Member-only story

5 Hilarious Movies That Everyone Needs to Watch

Old, underground, forgotten — let’s rewatch these laugh-out-loud masterpieces.

Nicolas Carteron

--

Some movies hurt you bad; they make you cry, shudder, crawl under your weighted blanket with a bottle of scotch and wish the day had never started and you were still yesternight, innocent and unblemished by what you just watched.

Other movies make you laugh.

I love both kinds but, surprisingly enough, find myself watching the latter category a bit more often.

We tend to assume that humour is a concept deeply rooted in the zeitgeist. We may believe that comedies from far ago or far away will not make us laugh because of cultural differences or changes in our sensitivities. For the open mind, however, humour transcends time and place. It brings us together in laughing at the nonsensical nature of our life experience.

I don’t know about you, but I take immense pleasure in laughing in front of a 60-year-old movie, thinking that people born in the nineteenth century laughed at it too. It reminds me of how stable the human experience is across time, of how, even in the face of technological progress and social change, we keep on caring for the same topics and laughing at the same jokes. If you want the extreme of this experience, read Lysistrata, a comedy written in 411BC by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. I guarantee you’ll laugh out loud, 25 centuries onwards.

But I digress. Movies, funny ones, here’s the list!

1. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Marylin Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon star in this masterpiece of comedic writing. Some Like It Hot isn’t precisely an underground, unknown movie. It is #1 on the AFI 100 Years… 100 Laughs list and stars three of the most famous people of the decade. However, many would hesitate to watch it thinking that it is too old and too removed from today’s life to be funny. Many would discard the movie as a B&W bore.

--

--

Responses (37)

Write a response