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Bringing Up Baby 1938

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Part of the AFI 100 Years… series, AFI's 100 Years…100 Laughs is a list of the top 100 funniest movies in American cinema. A wide variety of comedies were nominated for the distinction that included slapstick comedy, action comedy, screwball comedy, romantic comedy, satire, black comedy, musical comedy, comedy of manners and comedy of errors. The list was unveiled by the American Film Institute on June 13, 2000.

Source: http://www.afi.com/Docs/100Years/laughs100.pdf

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This is a list of the 100 funniest American films of all time.
The list was unveiled by the American Film Institute on June 13, 2000.

According to the AFI, the criteria for nomination are:

  • Feature-Length Fiction Film: The film must be in narrative format typically over 60 minutes in length;
  • American Film: The film must be in the English language with significant creative and/or financial production elements from the United States;
  • Funny: Regardless of genre, the total comedic impact of a film’s elements that creates an experience greater than the sum of the smiles;
  • Legacy: Laughs that echo across time, enriching America’s film heritage and inspiring artists and audiences today.

https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-laughs/

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https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-comedy-movies/

UPDATED: 1/29/24

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https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time?ok=

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https://variety.com/lists/best-movies-of-all-time/

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From https://letterboxd.com/reelstats/list/the-500-greatest-movies-of-all-time-according/

Hey everyone, great to be back again. Some of you might remember a similar title from a list I made back in April, where I made a list of the top 250 movies with 13 sources, or a preview of this list I made last month.

I want to emphasize that this is NOT an official ranking nor my personal ranking; it is just a statistical and, personally, interesting look at 500 amazing movies. These rankings reflect the opinions of thousands of critics and millions of people around the world. And I am glad that this list is able to cover a wide range of genres, decades, and countries. So before I get bombarded with "Why isn't X on here?" or "How is X above Y?" comments, I wanted to clear that up.

I sourced my data from Sight & Sound (both critic and director lists), TSPDT, iCheckMovies, 11 domestic websites (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, Letterboxd, TMDb, Trakt, Blu-Ray, MovieLens, RateYourMusic, Criticker, and Critics Choice), and 9 international audience sites (FilmAffinity, Douban, Naver, MUBI, Filmweb, Kinopoisk, CSFD, Moviemeter, and Senscritique). This balance of domestic/international ratings made the list more well-rounded and internationally representative (sites from Spain, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and France).

As for my algorithm, I weighted websites according to both their Alexa ranking and their number of votes compared to other sites. For example, since The Godfather has hundreds of thousands of votes on Letterboxd but only a couple thousand on Metacritic, Letterboxd would be weighted more heavily. After obtaining the weighted averages, I then added the movie's iCheckMovies' favs/checks ratio and TSPDT ranking, if applicable. Regarding TSPDT, I included the top 2000 movies; as an example of my calculations, Rear Window's ranking of #41 would add (2000-41)/2000=0.9795 points to its weighted average. I removed movies that had <7-8K votes on IMDb, as these mostly had low ratings and numbers of votes across different sites as well. For both Sight & Sound lists, I added between 0.5 and 1 point to a movie's score based on its ranking, which I thought was an adequate reflection of how difficult it is to be included on these lists. As examples, a #21 movie would have 0.9 points added while a #63 would have 0.69 points.

Any feedback is appreciated, especially other sites I may not have sourced. If you found this list interesting, I would really appreciate it if you can give my newish Youtube channel a subscribe. It really helps a lot. Thanks guys.

Some stats:

Decades:
1900s - 1 film
1910s - 1
1920s - 22
1930s - 22
1940s - 40
1950s - 65
1960s - 75
1970s - 58
1980s - 54
1990s - 64
2000s - 55
2010s - 43

Directors with multiple films:
12 films - Akira Kurosawa
10 - Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman
8 - Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick
7 - Andrei Tarkovsky, Billy Wilder, Hayao Miyazaki, Steven Spielberg
6 - Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel
5 - Christopher Nolan, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen
4 - David Lynch, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, Lee Unkrich, Quentin Tarantino, Roman Polanski, Sergio Leone, Werner Herzog, William Wyler, Yasujirō Ozu
3 - Brad Bird, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers, David Fincher, David Lean, François Truffaut, Frank Capra, Hirokazu Koreeda, James Cameron, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Huston, Masaki Kobayashi, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pete Docter, Peter Jackson, Richard Linklater, Ridley Scott, Robert Bresson, Satyajit Ray, Sidney Lumet, Vittorio De Sica, Wim Wenders
2 - Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Resnais, Andrew Stanton, Arthur Penn, Béla Tarr, Bong Joon-ho, Brian De Palma, Chris Marker, Edward Yang, Elia Kazan, Emir Kusturica, Frank Darabont, George Cukor, George Roy Hill, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Isao Takahata, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jim Sheridan, John Cassavetes, John Lasseter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Kenji Mizoguchi, Leo McCarey, Louis Malle, Luchino Visconti, Max Ophüls, Mike Leigh, Mike Nichols, Mikhail Kalatozov, Miloš Forman, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Park Chan-wook, Pedro Almodóvar, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Weir, Raoul Walsh, Robert Zemeckis, Sam Mendes, Stanley Donen, Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, Thomas Vinterberg, Victor Fleming, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou

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List created and maintained by https://listrr.pro

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I well remember being taken to Blazing Saddles at the age of 10, when I was far too young to understand most of the jokes. At the same time, I could see how important Blazing Saddles was to my parents and their friends. They quoted from it for months—years—afterward.

As much as savoring a particular joke, I realize now, they were trying to reclaim that initial, joyful shock to the system. There’s not a film on the WGA’s 101 Funniest Screenplays that doesn’t produce such an unexpected jolt, if not a sustained quake, and for the same reasons Blazing Saddles did—by transgressing accepted norms.

One question that this list asks, however: Should a great comedy simply be gauged by the laughter it elicits? “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” George S. Kaufman famously quipped. A number of the comedies on this list went under-appreciated at the box office and by critics; years, if not decades, had to pass before the work began to receive its due. This was as true for Buster Keaton’s The General as it was nearly half a century later for Harold and Maude, and 30 years after that for Office Space.

The oldest movie on the list is Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), while the most recent is Bridesmaids, released in 2011. The latter also has the distinction of being written by two women—Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, working in slapstick, a genre historically dominated by men. Bridesmaids comes in at no. 16, immediately after When Harry Met Sally, written by the legendary Nora Ephron. Comedy screenwriting has long been a playground that women and writers of color have not had enough time in. The work of Richard Pryor on Blazing Saddles, Tina Fey on Mean Girls, Amy Heckerling on Clueless, and Hagar Wilde, co-writer of Bringing Up Baby, makes you wonder what a list would be if the playground had been more inclusive all along.

In the end, the variety of films on the list—as different as Being There is to Airplane! or Duck Soup is to Fargo—indicates how difficult it is to gauge a great comedy by any set of particular criteria. Better to say the best comedy writers and comedians are like astronauts, launching themselves beyond the ozone layer of the tasteful and the expected in order to find the forbidden or the outrageous or the merely uncomfortable. Whether that produces an outrageous comedy like Mrs. Doubtfire or a satire like Dr. Strangelove, the goal is still provocation. And truth.

Written by Paul Brownfield
2015-11-15

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I started off by gathering ratings from IMDB (User/Critic Average), Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer, Critic Average, Audience Score, User Average), Metacritic (Critic Average, User Average) and Letterboxd (User Average). I was then able to determine a rating (out of 10) for each individual rating and therefore come up with an average rating for each site. Each site’s average rating was then weighted fairly so that no site’s ratings were favored above the rest.

The next step was to make sure that each film was treated fairly. Other top movie list’s like IMDb’s Top 1000 removes films that have under a certain viewing number (25,000 I think), but rather than ruling out films that may have been overlooked by the general audience (especially older films), I opted to alter these films score by carefully deducting points depending on how many people have seen it, and therefore voted on it. I also thought it was needed to make sure that recent films (released within the past 36 months) were also not favored, as it usually takes 3 years for the average rating to settle down. So I also added a deduction to these films that fell under this rule.

Taken from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3hbiio/update_1001_greatest_movies_of_all_time_plus/

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Movies of the 30's, Jürgen Müller (ed.) Taschen.

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AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies – 10th Anniversary Edition is an updated edition to AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies, a list of the top 100 greatest American films of all time.

Honoring the 10th anniversary of this award-winning series, a jury of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians determined that CITIZEN KANE remained the greatest movie of all time.

The television special AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies – 10th Anniversary Edition originally aired June 20, 2007 on CBS.

https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies-10th-anniversary-edition/

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As a genre, the romantic comedy has had pretty sharply defined highs (the 1940s and 1980s) and lows (1990s-2000s) based on viewer appetite and studio competence, but thanks to this thing we call “the human condition,” hope-laden fables showing how two people can, indeed, find and cherish one another despite all obstacles will never stay out of fashion long—no matter how soulless and cynical the industry. Whether because we are young and naïve, not-so-young and searching, or old and grumpy with a soft spot (or wistful memory), there’s always an appetite for fascinating meet-cutes, resolved comedies of errors and melted gruff exteriors. So no matter your particular poison when it comes to scripted takes on love and relationships, let Paste’s list of the 100 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time provide you just what the doctor ordered.

List published April 2013. Updated and expanded in October 2018

Source: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/romantic-comedies/the-100-best-romantic-comedies-of-all-time/

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