7) Hamlet 2
This last one may be more particular and less universally appealing than some of the previous entries. It’s possible a person has to be in just the right mood to watch it. You have to feel a little silly. And want something to be silly at you. Hamlet 2 is that silly movie.
Steve Coogan has an incredibly unique quality that very few comedic actors possess, where he can seem as though he’s playing something completely ridiculous in a deadpan expression that results in magic. Jason Bateman can do this at times. In fact, most of Arrested Development depended on this brand of humor. Coogan does that here, best epitomized in the line delivery featured in the trailer, where he angrily asks his staring cat “What is your f**king problem, man?” Somehow, the way he says it, the look he gives, makes it amazing. And there are other little moments in the movie like this, all building up to the show-stopping musical featuring the sublime tune “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” It also has perhaps the best title in history.
We often want two things out of comedy that are sort of in opposition to each other. We want it to push boundaries of taste and style and show us something new that we haven’t seen before, to surprise us. We also want it to satisfy our desire for familiarity, to show us something that we see all the time and point out how ridiculous life can be. It’s a difficult balancing act, and oftentimes humor takes some warming up to before it can go from “WTF” to “LOL.”
In my experience comedies have a way of feeling completely different years later that is even more pronounced than drama. This is largely intangible though. If anything, this list proves how hard it is to articulate why something is funny, both in the difficulty of putting a feeling into words, and in inevitably removing all humor from a gag by describing it in sentences. It’s probably best to just let the movies speak for themselves. He said at the end of 8 written pages.
