The 10 funniest American movies ever made, according to AFI

Updated October 16, 2026

The American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Laughs" was never a box office tally. The ranking, published in 2000, came out of ballots cast by more than 1,500 leaders of the American film community. Directors, screenwriters, actors, critics and historians all voted. They were asked to weigh a comedy's cultural impact, its influence on the genre and the strength of its laughs. The result is a list of the funniest American movies that rewards staying power over a strong opening weekend.

That methodology explains the shape of the top 10. Three entries predate 1960, two of them from the 1930s. A Marx Brothers satire about a made-up republic blundering into a pointless war sits inside the top five. So does a Cold War comedy that ends in nuclear annihilation. The No. 1 pick is a 1959 farce about two musicians who hide from the mob inside an all-female band — a premise the film sustains for close to two hours without the joke wearing out.

The list also freezes a particular moment in American film criticism. Nothing released after the vote was eligible, which leaves out the improv-driven studio comedies that followed. Several picks lean toward satire and social observation rather than pure joke delivery. "The Graduate" and "M*A*S*H" earned their places on tone and influence as much as on laugh count. Viewers raised on broader contemporary comedy may find a few of the choices unexpected.

What the top 10 gives a reader is a compact map of how American screen comedy developed. It starts with the fast, class-crossing banter of 1930s screwball and the ensemble anarchy of the Marx Brothers. It moves through disguise plots built around star performers, then into the dark institutional satire of the late 1960s and 1970s. It ends with the relentless gag-stacking that arrived with "Airplane!" in 1980. The films below appear in AFI's order, with what each one did, who made it and why it is still quoted, taught and copied.

Illustration: Quartz

Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" sits at No. 1 on AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs." The 1959 film follows two Chicago musicians who witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. They disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band bound for Florida to escape the gangsters hunting them.

Tony Curtis plays Joe, who becomes Josephine and also impersonates a wealthy oil heir to court Marilyn Monroe's Sugar Kane. Jack Lemmon plays Jerry, renamed Daphne, who spends much of the film fending off a smitten millionaire named Osgood Fielding III. Wilder wrote the screenplay with I.A.L. Diamond. The two keep three deceptions running at once without stalling the plot.

Wilder shot the film in black and white after color tests made the leads' makeup look harsh. The choice also softened the jump between the comedy and the gangland shooting that opens the story.

Monroe handles the musical numbers, including "I Wanna Be Loved by You," "Running Wild" and "I'm Through with Love." The shoot was difficult — Wilder and Monroe clashed over missed lines and repeated takes — though none of that friction shows on screen.

The Motion Picture Production Code administration denied the film a seal of approval over its cross-dressing premise. United Artists released it without one, and the box office returns helped weaken the code's authority in the years before the ratings system replaced it.

The closing exchange — Lemmon's character confesses he is a man, and Joe E. Brown's Osgood answers "Nobody's perfect" — has been quoted and parodied for more than six decades. The film won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design in black and white and earned five other nominations, including Best Director for Wilder and Best Actor for Lemmon. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1989, in the registry's first class of 25 titles.

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"Tootsie," Sydney Pollack's 1982 comedy, sits at No. 2 on AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs." Dustin Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, a New York actor so difficult that no one will hire him. He auditions as a woman named Dorothy Michaels and wins a part on a daytime soap.

The show within the film is "Southwest General," a hospital serial where Dorothy ad-libs her lines and becomes a national figure. That is the engine of the comedy: a man who could not hold a job gets rewarded for assertiveness only once people assume he is a woman.

Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal share screenplay credit. The script keeps its humor rooted in the mechanics of show business — agents, casting calls, soap production schedules and the grind of auditioning — rather than in wigs and pratfalls. Pollack himself appears on screen as George Fields, Michael's exasperated agent, and delivers some of the film's sharpest exchanges.

Jessica Lange won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Julie Nichols, the co-star who confides in Dorothy without knowing who she is. Teri Garr drew a nomination in the same category as Sandy, the friend Michael deceives. Charles Durning was nominated for Best Supporting Actor as Julie's widowed father, who falls for Dorothy and proposes marriage. The film collected 10 nominations in all, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Hoffman. Lange's was the only win.

Bill Murray plays Jeff, Michael's playwright roommate, in a part built largely from dry asides that cut against the film's otherwise grounded tone. Geena Davis made her feature debut as April, a soap actress who shares a dressing room with Dorothy.

The deception ends during a live broadcast. Michael abandons the script and reveals on air that Dorothy is a man, inventing a soap-style backstory to explain it. The scene resolves the premise in public, in front of the audience Dorothy built, rather than in a private confession.

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Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" sits at No. 3 on AFI's ranking. The 1964 film builds its comedy out of nuclear annihilation. A paranoid Air Force general sends a bomber wing toward the Soviet Union, and Washington scrambles to recall it.

Peter Sellers carries three roles. He plays Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, the British exchange officer stuck at the air base with the general who launched the attack. He plays U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who spends much of the film apologizing by telephone to a drunk Soviet premier. He also plays Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-using former Nazi scientist advising the president, whose right arm keeps acting on its own.

George C. Scott plays General Buck Turgidson, the Joint Chiefs representative who treats the crisis as a tactical opening. Scott's performance is broad — pratfalls, mugging, arms swinging over the war room map. Kubrick drew it out by asking Scott to run exaggerated warm-up takes, then cutting those into the finished film.

The screenplay began as a straight adaptation of Peter George's thriller novel "Red Alert." Kubrick found the material sliding toward absurdity as he worked, and brought in Terry Southern to push the satire further. George shares screenplay credit with both men.

Slim Pickens delivers the film's most reproduced image. As Major T.J. "King" Kong, he rides a hydrogen bomb out of the bomb bay, hat in hand, whooping like a rodeo rider. Ken Adam's war room set, a vast circular table lit by a ring of overhead lamps, became one of the most imitated production designs in film.

The movie earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Sellers, and won none. The fourth nomination went to its adapted screenplay. Its treatment of institutional absurdity shaped later political and military comedies.

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Woody Allen's 1977 film "Annie Hall" ranks fourth on AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs." Allen plays Alvy Singer, a New York comedian picking over a finished relationship with Annie, an aspiring singer from Wisconsin played by Diane Keaton.

The film won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Keaton, and Best Original Screenplay, which Allen shared with co-writer Marshall Brickman. Allen was also nominated for Best Actor and lost. Best Picture wins for comedies are rare, which is part of why the film holds a place this high on the list.

The script refuses to run the romance in order. It jumps between childhood memories, arguments and asides as Alvy tries to work out what went wrong. Allen addresses the camera directly. He pulls Marshall McLuhan out from behind a lobby display to settle an argument in a movie line. Subtitles run under a rooftop flirtation to show what each character is actually thinking. A split screen sets Alvy's talked-over Jewish family dinner against Annie's restrained WASP one. One passage turns animated, dropping Alvy into a cartoon beside the queen from Disney $DIS's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Keaton's costumes — men's ties, waistcoats, loose khakis, a slouchy hat — became a widely copied look, and the character's name turned into shorthand for it. Keaton was born Diane Hall and goes by Annie.

Christopher Walken appears briefly as Annie's brother Duane, who describes a disturbing impulse behind the wheel before driving the couple to the airport in the rain. Paul Simon plays a Los Angeles record producer. Shelley Duvall, Carol Kane and a young Jeff Goldblum fill out smaller roles.

Gordon Willis shot the film, carrying the dim, shadowed style he had built on "The Godfather" into a comedy about anxiety, therapy and New York intellectual life. The mix of formal experiment and dense verbal humor is why "Annie Hall" is still assigned in screenwriting classes, and why its structure keeps resurfacing in films and series that tell a relationship out of order.

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The Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," released by Paramount $PARA in 1933 and directed by Leo McCarey, holds the No. 5 position on AFI's list. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx send up nationalism and warfare in the invented European nation of Freedonia.

Groucho stars as Rufus T. Firefly, handed leadership of the bankrupt country as a condition set by its wealthiest benefactor, Mrs. Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont. Firefly insults Trentino, the ambassador from neighboring Sylvania, and drags Freedonia into a war over the slight. Chico and Harpo play Chicolini and Pinky, spies hired to watch him who prove useless at the job.

The plot works as scaffolding for set pieces rather than as a story with stakes. The best known is the mirror routine, in which Pinky, dressed identically to Firefly, matches his movements inside an empty doorframe where a mirror should be. Variations on the gag had circulated in vaudeville and silent film before 1933, but the "Duck Soup" version is the one later comedians and animators kept returning to.

McCarey's film includes no romantic subplot, and it drops the harp and piano solos that paused the brothers' other features. What remains is roughly 68 minutes with almost no gap between gags.

Audiences in 1933 did not take to it. The picture underperformed against earlier Marx Brothers releases, Paramount and the brothers parted ways soon after, and the act signed with MGM. Zeppo left the group, making this his final screen appearance with his brothers.

The film's standing rose over the following decades. Its war sequence plays as a musical number, with Groucho's uniform changing from shot to shot. He wears Civil War blue in one cut and a coonskin cap in the next, as Freedonia mobilizes over an insult. The picture opened in November 1933, 10 months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The Library of Congress added "Duck Soup" to the National Film Registry in 1990.

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Mel Brooks' 1974 Western parody "Blazing Saddles" sits at No. 6 on AFI's ranking. Cleavon Little stars as Bart, a Black railroad worker appointed sheriff of an all-white frontier town. The appointment is a scheme by state attorney general Hedley Lamarr, played by Harvey Korman, who wants the residents to abandon their land.

Brooks shared screenplay credit with Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger. Bergman's story supplied the premise. Pryor pushed the writing toward meeting racist language head-on rather than working around it. Gene Wilder plays the Waco Kid, a gunslinger who has drunk away his reputation and becomes Bart's only real ally in town.

Warner Bros. executives objected to the content, and Brooks has said in interviews that the studio asked for substantial cuts. The release print kept the campfire sequence, in which cowboys eat beans and pass gas around a fire. That scene moved the line on what a major studio comedy could put on screen.

The ending leaves the Western behind completely. A brawl breaks through the frontier set and onto a neighboring soundstage, where a Busby Berkeley-style musical number is being filmed. The fight then spills into the street, and the characters finish the film watching their own premiere at a Hollywood theater. Few mainstream comedies before 1974 took apart their own fiction that thoroughly.

The film earned three Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Madeline Kahn, Best Film Editing and Best Original Song for the title track, sung by Frankie Laine. Kahn plays saloon singer Lili Von Shtupp, a send-up of Marlene Dietrich's role in "Destry Rides Again." The picture also became one of the highest-grossing releases of 1974.

Brooks has argued over the decades that the satire works by putting bigoted language in the mouths of fools, and that a studio would be unlikely to approve the same script now. That argument keeps "Blazing Saddles" in circulation as both a comedy and a case study.

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Robert Altman's 1970 film "M*A*S*H" holds the seventh spot on AFI's ranking. It follows the surgeons and nurses of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during the Korean War. Battlefield medicine supplies the setting for the comedy rather than an obstacle to it.

Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould star as Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre, two drafted surgeons who answer an endless flow of casualties with pranks, martinis and contempt for military protocol. Sally Kellerman plays Major Margaret Houlihan and Robert Duvall plays Major Frank Burns, the by-the-book officers the surgeons target most often.

Altman built the film around overlapping dialogue. Characters talk across one another while the camera roams and zooms rather than cutting cleanly between speakers. Lines land half-buried under other lines. That crowded texture became a signature of his work, and it separated the film from the cleaner comic staging common in studio releases of the period.

Ring Lardner Jr. won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, working from Richard Hooker's novel. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for Kellerman.

The operating room scenes are unusually graphic. Blood and exposed tissue fill the frame while the surgeons trade jokes over the table. That contrast carries the satire — the humor functions as a defense mechanism, and the film keeps the reason for it on screen.

Released during the Vietnam War, the picture invited comparison to that conflict despite its Korean setting. Its success produced the CBS television series, which premiered in 1972 and ran 11 seasons. The show outlasted the three-year war it depicted by a wide margin.

The film's standing on AFI's list rests on that mix of ensemble performance, formal experimentation and comedy drawn from institutional absurdity. It set a template for war comedies that keep the violence in frame instead of cutting away from it.

Illustration: Quartz

Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" takes the No. 8 spot on AFI's ranking. The 1934 comedy pairs Clark Gable, as a newspaper reporter chasing a story, with Claudette Colbert, as a runaway heiress. The two meet on a cross-country bus and argue their way into a romance.

At the 1935 Academy Awards, the film won all five of the major categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Only two films have matched that sweep since, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The Silence of the Lambs." Columbia Pictures made it on a modest budget at a point when the studio ranked well below MGM and Paramount $PARA in Hollywood's pecking order.

Robert Riskin wrote the screenplay, adapting "Night Bus," a Samuel Hopkins Adams short story published in Cosmopolitan. The script laid down the template screwball comedy would follow for the rest of the 1930s. Two people from opposite social classes get stuck in close quarters, and the insults they trade do the work of courtship. Capra keeps the bickering light even though the plot runs on money, family control and the bad marriage Colbert's character is fleeing.

Two sequences account for much of the film's lasting reputation. In the first, Gable's character tries to hitch a ride and no driver stops; Colbert's character lifts her skirt and a car pulls over at once. In the second, the pair split a motel room with a blanket strung over a clothesline, which Gable's character calls the walls of Jericho. The blanket stands in for everything the two will not say out loud, and the film pays it off in its final shot.

The awards haul lifted Columbia's standing in the industry and turned Capra into one of its most bankable directors. The frame he and Riskin built — mismatched travelers, forced proximity, irritation sliding into attachment — still runs under romantic comedies made nine decades later.

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Mike Nichols' 1967 film "The Graduate" is ninth on AFI's "100 Years...100 Laughs." Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, an aimless new college graduate who drifts into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, an older family friend played by Anne Bancroft, then falls for her daughter Elaine, played by Katharine Ross.

The comedy runs on discomfort rather than punchlines. Benjamin spends much of the film cornered — by his parents' friends at a backyard party, by a hotel desk clerk, by Mrs. Robinson herself. Nichols holds the camera on his unease long enough for the audience to squirm before it laughs. One early scene, in which a family friend presses a single word of career advice on him, "plastics," became shorthand for the generational gap the film was built around.

Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor for Hoffman, Best Actress for Bancroft, Best Supporting Actress for Ross and Best Adapted Screenplay. Hoffman was 30 when the film opened, and he had built his career on the New York stage rather than in movies. His casting pushed Benjamin away from the polished leading-man type the role might otherwise have attracted.

The Simon and Garfunkel songs run through the picture instead of sitting at the front and back of it. "The Sound of Silence," "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" and an early version of "Mrs. Robinson" carry long stretches of story with no dialogue at all. Building a score out of an existing pop catalog became common practice for filmmakers who came after.

The ending withholds a tidy romantic payoff. Benjamin breaks up Elaine's wedding, the pair run for a passing bus, and Nichols lets the shot continue well past the escape. The elation drains out of both faces and settles into something closer to doubt. The film's standing on this ranking rests on tone and influence as much as on laugh count, which makes it one of the odder entries in the top 10.