10 Funniest Movies From the Last 40 Years, Ranked

Comedy is notoriously subjective, which makes ranking the funniest films a fraught exercise. Narrowing the field to the past 40 years reduces the risk of jokes that haven’t aged, and still leaves plenty of wildly different approaches to humor to argue over. The list includes Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), which plays like wish fulfillment more than a conventional coming-of-age story and remains very quotable; Clerks (1994), a single-day, dead-end-job comedy that earned cult status; One Cut of the Dead (2017), a deceptively rough zombie set-piece that shifts into something much odder and more rewarding; and Hot Fuzz (2007), Edgar Wright’s spoof of action/cop films that also delivers genuinely effective action and quick, clever jokes.

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