This year marks the 15th anniversary of Bridesmaids, the beloved comedy classic that helped to turn Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne into bonafide movie stars.
While Watch With Us loves Bridesmaids, we hardly think it’s the best comedy movie of all time — and we’ll gladly die on that hit.
We want to highlight three movies in particular that we think make the comic genius Bridesmaids look like small potatoes.
Our first choice is Clifford, which stars Martin Short as the worst 10-year-old boy who has ever lived.
5 Great ’90s Movies With Surprisingly Low IMDb Ratings: ‘To Die For’ and More
‘Clifford’ (1994)
Clifford (Short) is on a plane to Hawaii with his parents when he single-handedly forces the plane to ground in Los Angeles. There, Clifford’s father (Richard Kind) reaches out to his estranged brother Martin (Charles Grodin) to see if he’d be willing to take Clifford off their hands while they’re gone. Martin agrees, as a ploy to prove to his girlfriend, Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), that he’s ready for the commitment of marriage and kids. But Martin has no idea what he’s dealing with, and he soon realizes he’s babysitting an evil mastermind who will stop at nothing to go to Dinosaur World.
Clifford is simply one of the best comedies of all time. The comedic chemistry between the increasingly exasperated Grodin, driven insane by Clifford’s maniacal antics, and Short’s convincingly farcical performance as a child makes Clifford an absurdist masterpiece alone, but that’s not the only thing that makes this movie tick. The production design is insanely impressive, with gorgeous matte paintings and animatronics once we get to the Dinosaur World set piece. Ultimately, Clifford manages to get better and better with each watch.
‘Rap World’ (2024)
In the humble town of Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, three aspiring rappers get together for an epic all-night album recording sesh to break into the music business and make it big. The friends decide to bring their fourth friend, Ben (Danny Scharar), along to document this momentous undertaking, as Matt (Conner O’Malley), Casey (Jack Bensinger) and Jason (Eric Rahill) camp out at Casey’s mom’s house to record their album. But the trio seems committed to doing everything except making music, like hanging out in parking lots, picking up Matt’s sister (Edy Modica) from work, buying weed and attending a house party.
Clocking in at 56 minutes, Rap World just barely constitutes as a feature film, yet its comedic prowess handily surpasses every other full-length modern mainstream comedy. Co-directed by O’Malley and his frequent collaborator Scharar, O’Malley takes the smaller-scale ambitions of his short YouTube films and transplants them into a loose narrative about those guys you remember from your suburban hometown in the mid-2000s. Ultimately, despite its irreverence, the comedy of Rap World is beautifully, intentionally constructed, with a joke-a-minute dynamic that will make your head spin.
‘Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story’ (2007)
In the present day, before Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) can perform his music in front of his adoring audience, he has to think about his entire life. Dewey goes back to the very beginning as a poor boy on his family’s farm, when his life is altered forever after a machete accident leaves his younger brother (Chip Hormess) sliced in half, and the trauma causes him to lose his sense of smell. Though Dewey gets hitched up young and has kids with a girl named Edith (Wiig), he breaks free from the shackles of domestication and pursues his dreams of becoming a country rock star. But the life of a rocker comes with many vices, all of which Dewey is susceptible to — especially his own ego.
5 Greatest R-Rated 1980s Comedy Movies, Ranked: ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ and More
This timeless parody of music biopics like Walk the Line and Ray remains such a searing take-down of the genre that it’s hard to watch modern music biopics without noticing that they still indulge in all the corny tropes that Walk the Line so masterfully lampooned almost 20 years ago. Aside from its success as a sharp satire, the movie is just one of the funniest, most absurd comedies of all time, with jokes that continue to knock it out of the park even when the narrative feels like it’s losing steam.
