7 Great Comedies That You Can’t Stream Anywhere
Between Max, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+ and the myriad other streaming services, you can instantly watch almost every great comedy ever created. But a few hilarious films have somehow slipped through the cracks. Here are seven comedies that we wish would find their way to our TV menus. (Keep this list handy — a lot of these movies reappear on streamers without warning, only to disappear again.)
Tootsie
Tootsie trails only Some Like It Hot on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Comedies of the 20th Century. With a low-key great Bill Murray turn, all-star Dustin Hoffman and an Academy Award-winning performance for Jessica Lange, it’s hard to do better than this one. Do the cross-dressing laughs still hold up? Maybe better than you think.
Silent Movie
Not the absolute greatest Mel Brooks comedy, but still Brooks in his prime. It’s a comedy (almost) completely without dialogue, an homage to the silent film era in the way Young Frankenstein saluted horror movies and Blazing Saddles sent up the western. “Brooks has taken a considerably stylistic risk and pulled it off triumphantly,” wrote Roger Ebert in his four-star review. “Silent Movie is not only funny, it’s fun. It’s clear at almost every moment that the filmmakers had a ball making it.”
Best in Show
Waiting for Guffman was the mockumentary that put Christopher Guest on the map, but Best in Show might be his most successful mix of sturdy storytelling and improvisational comic brilliance. Fred Willard wuz robbed when he didn’t get a Best Supporting Actor nod for his bizarro dog “expert” Buck Laughlin. “Now tell me, which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?”
Amélie
For sheer accolades, it’s hard to beat Amélie and its five Academy Award nominations, along with a spot on several lists of Best Films of (fill in the blank). “Here is a comedy with a lightness of touch, a clear line of thought and interesting characters,” wrote Andrew O'Hagan in Daily Telegraph. “What more do you want for the price of a half-decent bottle of Chablis?”
Cannonball Run
Amélie too fancy for your tastes? Cannonball Run ditches subtlety and whimsy for beer-fueled, mindless buffoonery with Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise and a bunch of their idiot friends. This one had zero chance on the awards circuit, but as Empire’s Ian Nathan says, Cannonball Run is “nonsense but fun nevertheless.”
The Heartbreak Kid
No, not the tepid 2007 remake with Ben Stiller. The original Heartbreak Kid, written by Neil Simon and directed by the great Elaine May in 1973, inspires multiple iterations of “painfully funny” on Rotten Tomatoes. In other words, this one’s for you if you like a little cringe in your comedy.
The Room
Writer, director and star Tommy Wiseau only copped to The Room being a comedy when the rest of the world decided that’s exactly what it was. The laughs may be unintentional but scene for scene, no movie on this list inspires more laugh-out-loud moments. The Daily Beast got it right when it called The Room “a trash masterpiece.”
