proven he could rap and act dramatically, the talented artist proves his ability to dip into comedic territory leading man stuff as well. How did he do it? By surrounding himself with some of the funniest people around, and inserting personal life experiences to provide a level of specificity and interesting characters to the joke telling. The gender politics stuff is of its time, but large chunks of Friday’s laughs are pretty brilliant. You don’t think so? Then, Bye Felicia!
A missionary’s African village is killed by German troops in WWII, so she enlists a steamboat captain to find a German gunboat and destroy it.
Comedic Style
Adventure romcom
How’s The Comedy Aging?
This movie has mostly aged like a fine wine, becoming the template for all adventure romcoms to come. Casting goes a long way here: Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart are two of the best in the business, and had been falling in love going on 2 decades by that point. Aiding them is a stellar script which slowly breaks the barriers between the two as they get to know each other. Surrounding the acting heat is real, gorgeous African locales, adding additional heat to Bogart and Hepburn’s chemistry. And as a cherry on top, the goal is to explode a ship, meaning we might see some explosions too! What more could you want!
