The Five Best Comedies on Paramount+ to Watch Right Now
Either because you can’t stop mainlining Top Gun: Maverick, or maybe you’re under the impression that watching old episodes of Frasier is a more affordable alternative to going to therapy, a lot of you are probably subscribed to Paramount+. Despite the fact that their logo is a scary, presumably corpse-strewn mountain, there’s a lot of funny stuff on there, and here are some of our recommendations that in no way involve handsome fighter pilots...
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy is, of course, one of the greatest TV comedies ever made. Obviously, it was groundbreaking, but it’s also remarkable just how well some of these episodes have held up over the years — whether it’s the one where Lucy auditions for a commercial hawking a revolting health tonic…
…or about the time she had to give John Wayne a massage:
This show’s so great that it somehow wasn’t totally ruined by that crazy boring Aaron Sorkin movie.
Before he entered the "straight-up playing God" portion of his career with The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder got his (non-Canadian) TV start on Comedy Central’s Nathan for You. It’s hard to sum up the entirety of this faux business reality show’s brilliance in only a few short sentences — after all, this is the series that gave us Dumb Starbucks, a gun-toting Santa Claus and that gas station attendant who proudly boasted about the health benefits of drinking his grandson’s urine.
This underrated indie comedy is one of the most visually-inventive low-budget movies in recent years. Stand-up comic Nick Thune stars as a normal dude who somehow constructs an elaborate, uncannily huge cardboard labyrinth in his small apartment but can’t get out. There’s truly no other movie quite like it.
There are roughly 500 million Star Trek shows on Paramount+, and one of them is a legit comedy — two if you count that episode where Kirk fights a robot with a rock shaped like a giant dong. Star Trek: Lower Decks somehow finds a way to work as both a functional Trek series and a hilarious parody of the franchise’s familiar tropes. While there have been other Star Trek spoofs in the past, none have been able to, say, include a running joke about a Tom Paris collector’s plate.
Nathan Lane and Lee Evans play brothers trying to rid their newly inherited mansion of a rodent troublemaker. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. But there’s something admirably deranged about this movie, which is full of nonstop, extreme slapstick — not to mention a random Christopher friggin’ Walken showing up as an eccentric exterminator. An underrated oddity from the director of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean.
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