With The Naked Gun and Freakier Friday in cinemas, Happy Gilmore 2 leading the Netflix rankings and releases slated for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Spaceballs 2, a new Meet the Parents instalment, Focker In-Law, and a Pink Panther reboot starring Eddie Murphy, it seems Hollywood has learnt to laugh again. Or at least it has learnt that remaking old comedy hits may be a way to bring in the big bucks from a cinema-going public tired of superheroes. And besides, we could all do with a laugh as the world burns. As Liam Neeson said of The Naked Gun, “The film is a giggle and we need that.” Here are ten more simple pleasures to enjoy, picked by our experts.
• Naked Gun review — Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are irresistible
1. Marx Brothers — A Night at the Opera (1935)
Groucho Marx, Chico Marx and Harpo Marx on the set of A Night at the Opera, 1935
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER/GETTY IMAGES
There’d be no screwball comedy without the Marx Brothers. Arguably Duck Soup, the one about Groucho ruling the fictional country of Freedonia, is the Brothers’ lodestone, but their canvas was wider in this, a romp that never pauses for breath, featuring a breathtaking physical skit set in a cabin on a cruise liner (“and two-hard boiled eggs”), the immortal gag “there ain’t no such thing as a sanity clause” and a climactic lampoon of Verdi’s baffling Il trovatore. It’s bliss. Buy/rent
2. Some Mothers Do Ave ’Em (1973-78)
Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer
BBC
Few characters are as infantile as Frank Spencer, for all his good intentions, and as he accidentally creates mayhem wherever he goes, he also creates timelessly funny farce. His DIY skills will end in systematic destruction of the room, reversing a car will somehow result in it hanging off a cliff edge (“You promise you won’t be angry with me?” he asks his wife, Betty, nervously) — the man is a walking catastrophe in a tank top and proof that dumbness never ages. iPlayer
3. Blazing Saddles (1974) 
Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles
ALAMY
Who could watch a western — or eat baked beans — in the same way after seeing Mel Brooks’s fantastically silly postmodern takedown of the genre? Packed with surreal gags and clever anachronisms, it featured a sublime central performance from Gene Wilder but it’s the campfire scene that many people remember: it was believed to have set a record for the number of on-screen farts in a film.
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4. Airplane! (1980)
Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker would become kings of the spoof with Hot Shots!, Top Secret! and the Naked Gun franchise but this airline disaster comedy, arguably their daftest moment, was their breakthrough. A blitzkrieg of sight gags and awful puns, it included this immortal exchange between Robert Hays’s Ted Striker and Leslie Nielsen’s Dr Rumack: “Can you fly this plane and land it?” Rumack says. “Surely you can’t be serious,” Striker says. “I am serious … and don’t call me Shirley.” Buy/rent
5. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean in This Is Spinal Tap
ALAMY
So many expressions from this semi-improvised mock-rockumentary have entered the culture — “These go to 11”; “There’s a thin line between clever and stupid” — that it can be hard to remember just how flaming funny it is. It’s played beautifully straight, studded with great set pieces — Stonehenge almost being crushed by a dwarf; the band failing to find the stage at showtime — and has long been endorsed as ludicrously lifelike by the people it satirises. Buy/rent
6. Mr Bean (1990-95)
Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean
ITV/SHUTTERSTOCK
If we’re talking daft comedy, there is no one dafter than Mr Bean. Like a British Jacques Tati, Rowan Atkinson is a silent clown, the entire series and its films a vehicle for his gormless, rubber-faced facial expressions as he creates chaos. Where? Everywhere: in the dentist’s chair, watching a scary film at the cinema (putting popcorn in his ears), meeting the Queen in a line-up with a broken trouser zip. Admit it, you were laughing. ITVX/Netflix/Prime Video
7. Bottom (1991-1995)
Rik Mayall as Richie and Adrian Edmondson as Eddie in Bottom
BBC
Nihilistic, violent and at times chaotic, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s sublime comedy of the absurd gave us big laughs in the Nineties across three brilliant series. Taking their Young Ones characters Richie Richard and Eddie Hitler and dropping them into a filthy flat in Hammersmith, the show is driven by the duo’s ridiculous plots to make money and impress women, their perverted fantasies and an overfamiliarity that has long ago turned to contempt. iPlayer
8. Bowfinger (1999)
Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger
ALAMY
Perhaps the last gasp of out-and-out silliness from its writer and star, Steve Martin, and a reminder that Eddie Murphy is a performer of genius. Martin plays the never-say-die film-maker Bobby Bowfinger and Murphy plays both the paranoid superstar Kit Ramsey — whom Bowfinger films secretly on the streets of Hollywood after he refuses to star in his no-budget sci-fi thriller “Chubby Rain” — and his shy, hopeless twin-cum-body double, Jiff. Oh, and Heather Graham is their ruthlessly ambitious co-star. Ridiculous. Glorious. Buy/rent
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999-2024)
Larry David as a version of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm
ALAMY
Larry David, the brilliant Seinfeld co-creator and producer, was not a man for boundaries in the more than two decades in which he played a hyper-real version of himself. Every episode had him offending someone, whether wearing a Maga hat to ward off unwelcome members of the public or dating a woman in a wheelchair to earn social kudos. Perhaps the silliest “I want to die” moment came when he placed an obituary tribute to his “beloved aunt”. Only, of course, the “A” was accidentally switched for a “C”. Now
10. They Came Together (2014)
Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler in They Came Together
ALAMY
Is it too much to hope for, one really funny film comedy a year? Well, how can Hollywood commit to out-and-out grown-up laughs when a masterpiece like this spoof, the Airplane! of rom-coms, bellyflopped on release? Yet David Wain’s film is constantly inventive: Paul Rudd is the corporate candy exec — “handsome but in a non-threatening way … vaguely but not overtly Jewish” — who meets the single mother Amy Poehler, who runs a small, not-for-profit candy store (yeah, one of those) in New York. Every detail is smartly observed but, as with the best spoofs, somehow you care what happens to these goons too. Buy/rent
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