He’s a well-meaning rube turned rock’n’roll pioneer who never quite sheds his dopey innocence, even while getting hooked on stronger and stronger drugs and writing increasingly indulgent songs featuring ‘an army of didgeridoos’. Arriving on the heels of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning Ray Charles impression and the Carter-Cash box-office phenomenon Walk the Line, co-writers Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow superimpose elements of both – along with not-at-all subtle bits of Elvis, Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson – into the lumpy form of Reilly’s Dewey Cox. Spoofs of the grandly silly Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker variety were decades out of style in 2007, but the genre almost had to be resurrected in order to deliver an all-out roasting of an ascendant brand of awards bait: the prestige musical biopic. ‘Goddamnit, this is a dark fucking period!’Ĭast: John C Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig But Coogan and Brydon have the kind of comic chemistry where that concept can sustain itself across three, almost equally funny films. Explaining why is difficult: it’s a road movie that quickly succumbs to travel delirium, that point in a long excursion where boredom, exhaustion and annoyance combine into a sort of euphoria, and things become funny for no reason at all. Trimmed to film length from a six-episode BBC television series, it’s arranged by director Michael Winterbottom as a series of vignettes that all play out more or less the same way, and yet it’s hysterical. That’s literally the whole thing – and that’s all it needs to be. Here’s what happens in The Trip : Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, drive across the English countryside, eating fancy meals, bickering about their careers, singing ABBA and doing a lot of celebrity impressions. ‘I think anyone over 40 who amuses themself by doing impressions needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror.’ □ The greatest romantic comedies of all time No matter your sense of humour – silly or sophisticated, light or dark, surreal or broad – you’ll find it represented here. In doing so, we believe we’ve found the 100 finest, most durable and most broadly appreciable laughers in history. To put together this list, we asked comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers about the movies that make them chuckle the hardest for longest. Comedies might rarely win Academy Awards, and most successful comic actors may strive to prove themselves as dramatic thespians, but the best comedy movies stick with us longer – and get rewatched more frequently – than just about any other type of film. What causes an audience to nearly hyperventilate from laughter in 2022 might fall flat just a few years later, let alone a half-century.Īnd so, those that have kept us cracking up for decades are truly special. A heart-tugging drama will jerk tears just about everywhere, and a big, loud action flack will leave ears ringing and faces flush across time. Is there anything harder, after all, than getting a whole theatre to erupt with laughter? As any stand-up comedian will tell you, the stuff people find funny varies greatly – from country to country, city to city, generation to generation. Comedy gets no respect, no respect at all.
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