The 34 Funniest Moments in Movies in 2024

34 The Craptastic Car Scene in ‘Incoming’

Writing-directing brothers Dave and John Chernin, who have worked on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and created The Mick, made their feature debut with Incoming, a juvenile comedy about some uncool high school freshmen going to their first blowout party. The film’s highlight gross-out moment involves a super-drunk popular girl in the backseat of a car who wants some Taco Bell — and the disastrous digestive repercussions of that poor decision. 

“Man, that was an idea that we’ve had for a long time,” Dave told me this summer about the shit-centric gag. “We sat on that (idea) for 15 years just knowing, ‘Well, no one’s ever going to do that — we’re never in danger of getting beat to the finish line on that idea.’” Prepare to laugh or gag, depending on the strength of your stomach.

33 ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ Turns Back the Clock 100 Years

You often hear people complain, “They don’t make movies like that anymore.” Well, they really don’t make films like Hundreds of Beavers, which was a conscious attempt to recreate the look and feel of silent cinema, telling the story of a wacky frontiersman/applejack salesman (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) who goes to battle in the dead of winter with some pesky beavers. Recalling Charlie Chaplin classics like The Gold Rush, director Mike Cheslik made an indie sensation that proved audiences still have a hankering for old-fashioned slapstick. 

32 The Dildos of ‘Drive-Away Dolls’

Ethan Coen (one-half of the Coen brothers) directed his own feature in 2024, a road movie in which two lesbian friends (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) hit the highway in a rental car that, unbeknownst to them, contains a valuable suitcase wanted by some bad dudes. What’s in the case? A bunch of dildos, but they’re not just any dildos — they’re ones made from the penises of powerful men who wouldn’t want the sex toys to fall into the wrong hands. Drive-Away Dolls is too tame to be the daring political/sex comedy it longs to be, but Coen and his game cast have a lot of fun with all those wieners. 

31 Anne Hathaway’s Adorkable Mom in ‘The Idea of You’

Several films this year were about age-gap romances, except they flipped the script by featuring older women with younger men. Anne Hathaway’s contribution was The Idea of You, based on the Robinne Lee novel, about a divorced mother named Solène who starts dating a boy-band hunk (Nicholas Galitzine). Now in her early 40s, the Oscar-winner can believably play moms, but that doesn’t mean she has to fall into the unflattering clichés that filmmakers usually assign to such characters. Far from frumpy or frazzled, Solène is a sexy, assured career woman. But because she’s played by Hathaway, she’s also a delightful dork — Hathaway has rarely been as likable as she is in The Idea of You playing a woman who isn’t ready to give up her identity just because she’s got a kid.

30 All Hail ‘The Pink Opaque’

I Saw the TV Glow was further proof that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair filmmaker  Jane Schoenbrun is an auteur on the rise. Understandably, this despairing indie drama/psychological horror film didn’t have a lot of laughs, but one of its best jokes concerns a 1990s cult TV show that obsesses the sensitive, alienated characters: The Pink Opaque, which we quickly realize from the title sequence and overall look is meant to be a cheeky takeoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As beloved as Buffy remains in the culture, it was very satisfying to see TV Glow parody the show’s most cringe-y Clinton-era elements.

29 Everybody Dunks on ‘Kraven the Hunter’

It’s always amusing when a studio pushes back a film’s release, insisting that it’s not because the movie is terrible. (“No, no, you see, it’s really so that the movie can perform better at the box office at a later date.” Yeah, sure, whatever.) One especially embarrassing recent example of this was Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the titular comic-book villain whose superpowers include wearing a leather vest without a shirt underneath. Sony kept delaying the movie, and audiences knew what that meant: It was a certified stinker, which was why the flick bombed in its opening weekend. Those unlucky enough to sit through Kraven the Hunter got the last laugh, though, writing some of the most hilariously mean reviews on Letterboxd. My favorite burn: “IDK how to explain it, but this feels like watching a power point presentation.” At least you get something out of those, buddy. 

28 Apple Decides No One Gets to See the New George Clooney/Brad Pitt Movie

One of our least-favorite activities is explaining to our parents why films they’d like to see don’t play in theaters. Take, for instance, the perfectly-fine action-comedy Wolfs, which starred Ocean’s Eleven pals George Clooney and Brad Pitt as rival fixers who must work together. It’s the sort of thing adults would enjoy at the multiplex, right? Well, because the distributor, Apple, decided to barely release Wolfs — preferring to make people sign up for its streaming service — lots of folks never even knew this reunion of the two aging heartthrobs happened. The film’s writer-director Jon Watts was so pissed by the company’s decision that he killed the idea of doing a sequel (which Apple had paid him to do), saying, “I no longer trusted them as a creative partner.” It’s almost like tech companies with endless amounts of money and no idea how to make movies are a really bad thing for the future of the film industry.

27 Tilda Swinton Makes Everyone Miserable in ‘Problemista’

We’ve all had the boss from hell, but leave it to Tilda Swinton to take this familiar character type and turn it up to 11. In Problemista, she’s Elizabeth, a pretentious artist who hires a struggling toymaker, Alejandro (writer-director Julio Torres) so he’s not deported. But her seeming benevolence proved short-lived: Elizabeth is rude and cruel to everyone around her — she’s the sort of high-maintenance New Yorker who can’t survive unless life is a total drama. You will want to throw Elizabeth through a window — and congratulate Swinton for bringing such a horrendous human being to such grotesquely funny life.

26 Take a Look at ‘The Fall Guy’ Now

One of the bigger disappointments of 2024 was The Fall Guy, a middling action-comedy that had the potential to be a lot better. Unfortunately, the movie was more smug than funny, more knowingly clever than actually inventive. But its highwater mark was Emily Blunt’s impassioned karaoke performance of the Phil Collins’ power ballad “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” sung as her heartbroken character realizes that suave stuntman Ryan Gosling is never going to commit to her. That the song is crosscut with The Fall Guy’s best action sequence — in which Gosling’s stuntman is risking life and limb to make his way to her — suggests the superior film this could have been. Too bad the “Odds” were against them.

25 Vera Drew Sticks It to Warner Bros. With ‘The People’s Joker’

Studios do everything in their power to protect their intellectual property. So it seemed highly unlikely we would ever see The People’s Joker, a giddy, low-budget riff on superhero movies — and the Joker, specifically — that was directed and co-written by Vera Drew, who plays a young woman who transforms into the Clown Prince of Crime. The film was set to premiere at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival, but then Warner Bros. pressured Drew not to screen the movie, its future in legal limbo. But then, to everyone’s surprise, the movie got released this year, although The People’s Joker did contain the following disclaimer: “This film is a parody and is at present time completely unauthorized by DC Comics, Warner Brothers or anyone claiming ownership of the trademarks therein (eg. ‘Joker,’ ‘Batman, etc.).” Those who saw the film got to enjoy an irreverent trip through superhero cinema paired with a more personal story about Drew’s journey as a transgender comic trying to find her voice. The best joke of all: Many critics preferred The People’s Joker to Warner Bros.’ official 2024 Joker movie (which we’ll get to later in this list).

24 Cate Blanchett Plays a Really Dumb World Leader

The arthouse political satire Rumours imagined a scenario in which the leaders of the G7 get together for a high-profile conference, this self-important group of presidents and chancellors quickly getting lost in the woods and, inexplicably, being attacked by creepy nocturnal creatures. The movie was decidedly hit-or-miss, but Cate Blanchett killed as Hilda Ortmann, clearly a takeoff on former German leader Angela Merkel. The hair, accent and manner are all spot-on, but what makes the performance so good is how the two-time Oscar-winner dives into her character’s utter stupidity — Hilda may carry herself with regal poise, but she’s painfully dumb. Pity Blanchett never got to be on Veep — she would have fit right in.

23 Nostalgia Shows Up in ‘Inside Out 2’

Almost as good as the original, Inside Out 2 introduces a few new emotions, but the best is Nostalgia (voiced by June Squibb), who occasionally pops in to remind everyone about how great something in the past was. Not surprisingly, the rest of the emotion crew don’t feel like she’s really necessary for the mind of a young teen: As Maya Hawke’s Anxiety explains to her, “You still have about 10 years, two graduations and a best friend’s wedding before you’re invited.”

22 Cult Director Uwe Boll Gets Real (Weird)

Provocative Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s new movie, a dark comedy called Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, takes us through the day of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a lowly P.A. for a commercial production company in Bucharest. Her job sucks, but to pass the time, she films TikTok videos in the guise of her alter ego — an angry, sexist dude who likes espousing crude, women-hating rhetoric. As part of Angela’s series of misadventures, she’ll come across several colorful individuals — none stranger than real-life grade-Z genre filmmaker Uwe Boll, who plays himself. Worshipped as a cult figure by cinephiles who love his ultra-schlocky movies, Boll is an absolute hoot playing along with Angela’s knowingly repulsive alter ego. The movie’s punk-rock, burn-it-all-down energy peaks with this foul-mouthed cameo. 

21 Chris Evans’ ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Cameo

The blockbuster pairing of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman was one of the rare bright spots for superhero cinema in 2024. Not that Deadpool & Wolverine was all that great — Wade Wilson’s snark has lost its spark — and the movie was stuffed with mediocre, fan-service-y cameos. But the one that was funny was Chris Evans reprising his role… as the Human Torch, the character he played in those forgotten Fantastic Four films of the early 21st century. It was amusing to see Mr. Captain America acknowledge his less-sterling comic-book past — and to watch the audience’s reaction once they realized they’re not gonna see him play Cap again. (Although, apparently, Evans will be back in his most iconic role soon. Sigh.)

20 Aubrey Plaza’s Awesomeness in ‘My Old Ass’

Many enjoyed former Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza’s knowingly sleazy turn in Megalopolis — the shameless seductress she plays is wonderfully named Wow Platinum — but my favorite of her 2024 performances came in the sweet comedy-drama My Old Ass, in which she’s the older version of the teen main character Elliott (Maisy Stella), who meets her after taking mushrooms. Plaza has been famous for so long — she now looks so young in those early Parks and Rec seasons — that it’s funny to think of her as the wise, older grown-up in a coming-of-age movie. Whereas in Megalopolis Plaza plays a scheming, gold-digging caricature, in My Old Ass she gets to be a more fully-fleshed-out adult whose life looks fascinating and strange to her teenage self. Plaza has done lots of great work in recent years — it’s heartening to see her as the cool grown-up we’d all like to become.

19 Sasquatch Sex

One of the stranger, more beautiful films of 2024 was Sasquatch Sunset, a straightforward, dialogue-free drama in which four sasquatch (two of whom are played by Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg) try to live in peace in the deep forest. The makeup work is incredible — you’ll believe the actors are these mythical beasts — and the movie is a transporting look at survival and family. But while Sasquatch Sunset is often quite moving, it can also be really funny, especially when filmmaking brothers Nathan Zellner and David Zellner remind us that these majestic creatures sure love to hump. Probably no sex scene this year was funnier than this movie’s depiction of bigfoot bonin’.

18 Meet Benji Kaplan

Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s terrific, surprisingly funny A Real Pain is about two close American cousins on a trip to Poland to visit the concentration camps as a way to honor their late grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. Eisenberg plays mild-mannered David Kaplan, a put-together family man, while Kieran Culkin is the volatile Benji, a restless spirit you want to hug one moment and punch the next. Early on, Benji (and Culkin) indicate what a handful the character is going to be during an informal get-together with the rest of this tour group. Nobody likes introducing themselves to strangers, but Benji’s initial interactions are hilarious, cringe-inducing, shocking and, also, weirdly touching. If Culkin wins the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this indelible performance, it will be partly because of the first impression Benji makes with that tour group — the guy is unforgettable, for better or worse.

17 Warner Bros. Tries to Hide the Fact that ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Is a Musical

A bizarre trend in movie trailers lately is concealing that the film being advertised is a musical. If you saw spots for the recent Mean Girls or Wonka, you’d have no idea there was a lot of singing and dancing in the actual movies. The reason why is because studios are convinced that audiences will stay away if they know it’s a musical — which seems silly. (If you’re that worried, maybe don’t make a musical in the first place?) The funniest example of this tendency was how everyone involved with Joker: Folie à Deux bent over backwards assuring us the film wasn’t a musical, which it most obviously was. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” director Todd Phillips insisted. “It’s just (Joaquin Phoenix’s character) not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” 

Right… That’s a musical, buddy. Clearly, Warner Bros. freaked out that comic-book fanboys would never see a musical about their favorite villain the Joker — and that instinct was correct. Joker: Folie à Deux was a box-office bomb, leaving Phillips and the studio singing the blues.

16 Gladiator vs. Sharks

After nearly a 25-year wait, we finally got a Gladiator sequel… which was pretty mediocre. (Paul Mescal, we love you, but you’re no Russell Crowe.) Director Ridley Scott went bigger and sillier with this follow-up to his Oscar-winning original, especially when it came to the amped-up gladiatorial fights. In Gladiator II, at one point, the floor of the Roman Colosseum is filled with water, pitting Mescal’s warrior against sharks. Wait, what? Apparently, such a scenario was completely made-up, but at least the goofy fight scene allowed us to pinpoint the exact moment this movie jumped the shark.  

15 Cory Michael Smith Nails Chevy Chase in ‘Saturday Night’

Because Chevy Chase has become such a loathed figure, it can be easy to forget what a big deal he was back in the 1970s and early 1980s. Saturday Night serves as a nice reminder, looking at the tense backstage drama that occurred before the venerable NBC show’s first episode. Cory Michael Smith is impeccable playing the strutting, charismatic Chase, while also hinting at the insecurity underneath. If anything, Smith is better than the real thing: funny, charming, actually likable. 

14 Dakota Johnson DGAF

Was Madame Web funny-bad intentionally? The movie was a commercial stiff, but star Dakota Johnson seemed to be having a blast in this stinker, her New York paramedic character Cassie delivering a bevy of snarky quips while discovering that, apparently, she has superpowers. As superhero cinema seems to be entering its death spiral, Johnson’s eye-rolling performance slyly critiqued the tired genre from within, commenting on the clichés and absurdity in real time. The film would have been intolerable without her. 

13 Let Tom Hardy Play Venom Forever

Venom: The Last Dance is a mediocre close to that commercially successful trilogy, but I’ll never tire of Tom Hardy’s nutso dual performance as the irreverent journalist Eddie and the needy, volatile alien symbiote Venom. It was just a shame that the films weren’t as inspired as that live-action-Looney-Tunes performance. And it’s too bad we’ll never see these two host the Oscars. 

12 June Squibb: Action Star

Speaking of Inside Out 2’s June Squibb, the veteran character actress has been in acclaimed dramas like The Age of Innocence, Far From Heaven and Nebraska — but it was only until she reached her 90s that she got to be the lead in an action movie. Well, kinda: The hit Sundance comedy Thelma stars her as the titular senior citizen, who goes on a crazy adventure to get vengeance on the phone scammers who bilked her out of $10,000. This requires Thelma jumping on a scooter and slowly cruising around Southern California to track down the crooks, engaging in a less-intense version of the high-risk stunts Tom Cruise performs on the regular. Although parodying action flicks, Thelma never makes fun of its older characters, and Squibb has a ball performing age-appropriate hair-raising feats, like navigating past a big bed that’s in her way.

11 Chris Hemsworth Goes ‘Mad’

Prediction: Years from now, people will revisit Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and realize they underrated it. This gonzo prequel, with Anya Taylor-Joy playing a younger version of Charlize Theron’s warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road, disappointed at the box office, but it’s a similarly stunning achievement. However, the film’s secret weapon is Chris Hemsworth, who lets loose as Dementus, a gonzo warlord. Some A-listers go big when they play a baddie — and then there’s Hemsworth, who devours the scenery, sporting a fake nose, ghastly beard and outsized personality as a villain who long ago lost his mind. The Thor star is often at his best in comedic roles — he’s hilarious in the 2016 Ghostbusters — and in Furiosa he manages to be revolting and a riot simultaneously. 

10 The Phone Scene in ‘Hit Man’

In Richard Linklater’s crowd-pleasing comedy, based on a true story, Glen Powell plays a nerdy professor who moonlights as a pretend hit man, helping the cops entrap people wanting to hire him for his supposed lethal skills. But then he falls for one of his targets — a bewitching beauty (Adria Arjona) who wants him to off her asshole husband. Things get complicated, though, once the husband dies by other means. We won’t reveal the plot twists, but suffice it to say that the cops start suspecting the wife, leading to Powell’s professor having to have a conversation with her while the police listen in. It’s a small masterclass in expertly executed farce. 

Some have questioned if Luca Guadagnino’s very entertaining love story about three budding tennis stars should be called a comedy. I say yes: Challengers had more zingers than just about any other film released this year, showing how humor and sexiness can coexist. That’s never truer than during the movie’s infamous threesome scene, in which best friends Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist both try to bed Zendaya the night they all meet. What happens? I’m not gonna tell you, horndogs, but it’s a reminder that there’s nothing more alluring than someone with a teasing sense of humor. 

8 The Spy Cam in ‘Unfrosted’

In 2024, Jerry Seinfeld finally directed a movie. And it was terrible. Still, there’s one joke from Unfrosted that has stayed with me all year. In the 1960s, rival food companies Kellogg’s and Post are battling to make the best breakfast pastry, discovering in the process that they’re both spying on each other. But because it’s 60 years ago, their espionage technologically is amusingly primitive — and not especially subtle. This joke couldn’t be dumber but, god, is it good.

7 The Rock and His Pee Bottles

Dwayne Johnson has been in some duds lately, including Black Adam and his new Christmas-themed action-comedy Red One. Tellingly, the most entertaining thing he brought to us in 2024 was confirming a rumor that seemed too good to be true: Yes, the Rock does indeed pee in water bottles on set to “save time.” (Or, as he put it to GQ, “I pee in a bottle. … Yeah. That happens.”) No word, however, if he referred to his urine as sun tea.

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s edgy indie comedy starred Sebastian Stan as Edward, an unsuccessful actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes a radical procedure to shed himself of his condition — ending up looking like Sebastian Stan. But he gets an unexpected surprise when a play based on his old life stars a charming man with neurofibromatosis, Oswald (Adam Pearson), who has found the happiness and romance poor ol’ Edward has never known. A Different Man is a brilliant satire about looks, identity and insecurity, but its most hilarious moment comes when the play turns into such a hit that there’s talk of adapting it into a movie — with Michael Shannon (playing himself) in the lead role. Everything wrong with Hollywood and pretentious indie actors is summed up in Shannon’s ingenious, straightfaced cameo — it’s one of his finest performances, and it’s all of just a few minutes long.

5 Monstro Elisasue Makes Her Debut

Demi Moore was one of the year’s great comeback stories: She starred in The Substance, a dark comedy/body-horror in which she played a washed-up actress who takes a mysterious substance that results in her creating a much-younger clone (Margaret Qualley) who can be successful in youth-obsessed Hollywood. But, of course, there’s a catch if you don’t follow the rules of how to use this serum properly, resulting in some of the most horrifying makeup work in any movie this year. The chef’s-kiss finale involves Moore/Qualley abusing the product so badly that they produce a hideous beast, nicknamed Monstro Elisasue, that must go before a live studio audience on New Year’s Eve. Some were grossed out by The Substance’s sicko finale — the rest of us laughed our asses off.

4 The ‘Conclave’ Remake We Desperately Want

The Oscar frontrunner — about the intense backstabbing and political maneuvering that goes on at the Vatican during the election of a new pope — has some humorous moments as we watch these seemingly holy cardinals engage in levels of petty squabbling that would make Election’s Tracy Flick blush. But Conclave’s best joke came from social-media users, who instantly figured out a way to make the movie infinitely better.

C’mon, Hollywood: This redo needs to happen.

3 Anora Gets Kidnapped

Revered indie filmmaker Sean Baker won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival this summer for Anora, a funny-sad look at a New York sex worker (Better Things’ Mikey Madison) who weds the immature son of a Russian oligarch, her Cinderella dreams quickly dashed once the oligarch sends his thugs to get the marriage annulled. Anora navigates several wild tonal shifts, but the most shocking occurs when those thugs try to tie up the feisty Anora in the son’s palatial estate. She isn’t going down without a fight, leading to a chaotic, funny sequence that recalls Hollywood’s golden age of screwball comedies — albeit with a lot more swearing and broken noses.

2 So Go Back to the Cluuuub…

Francis Ford Coppola’s expensive, ambitious Megalopolis flopped at the box office. But it created the year’s best movie meme, inspired by a comment Adam Driver’s arrogant architect makes to Nathalie Emmanuel’s spoiled socialite, dismissing her by telling her snottily to “go back to the club.” The way Driver stretches out “club” to about seven syllables, while shaking his head in a mocking fashion, was hilarious in the theater, but it was even better once the internet got its hands on the scene, turning the line-delivery into a viral sensation. Even terrible artistic misfires by acclaimed directors can have a few flecks of gold.

1 The Tape in ‘Kinds of Kindness’

Audiences have come to expect the unexpected from the weird, disturbing films of Yorgos Lanthimos. He followed up Poor Things with the even darker Kinds of Kindness, a triptych of bizarre tales all starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe. As always, Lanthimos’ jet-black sense of humor is on full display, especially during the second segment, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” in which depressed cop Daniel (Plemons) fears that his marine biologist wife Liz (Stone) has been lost at sea. Trying to cheer Daniel up, his married friends (Mamoudou Athie and Margaret Qualley) stop by for dinner, and he asks them if they can watch an old home movie of the four of them, wanting to relive happier times. The married friends are unsure if now is the best time but, well, Daniel seems so distraught. Maybe they could watch a little.

Since Kinds of Kindness wasn’t widely seen when it opened in theaters this summer, I don’t want to spoil what happens. But I will say that I didn’t laugh harder at a moment all year — Lanthimos loves upsetting his audience, but this reveal was something you couldn’t have predicted. As these characters will learn, sometimes it’s better not to revisit the past — and, really, maybe you shouldn’t film everything you and your friends do.