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Best Comedy Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of comedy cinema — measured across 97,531 indexed frames from 1241 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

  1. 1

    Deadpool (2016)

    Tim MillerDP Ken SengIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    This is the origin story of former Special Forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson, who after being subjected to a rogue experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, adopts the alter ego Deadpool. Armed with his new abilities and a dark, twisted sense of humor, Deadpool hunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life.

  2. 2

    Pulp Fiction (1994)

    Quentin TarantinoDP Andrzej SekulaIMDb 8.8TMDB 8.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) are two hitmen who are out to retrieve a suitcase stolen from their employer, mob boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Wallace has also asked Vincent to take his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) out a few days later when Wallace himself will be out of town. Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) is an aging boxer who is paid by Wallace to lose his fight. The lives of these seemingly unrelated people are woven together comprising of a series of funny, bizarre and uncalled-for incidents.

  3. 3

    Forrest Gump (1994)

    Robert ZemeckisDP Don BurgessIMDb 8.8TMDB 8.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Forrest Gump is a simple man with a low I.Q. but good intentions. He is running through childhood with his best and only friend Jenny. His 'mama' teaches him the ways of life and leaves him to choose his destiny. Forrest joins the army for service in Vietnam, finding new friends called Dan and Bubba, he wins medals, creates a famous shrimp fishing fleet, inspires people to jog, starts a ping-pong craze, creates the smiley, writes bumper stickers and songs, donates to people and meets the president several times. However, this is all irrelevant to Forrest who can only think of his childhood sweetheart Jenny Curran, who has messed up her life. Although in the end all he wants to prove is that anyone can love anyone.

  4. 4

    The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

    Martin ScorseseDP Rodrigo PrietoIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) is Long Island penny stockbroker who serves almost two years in prison for refusing to co-operate in a huge 1990s securities fraud case that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including mob infiltration.

  5. 5

    Inside Out (2015)

    Pete DocterDP Patrick LinIMDb 8.1TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    Growing up can be a bumpy road, and it's no exception for Riley, who is uprooted from her Midwest life when her father starts a new job in San Francisco. Like all of us, Riley is guided by her emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. The emotions live in Headquarters, the control center inside Riley's mind, where they help advise her through everyday life. As Riley and her emotions struggle to adjust to a new life in San Francisco, turmoil ensues in Headquarters. Although Joy, Riley's main and most important emotion, tries to keep things positive, the emotions conflict on how best to navigate a new city, house and school.

  6. 6

    Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

    Taika WaititiDP Javier AguirresarobeIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Imprisoned on the other side of the universe, the mighty Thor finds himself in a deadly gladiatorial contest that puts him against The Incredible Hulk, his former ally and fellow Avenger. Thor's quest for survival leads him in a race against time to prevent the all-powerful Hela from destroying his home world and the Asgardian civilization.

  7. 7

    Back to the Future (1985)

    Robert ZemeckisDP Dean CundeyIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Marty McFly, a typical American teenager of the Eighties, is accidentally sent back to 1955 in a plutonium-powered DeLorean "time machine" invented by a slightly mad scientist. During his often hysterical, always amazing trip back in time, Marty must make sure his teenage parents-to-be meet and fall in love to get back to the future.

  8. 8

    Up (2009)

    Pete DocterDP Jean-Claude KalacheIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    As a boy, Carl Fredricksen wanted to explore South America and find the forbidden Paradise Falls. About 64 years later he gets to begin his journey along with Boy Scout Russell by lifting his house with thousands of balloons. On their journey, they make many new friends including a talking dog, and figure out that someone has evil plans. Carl soon realizes that this evildoer is his childhood idol.

  9. 9

    Parasite (2019)

    Bong Joon HoDP Hong Kyung-pyoIMDb 8.5TMDB 8.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    The Kims - mother and father Chung-sook and Ki-taek, and their young adult offspring, son Ki-woo and daughter Ki-jung - are a poor family living in a shabby and cramped half basement apartment in a busy lower working class commercial district of Seoul. Without even knowing it, they, especially Mr. and Mrs. Kim, literally smell of poverty. Often as a collective, they perpetrate minor scams to get by, and even when they have jobs, they do the minimum work required. Ki-woo is the one who has dreams of getting out of poverty by one day going to university. Despite not having that university education, Ki-woo is chosen by his university student friend Min, who is leaving to go to school, to take over his tutoring job to Park Da-hye, who Min plans to date once he returns to Seoul and she herself is in university. The Parks are a wealthy family who for four years have lived in their modernistic house designed by and the former residence of famed architect Namgoong. While Mr. and Mrs. Park are all about status, Mrs. Park has a flighty, simpleminded mentality and temperament, which Min tells Ki-woo to feel comfortable in lying to her about his education to get the job. In getting the job, Ki-woo further learns that Mrs. Park is looking for an art therapist for the Parks' adolescent son, Da-song, Ki-woo quickly recommending his professional art therapist friend "Jessica", really Ki-jung who he knows can pull off the scam in being the easiest liar of the four Kims. In Ki-woo also falling for Da-hye, he begins to envision himself in that house, and thus the Kims as a collective start a plan for all the Kims, like Ki-jung using assumed names, to replace existing servants in the Parks' employ in orchestrating reasons for them to be fired. The most difficult to get rid of may be Moon-gwang, the Parks' housekeeper who literally came with the house - she Namgoong's housekeeper when he lived there - and thus knows all the little nooks and crannies of it better than the Parks themselves. The question then becomes how far the Kims can take this scam in their quest to become their version of the Parks.

  10. 10

    The Truman Show

    Peter WeirDP Peter BiziouIMDb 8.2TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Since birth, a big fat lie defines the well-organised but humdrum life of the kind-hearted insurance salesman and ambitious explorer, Truman Burbank. Utterly unaware of the thousands of cleverly hidden cameras watching his every move, for nearly three decades, Truman's entire existence pivots around the will and the wild imagination of the ruthlessly manipulative television producer, Christof--the all-powerful TV-God of an extreme 24/7 reality show: The Truman Show. As a result, Truman's picturesque neighbourhood with the manicured lawns and the uncannily perfect residents is nothing but an elaborate state-of-the-art set, and the only truth he knows is what the worldwide television network and its deep financial interests dictate. Do lab rats know they are forever imprisoned?

How comedy films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate comedy from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 20%high keyvs 12% baseline
  • 87%eye levelvs 69% baseline
  • 17%closeupvs 21% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Grabbers (2012) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 97,531 frames from 1241 films carrying the comedy label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/comedy

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used