By Hal Drucker

In choosing these 25, I could have arguably included every Chaplin comedy from City Lights to The Great Dictator, almost every Marx Brothers and “Road” picture, the entire Thin Man series, every motion picture graced by Hepburn and Tracy and any Alec Guiness comedy vehicle. For me, no Inspector Clouzot, Our Gang, Laurel & Hardy, Bowery Boys nor Three Stooges. I considered , but did not include, three movies, each with a single hilarious scene. Cary Grant costumed as a courting teenager vis-à-vis Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, in which he spouts “You Remind Me of a Man. What Man? A Man with Power etc.” Sid Caesar doing his dive bomber routine in Tars and Spars and Lou Costello in boot camp with his pants falling to his ankles as he goes through basic training in Buck Privates. Because the quotes are strictly by recall, you’ll forgive me if they are not precisely on the mark.

Claudette Colbert demonstrates to fellow hitch-hiker Clark Gable that
the ankle is mightier than the thumb.

2) It Happened One Night (1934). Frank Capra’s classic is mint fresh with every viewing. Clark Gable as a wise-cracking reporter and Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress who meet on a rural bus trip, play off one another as well as Tracy and Hepburn. Best moments: the hitchhiking scene and the collapse of “The Walls of Jericho,” with Gable’s bare torso setting back the men’s undershirt industry for years.

Groucho, Chico and Harpo, with Alan Jones (center) are stowaways
on an ocean liner in the hilarious, crowded stateroom scene.

3) A Night at the Opera (1935). Groucho, Chico and Harpo at their best, abetted by Margaret Dumont, Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones. Best moments: the boys as stowaways in the incomparable stateroom scene and the Party of the First Part contract.

4) The Philadelphia Story (1940). Director George Cukor’s brilliant adaptation of the Philip Barry Broadway comedy. And what a cast! Katherine Hepburn is luscious as the society woman about to marry her second husband, the tepid John Howard. Cary Grant is her jaunty ex-husband and James Stewart a fast-talking reporter (weren’t all newspaper men in the ‘30s movies?) who falls in love with her. Later remounted as the musical High Society.

5) The Gold Rush (1925). Immortal Chaplin classic pits the Little Tramp against the Yukon. We saw the reedited 1942 version containing Chaplin’s narration and music. Best moments: The Dance of the Rolls, eating his shoe (and shoelaces, spaghetti-style), and the teeter-tottering cabin.

6) A Day at the Races (1937). Same cast as “Opera,” save for Margaret O’Sullivan in lieu of Carlisle. Here the boys go bedlam at a sanitarium, with Dumont as a hypochondriac. Best moments; Groucho in his eyebrow-raising seduction scenes, Chico selling tutti frutti ice cream and racing tips. As Chico stuffs a bettor’s pocket with cash, the latter shifts it to his other pocket from which Harpo deftly removes each bill.

7) Adam’s Rib (1949). Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s marvelous comedy that pays homage to James Thurber’s The Battle of the Sexes. The matchless Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn are husband and wife lawyers on opposite sides of a murder case. What gives the movie its underpinning are a gaggle of such repertory-like worthies as Judy Holliday, Tom Ewell, Jean Hagen and notably, David Wayne, who almost steals the movie as a fey composer friend of the legal couple (read: Cole Porter). Best moments: Wayne rendering of the real Porter’s “Farewell Amanda” on the piano. And Tracy, attempting to gain sympathy from Hepburn, sticking the business end of a revolver in his mouth, and as she attempts to intercede, he rapaciously takes a generous bite of the chocolate simulation of the gun barrel.

8) Woman of the Year (1942). The first magical teaming of Hepburn and Tracy, She a famous and imperious political commentator. He a down-to-earth lug of a sports writer. George (“Giant”) Stevens directed and Ring Lardner, Jr. co-wrote the fabulous screen play. Best moments: Tracy’s description of Hepburn’s non-zaftig frame, “There may not be much there, but what’s there is cherce.” Hepburn spectating with Tracy in a press box, and attempting to understand the vagaries of baseball.

9) The Odd Couple (1968). In pairing the gruff and untidy sports writer Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau, recreating his stage role) with the meticulous, vacuum-wielding Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon) as divorced apartment-mates, Neil Simon may have owed something to Woman of the Year. Best moments: the poker scene which includes the dependable Herb Edelman as a cop friend. And a social with the boys’ neighbors, the Pigeon Sisters, in which Carole Shelley shines.

10) Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). Director Preston Sturges’s riotous send-up of wartime hero-worship, with Eddie Bracken as the 4F who is mistakenly proclaimed a genuine hero by his adoring townspeople. Where have you gone Franklin Pangborn, Raymond Walburn and William Demarest? Demarest is the constant of Sturges’s scene-stealing troupe whom he also uses to near-perfection in The Miracle of Morgan Creek made that same year (with Bracken in the lead) and his earlier The Great McGinty.

11) The More the Merrier (1943). Another wartime comedy romp starring Jean Arthur, who along with Myrna Loy, Madeline Carroll and Rosalind Russell were beautiful, urbane and equally at home with comedy or straight acting. Arthur is a working woman in housing-scarce, WWII Washington, who bunks in with leading man Joel McCrea and the wily Charles Coburn, winner of an Oscar for his supporting role.

12) His Girl Friday (1940). Director Howard Hawks takes Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s famed stage play The Front Page, (translated to the screen in 1931) and changes the hard-boiled crime reporter Hildy Johnson into a woman, Hildegard, casting Rosalind Russell in a role performed over the years by the likes of Lee Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Jack Lemmon and Robert Ryan. He then casts Cary Grant as Walter Burns, Hildy’s managing editor, and for purposes of the gender-switch, her ex-husband. The two are at the peak of their form, delivering the barbed dialogue with rapier speed. Best moment: the final line before fade-out, if memory serves, “The son of a _____ stole my watch.” (or what ever euphemism the Hays Office allowed in those days).

13) My Little Chickadee (1940) Mae West and W. C. Fields co-wrote as well as acted and ad-libbed in this unpredictable Western spoof. Best moments: Fields’ manipulations at the saloon poker table. And an Indian war party’s attack on the co-stars’ train. While West guns down a gaggle of mounted warriors through her parlor car window, Fields grab’s an eight-year-old by the collar, thrust’s a rifle in his arms and says: “Get up there and fight like a man!”

14) The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). Monty Woolley created the role on stage of the insufferably pompous Sheridan Whiteside (based on Kaufman and Hart’s friend Alexander Woolcott) who is forced to rehab at the home of a naïve mid-western family after slipping on the ice on their doorstep. He takes over the household and brings in a succession of wacky friends, including Banjo, played by Jimmy Durante (thinly disguised as Harpo Marx, an Algonquin roundtable-sharing friend of the authors and Woolcott). Best moment (curiously missing from last season’s credible revival with Nathan Lane): Woolley gives off a loud belch that shocks the sensibilities of the lady of the household (Billie Burke). Whereupon Whiteside disdainfully asks, “What did you expect … chimes?”

15) The Thin Man (1934). The incomparable William Powell and Myrna Loy in the first of a genre of sophisticated comedy-mysteries adapted from the Dashiell Hammett novel that spawned five sequels and innumerable imitations, and the failed musical Nick and Nora. And what would we crossword puzzle addicts do without Asta, the Charles’ wirehaired terrior? Funny thing about movie mores of the ‘30s. The silk pajama-ed Charleses sleep and breakfast in conspicuously separated single beds, while the Hays Office has no problem with the couple constantly tippling from oversized martini glasses.

16) M*A*S*H (1970). Robert Altman’s black comedy about the exploits of Hawkeye Pierce and the other members of his irreverent Korean War medical unit. Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye and Elliott Gould as Trapper John, are constantly amusing in the precursor to the successful TV series. Best moment: the make-shift football game.

17) All About Eve (1950). Thanks to the impeccable direction and script-writing of Joseph Mankiewicz, Bette Davis is magnificent as an aging theater star who takes an adoring and conniving fan (Ann Baxter) under her wing. Best moments: Thelma Ritter’s zingers and George Sanderson’s bravura performance as a cynically foppish drama critic, earning him an Oscar for Best Supporting Performance.

18) Hannah and her Sisters (1986). I’m not a fan of Woody Allen’s heralded early ’70s comedies, Bananas and Sleeper, but there’s no denying the greatness of this superbly cast motion picture about the intertwining lives of neurotic New Yorkers. Allen is in top form as the funny and sensitive hypochondriac ex-husband of Mia Farrow. Other familiar faces belong to Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Daniel Stern, Maureen O’Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, John Turturro, Julie Kavner, the unbilled Sam Waterston and Tony Roberts – and, yes – the little known Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Best Supporting Actor and Actress honors went to Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest, who plays Farrow’s self-destructive sister. Best moment: Wiest in a memorable five-minute vignette in Tower Records.

18) Ninotchka (1939). Greta Garbo, in her silent Swedish films, was hauntingly beautiful. In this film classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch, she proves to be the match of one of Hollywood’s most worldly and disarming practitioners of comedy, Melvyn Douglas. Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s story line has Garbo pegged as a frosty Russian agent in Paris in who falls for Douglas. It was later transformed into the Cole Porter Broadway musical Silk Stockings.

19) Some Like it Hot (1959). Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s laugh-out-loud tale about two musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, dress in drag to join an all-girls’ band, and attempt to negotiate high heels as they endeavor to elude their pursuers. Marilyn Monroe does a funny turn as band member Sugar Kane. Best moment: fade-out line of Joe E. Brown.

20) My Favorite Year (1982). Judd Hirsch, no slouch himself, when it comes to comedy, once declared to me that classical actor Peter O’Toole was the zaniest man he’d ever known. In this film, about a team of comedy writers in the ‘50s, headed by the Sid Caesar-like Joe Bologna and including gravel-voiced Selma Diamond and Adolph Green, it falls to the youngest writer Mark-Linn Baker, at the risk of being fired, to chaperone that week’s guest star to the show on time. It is a nigh impossible task because the guest is O’Toole, the incarnation of Erroll Flynn, swash-buckler on screen, imbiber and carouser off screen. Incorrigible as he is in public, O’Toole is also a pussycat, graciously accepting the invitation of Linn-Baker’s kvelling mother (Lainie Kazan) for a home-cooked Jewish meal. Best moment: O’Toole’s impromptu grand entrance, Douglas Fairbanks-style, over an impatient studio audience.

21)The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). This vintage Preston Sturges farce has Eddie Bracken as Norval, a wartime 4-F'er who is helpless to contain his sweetheart Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) from shacking up with just about every visiting GI in town.(The Hays Office must have been dozing through this one). One morning after a busy, mind-altering night Trudy labors under the assumption she'd married a soldier with a polysyllabic last name of Polish extraction. She soon discovers she's pregnant and begs Norval to tell the world  he's the father. He agrees, but only after secretly wedding Trudy under an assumed name. The plot thickens and before long Norval is facing arrest on a variety of charges. Providentially, Trudy gives birth to sextuplets (only six?) and suddenly Norval is a national hero. As was typical, Sturges populated his cast with members of his stock company, including, in guest roles, Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff,  stars of his previous film comedy, The Great McGinty. 

22) Born Yesterday (1950). Judy Holliday reprises her starring role on Broadway as the blonde bombshell girl-friend of a rich junk dealer, played in the stage version by Paul Douglas, and by Broderick Crawford in the movie. Set in the nation’s capital, William Holden is a nice addition as the man hired by Crawford to “culturefy” her. Best moment: the gin rummy game between Holliday and an exasperated Crawford.

23) The Road to Morocco (1942). The third and best of the Road series with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. In this one, with each vying for the hand of Princess Lamour, Bing attempts to sell Bob to a slave trader,. The typically breezy Crosby was as good at comedy (and ad-libbing topical gags with Bob) as he was at crooning. The talk-to-the-audience asides, poking fun at Paramount Pictures and other matters bearing scant relationship to the plot, were patterned by other zany movies, such as Airplane! Best moment: Bing and Bob on camelback singing Johnny Burke’s lyric: “… like Webster’s Dictionary, we’re Morocco-bound.”

24) The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). Danny Kaminsky got his start at Tamiment, a Borscht Belt breeding ground for entertainers (he was my parents’ busboy). No movie comedy list could not include Kaye, although every picture he made was flawed. Though very un-Thurber, this one is a showcase for Danny to pull out the stops as he morphs from Milquetoast to Superhero in his daydreams of glory. Best moment: Danny’s patter rendition of “Anatole of Paris.”

25) Sitting Pretty (1944). Four years after he played the very model of a cad in Laura, Clifton Webb takes on the role of the egomaniacal genius, Lynn Belvedere, engaged by Robert Young and Maureen O’Hara to baby sit. Think of equal parts W. C. Fields and Monty Woolley and you come close to the lunacy Webb dispenses in this sleeper, the forerunner to two weak Belvedere sequels. Best moment: An unruffled Webb obtaining the baby’s attention by pouring a bowl of porridge over his head.