The 32 greatest 2010s comedies
Dec. 11, 2024As superhero franchises got bigger, comedies got funnier
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Love is a game in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s acclaimed graphic novel series, Edgar Wright’s star-studded movie version follows the adventures of Toronto bassist Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who is challenged in hand-to-hand combat by the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Breathless in its barrage of pop culture and video game parodies mixed with young adult millennial angst, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World ranks up as one of the decade’s greatest and most hilarious offerings.
Go pucks deep, establish the forecheck – and always hit ‘em where it hurts. In Goon, Seann William Scott hits the rink to throw down as Doug Glatt, a simple but kind bar bouncer who finds local stardom as the new enforcer of a struggling minor league hockey team. (The movie is loosely adapted from Doug Smith’s autobiography Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey.) He is eventually pitted against hockey veteran Ross “The Boss” Shea (played by Liev Schrieber). Though Goon came a little too late to ride the wave of 2000s sports comedies with Dodgeball, Talladega Nights, and The Longest Yard, Goon hits the funny bone hard, skating by on Scott’s affable aura.
When The Lego Movie came out, everything was awesome. After Phil Lord and Christopher Miller proved their cinematic comedy chops with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, the duo unleashed their acclaimed animated family comedy The Lego Movie. Hailed for its stunning animation (especially its faithful recreation of how kids actually play with Lego bricks), excellent voice acting – including Parks & Recreation’s Chris Pratt as the wholesome, if naive everybrick protagonist – and triumphant tale about underdog heroes, The Lego Movie exceeded low expectations as a mere “toy movie” to be something so much more.
At the height of Hollywood’s new class of dude comedy stars, actors Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, and Jonah Hill played fictionalized versions of themselves in the outrageous apocalypse comedy This Is the End. During a party at Franco’s L.A. mansion, the biblical rapture unfolds and hell’s minions are unleashed all across Burbank. While most of the movie documents the hilarious efforts of these pampered movie stars to stay sane – including staging their own crude sequel to 2008’s Pineapple Express – This Is the End soon becomes a laugh riot of a survival horror where it’s every A-lister for themselves.
He’s a peacock, captain – and you gotta let him fly! The Other Guys, directed by Adam McKay, cleverly satirizes buddy cop comedies of the ’80s and ’90s with its own dynamic duo, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. The two star as desk-bound New York police officers as they stumble upon the case of their careers. With the NYPD’s two best cops six feet under (with Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson in an A-plus cameo), it’s time for theseotherguys to rise to the occasion. While the whole movie is a riot, it’s the opening that really makes the movie a modern classic. Remember: Make sure there’s actually bushes before you “aim for the bushes.”
Cobra Kai taught us to strike hard and strike first. But The Art of Self-Defense showed us to kick with your first and punch with your feet. In this droll black comedy, Jesse Eisenberg plays a timid, emasculated male who signs up for karate classes after he’s physically beaten by a motorcycle gang. Things get weird when Eisenberg’s character slowly becomes a toxic presence, only to be balanced out by a deserving fellow student (Imogen Poots). The Art of Self-Defense is, like karate itself, methodical in its takedown of toxic masculinity and gender discrimination. But it’s also just an offbeat movie that makes The Karate Kid look like child’s play.
When Marvel movies were the ruling class of mainstream cinema, the bloodthirsty, R-rated action-comedy Deadpool gave superhero movies an overdue wedgie. Spinning off (and totally embarrassed by) the unpopular 2009 films X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds reprises his role of Wade Wilson – a wisecracking, fourth-wall breaking mercenary. After falling in love, Wade is diagnosed with a terminal illness which draws him into a dark, experimental procedure he believes would cure him only to turn him into a hideous living weapon for sale. Thus begins Deadpool’s bloody road to revenge and quest to get back to beautiful Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). While Deadpool is loved by the worst people you might know, the movie is actually smarter and deeper than its red spandex looks, being a movie about the dangerous and extreme lengths people are willing to go for the ones they love.
In a time when romantic comedies were passé, Crazy, Stupid, Love had us feeling butterflies again. Half romantic comedy and halfbro-mantic comedy, Crazy, Stupid, Love stars Steve Carrell as a divorced man in his forties who turns to handsome ladies’ man Jacob (Ryan Gosling) to help him get back into the dating pool. But while Jacob grooms Carrell’s helpless bachelor, Jacob starts to question his ways when he begins developing real feelings for a lively young woman, Hannah (Emma Stone). Crazy, Stupid, Love didn’t reinvent the romantic comedy, but it practically perfected the formula just in time before the genre vanished for the rest of the decade.
A brilliant parody of pop star documentaries full of catchy songs you can’t sing in public, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping should have dominated the box office. The brainchild of The Lonely Island, Popstar chronicles the rise and fall of Connor4Real (Andy Samberg), a former boy band rapper turned solo act. (Think Justin Timberlake meets Justin Bieber, with a healthy dash of Macklemore.) While Popstar unfortunately bombed in theaters, the movie is a nonstop laugh riot that never stops never stopping.
While it earned mixed reviews, A Stupid and Futile Gesture soars when you don’t look up the history of National Lampoon on Wikipedia prior to viewing. Ostensibly a biopic of comedy writer Douglas Kenney (played in the movie by Will Forte) and the founding of National Lampoon, A Stupid and Futile Gesture plays with expectations by not merely breaking the fourth wall but vandalize it, scrawling it with doodles and dirty pictures before leaving the scene with a bit of poetry. Director David Wain doesn’t try to faithfully recreate the era nor accurately tell the story of National Lampoon. Rather, it ruminates about the quiet tragedy of one man’s lifelong effort to tell jokes on his terms. It also wouldn’t be National Lampoon if it weren’t funny, and A Stupid and Futile Gesture honors its subject with excellent jokes and a funky vibe of its own.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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