Here’s how I got to this list: I watched a movie called Behind Convent Walls. It was sold to me as drama and there wasn’t that much information available, so I did not have much expectations. Then I saw the cover…

Okay, that’s not a drama. That’s soft core porn. This belief was strenghtened after I noticed the director was Walerian Borowczyk, who previous to this movie had already been pushing even the relaxed French censorship laws for a while (although this specific movie was made in Italy) and would later go on to direct an Emmanuelle movie (if you know what those are). And indeed, it was basically soft core porn with one unsimulated explicit masturbation with a dildo scene, with the dildo having a crude image of Jesus in one end so the user can look at it in the mirror while using it. But the movie also felt like farce. The abbess is constantly trying to stamp out anything she sees as immoral, but her nuns are constantly finding ways to satisfy their desires and, here’s a spoiler on a movie you’ll likely never see, it ends with a nun accidentally poisoning everyone.

It’s actually better than I expected, but if you go in looking for a drama, it probably wouldn’t work. It’s a pretty stupid sex comedy, but smarter than most movies in that genre, which isn’t saying much.

From there I started to think about farces. What do I like? What I don’t like? What are they anyhow? The latter being the difficult question to answer as the demarkation here seems to change quite a bit.

I decided to go with the definition from Wikipedia, which in turn is based on the definition from Wordsmyth, which might not be the best source, as it is specifically made for educational purposes, so it tends to simplify things for a specific audience. Still, they defined the word this way:

definition 1: a comedy that depends for its humor on quick and surprising turns of events and on exaggerated characters and situations, or the type of humor characteristic of such a play.

definition 2: anything improbable, absurd, or empty of meaning; mockery; sham.

Here’s what I came up with as the list of my favorites. I did have a rule I don’t usually use: Only one movie per filmmaker. I will mention other movies that might have been in the list, if this rule wasn’t enforced.

Clue (1985)

The characters from the boardgame try to figure out who murdered the staff in the house they have all been invited to. This is famous for having three different endings. While the modern versions just give you all of them, the original theatrical release would only give you one depending on the copy the theater had (you know, when movies were still distributed on huge reels of film – the film version cost around $1200 per copy, which does mean that digitalization was a huge boost for movie business).

The movie is filled with great character actors and/or comedians, who are all competing in who can steal the show with their outlandish takes, but they work togethr nicely. They run around as they discover things and try their best to figure out what’s going on. Of course, as there are multiple endings, there is no way someone watching the movie could possibly figure it out, but the home media version does give you the most satisfying one.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)

All three of their movies would have been pretty easy choice for this one, but as I’ve grown older, this has somehow become my favorite. The plots in the other two are quite loose and more like scaffolding for a series of funny situations, this leaves all that behind and is actually in many ways closer to the original Python series in that there is a theme (the extent of a human life) and a progression, but each part is it’s own thing that has been inspired by the overall theme, which is nice, because this let’s each part go wild.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)

Luis Buñuel’s career was all over the place in the best possible way. He started with a short co-directed with Salvador Dali and ended his directing career with a kind of romantic movie about a man who falls in love with his former chambermaid, who is played by two different actors. My personal favorites from him are a movie about a bunch of aristocrats being stuck in a house with no explanation and a movie about two drifters following a pilgrimage route and encountering, or often missing, historical, often to do with heresies, events on the way. Then there’s a movie about a wife who is unable to have sex with her husband, but goes out to do sex work during the days, a harrowing movie about how a young kid is corrupted into criminality and violence, and a fake documentary about an extremely poor village in Spain.

And there’s this movie about a group of rich people trying to have a meal together, but they are constantly interrupted. While that can sound boring (as actually many of Bunuel’s movies do), it is actually a weird series of events, often involving dreams. Of course, as you can infer from the name of the movie, there is a decent amount of social commentary about the rich and how detached they are from the lives of the rest of us.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Whenever you hear that comedy is now illegal, just think about this movie. You can do comedy about anything, but you need to do it well. Like this movie about a kid, who has Hitler as his imaginary friend, and is thus eager to massacre Jews until he is actually confronted by one.

However, the more farcical part is about the Nazis, who are depicted in a way where you can’t accidentally think that they are somehow cool, which has been a problem with movies like American History X and even Fight Club (which isn’t about fascists, but it is about white supremacy). They are fumbling, too brainwashed by the ideology to be effective and unnecessarily cruel. This is just a textbook example on so many things about how you can discuss these topics.

Blazing Saddles (1974)

I mean, there’s a whole scene about farting.

Mel Brooks’ career has been all over the place, but not in a good way. He has his hits and he has his misses. His Rotten Tomatoes scores range from 11% (Dracula: Dead and Loving It) to 95% (Young Frankenstein). I do appreciate it that he knows who he is in the public eye, which lead him to take his name out of Elephant Man, a movie he produced, because he felt the audience expectations would be skewed by him.

Blazing Saddles is the grandfather of Jojo Rabbit. It is also making fun of authorities by making them look stupid and ineffective and uncaring. There’s some jokes I’m not really on board with, but there’s enough social commentary in there to keep this on the positive side.

Duck Soup (1933)

If Blazing Saddles is the grandfather of Jojo Rabbit, we are now moving two more generations back.

So, we are talking Marx Brothers here. I don’t know if they are even a widely known entity these days (not sure about Mel Brooks either, to be honest), but if you don’t know who they are, I would recommend reading up on all the weird stories about them. The core group were actual brothers Groucho, Harpo and Chico (not their real first names, but their surename was actually Marx) and in this movie they are joined by their younger brother Zerro, who later left the group, because he was bored of being forced into the straight man roles. The brothers weren’t just working together, they were an act that worked in vaudeville, Broadway and then movies. Each of the core three had very distinct roles (even though the actual characters would change from movie to movie): Groucho was a bolsterous society man, Harpo didn’t speak and was almost like a nature spirit who often communicated through music, and Chico was a fast talking con man. There was no continuity between the movies, but you always knew what you were going to get just based on these roles.

The movie is just chaotic. Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, who is the dictator of Freedonia. He declares war on their neighbor, Sylvania, basically on a whim. Chico and Harpo play spies who can’t seem to make up their minds on who they work for. Not that the plot really matters. It’s just there so that they have some kind of an excuse to move from one skit to the next.

Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

Stephen Chow is a director who has professed that he is much more interested in making his movies have a lot of weird action than having a plot. His approach has worked fine for him. At one point, in 2016, he directed Mermaids, the most successful Chinese movie of all time. It isn’t nearly as fun as this one, or his previous movie, Shaolin Soccer, both of which could have easily been on this list and I switch regularly on which one I prefer.

Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu movie, in case you weren’t sure. It’s about a wannabe gangster who messes with the wrong neighborhood. Turns out that residents are much more capable fighters than anyone could have predicted.

Here’s a fun sidestory: Yuen Qiu, who’s in the role of Landlady, had been away from movies for almost 20 years. Before that, she had been a prominent stuntwoman and sometimes on-screen talent. She left the business to coach newere talent, but when she joined one of her wards to an audition, Chow managed to persuade her to join his movie instead and she has been working on movies again ever since then, for over 20 years now.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Whatever happened to the Coen brothers? They haven’t made a movie together since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018. I guess they still work together on Fargo (at least nominally), but otherwise seem to have gone on their separate ways. And it doesn’t seem to have worked out that well.

But they did have a good over 30 year run starting from mid-80s with Blood Simple. Many of these movies could be categorized as farces or at least they have elements of that. To me, The Big Lebowski is their high-point. It’s about a man who only wants to live his life at his own pace, but it just so happens that there’s another man with his name and that man’s inability to keep his problems in control, so they just randomly spill out on the first man. Well, that was a weird explanation. But hey, it’s a farce.

In the Loop (2009)

Some politicians are looking to get into a war while others are looking to stay out. One minister in the UK says something that is being deliberately understood in different ways by the different sides, so now he is suddenly thrust into international politics where he is completely out of his depth. And we have a future Doctor Who and an Oscar winner (1995, Best Short Film, Live Action with the beautifully named Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life) using expletives and insults that are so far outside of any norms. At this point, I had already seen The Thick of It, the British political satire this is a spin-off from (many same actors, only a few of the same characters), so it wasn’t as shocking as it could have been, but I still laughed throughout.

Four Lions (2010)

It is always difficult to recommend a comedy that has a suicide bombing in it. Yeah, that’s a spoiler, but at the same time, you shouldn’t go into the movie without knowing what you are in for, because this movie is wild. This could have so easily been racist and islamophobic, but it manages to make fun of the individuals, not the religion, and Riz Ahmed, who starred in the movie and the Riz Test was named after (look it up and it is important in this context), has spoken positively about this movie.