The 15 Most Absurd Comedy Movies of All Time, Ranked
Updated
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Absurdism is all about chaos and, in fiction, is usually used to describe stories where wild, ridiculous, and unpredictable things happen. For hopefully obvious reasons, you often get absurd stuff happening in comedies, because weirdness can be funny, and humor is often, at its core, getting surprised by things you don’t entirely expect or see coming.
The following ranking might not necessarily be about the best absurd comedies, or the best comedies that get somewhat absurd, but is instead focused on highlighting the comedies that get the most absurd. And that’s a somewhat subjective thing to be sure, yet it’s an interesting topic to try and tackle (also, for what it’s worth, most of the movies here range from good to great in quality, so they're not too hard to recommend if you're drawn to particular wild and weird comedic films).
15 'Mind Game' (2004)
It’s hard to know where to start with Mind Game, as it’s one of the strangest anime films ever made. Also, it might be one of the best anime films ever made. Very little comes close to doing what this one does, in terms of the genres it blends and the places it goes to narratively and even physically. Regarding the latter, for example, so much of Mind Game literally takes place inside a giant whale.
It’s also a romantic comedy of sorts, and the plot kicks off because the protagonist clashes with the Yakuza, so add crime to the long list of genres that Mind Game plays around with and slots into. You probably won’t be able to keep up with it all, and maybe that sounds like a bit of a nightmare, but Mind Game is a fun nightmare; more of a fever dream, really, and somehow quite funny at the same time.
14 'The Greasy Strangler' (2016)
It may not be a classic, and it certainly caters to a niche crowd, but in terms of sheer absurdist might, few movies can rival the creative output of 2016’s The Greasy Strangler. Mixing outlandish black comedy with a lingering sense of horror dread, it follows a pathological liar and his son whose co-management of a disco-themed walking tour lands them in the thrall of a romantic rivalry when they are both smitten with the same woman. However, they also find themselves being targeted by an oily, inhuman serial killer that strangles its victims at night.
Director Jim Hosking revels in every repulsive and bizarre detail the screenplay has to offer, leaning heavily into extreme repetition, graphic nudity, cringe-worthy embarrassment, and ferocious anti-comedy fervor. For all the faults many will find in it, The Greasy Strangler does find a certain hilarity and depth in its transcendent quality. —Ryan Heffernan
13 'Black Dynamite' (2009)
Since it’s a parody of — and something of a homage to — Blaxploitation movies, it helps to be familiar with that genre to some extent before watching Black Dynamite, but you don’t absolutely have to be. It pushes conventions of those films, most popular in the 1970s, to their extremes, with a fairly loose and often random narrative about an unstoppable force of nature who wages a one-man war against any and all crime.
From one point of view, Black Dynamite makes no sense, but from another point of view, Black Dynamite makes all the sense in the world. If you want one of the most non-stop comedies of the 21st century so far, with far more jokes that land than miss, then it’s basically an essential watch, giving the likes of Airplane and the original The Naked Gun a run for their money in terms of movies that pack the most jokes into the runtime of a single film.
12 'Tux and Fanny' (2019)
Tux and Fanny is oddly heartwarming at times, and uniquely funny throughout, but it’s also kind of off and unsettling when it wants to be. It’s made up of lots of tiny scenes that might feel self-contained, but they all add up to something weirdly coherent… but coherent by the standards of Tux and Fanny. This is all very surreal and not willing to play by anyone’s rules except its own.
The two titular characters are a pair of friends stuck in a strange world, and the whole movie just has weird things happening to them the whole time and, all the while, they ponder life and the randomness of their universe, or maybe the universe. And it’s all fun. But also quite sad. And very simple, on an animation front, yet charming. This obscure animated film is worth a watch, since it’s remarkably unique overall.
11 'Rubin & Ed' (1991)
A hidden gem of dramedy punch, Rubin & Ed unwinds as a drifting, emotionally evocative buddy movie that uses absurdity to examine social isolation, self-help culture, and how people cope with personal failure. Crispin Glover stars as Rubin, an unsociable loner mourning his dead cat who joins a failing salesman on a road trip across Utah to a get-rich-quick seminar while looking for the perfect spot to bury his beloved pet.
It functions as most road movies do, exploring the bond that develops between the two major characters through the lens of the many people they meet on the way and the challenges that arise in their journey. However, Rubin & Ed takes these tropes to extreme levels, making for a movie of intense absurdity, unexpected poignancy, and profound depth. —Ryan Heffernan
10 'Army of Darkness' (1992)
The first two Evil Dead movies were pretty bloody, and the first was quite scary (the second was more a blend of horror and comedy), and then Army of Darkness concluded the trilogy of sorts and went all-in on comedy. It’s the kind of thing that pretty much entirely abandons horror, and even if you're sensitive to scary movies, it’s unlikely there’ll be anything here that’s genuinely frightening to you.
Horror isn't needed when something is this funny, though, with the progression from demonic possession horror to fantastical farce throughout the first three movies being great. Army of Darkness lets Bruce Campbell quip, ham it up, and fight undead forces who've rarely been so not frightening for a bit under 90 minutes, and it’s great. It turns out that’s all a movie really needs to have to be good.
9 'Sorry to Bother You' (2018)
Of all the R-rated sci-fi comedies out there, few earn that rating quite as much as Sorry to Bother You does. Where it goes is best left for you to discover, should you feel up to watching the whole thing, but it is challenging and uncompromising, as a warning. But it needs to be, in order to function as a modern-day satire, thereby mocking things about life in the 21st century that are ridiculous enough in reality.
It's about a telemarketer finding out certain truths about his profession, and then ending up in a surreal world because of the talent he shows at his job, but really, that only explains about 10% (maybe less) of the movie. The ride Sorry to Bother You takes you on is beyond gonzo, and the weird stuff it’s willing to throw at you never really subsides, for better or worse.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?
Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don't just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What's yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film's ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what's even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
8 'The Falls' (1980)
It’s got an epic runtime, clocking in at over three hours, so if you want to call it an epic, then The Falls might well be one of the funniest out there, albeit it’s a very dark and odd sort of comedy. There’s some kind of event that’s happened and has impacted the entire world, but it’s not very well understood, and the film sort of explores it by covering the experiences and recollections of a large group of survivors.
And it’s a really large group, which explains why The Falls ends up being over three hours long, even if each “character” only gets covered for two or three minutes, on average (if that). It’s not based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, but sort of feels in line with the style, humor, and horror of some of his works. That’s all to say that it’s very weird. It feels like the kind of thing you might well feel like you dreamed/hallucinated rather than actually watched, and that’s intended to be stated in a complimentary sort of way.
7 'Hundreds of Beavers' (2022)
There’s a lot that’s absurd about Hundreds of Beavers, but maybe the thing that leaps out first and foremost is the fact that it feels like a silent comedy and a video game movie all at once. But it’s not technically a fully silent movie, and only feels like it’s from the 1920s humor-wise, and then it’s not an adaptation of an actual video game, more just something that has a certain video game logic and progression to what actually happens.
It's primarily a comedy, but Hundreds of Beavers also has a good deal of ridiculous action, with it being all about a man trying to survive the elements by hunting beavers for their pelts, and eventually ending up in a fight for his life against a whole bunch of them (maybe even hundreds, you know). It’s hard to sell, given how weird it is, but Hundreds of Beavers truly is something special.
6 'The Lobster' (2015)
Combining a high-concept romantic sci-fi premise with barbs of black comedy surrealism, The Lobster stands out as one of the most absurd comedy movies ever made, even if it isn’t necessarily one people would watch and revisit for non-stop laughs. Set in a bizarre near-future where single people are taken to The Hotel to find a partner—and if they fail, they are turned into an animal of their choosing—it follows David (Colin Farrell) as he navigates his 45-day stay at the establishment.
Director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos uses bleak comedy to accentuate the movie’s emphasis on the dangers of conformity and the importance of independence. Morbid humor pierces through the gloomy dystopian atmosphere with striking precision, allowing David’s journey of rebellion and unlikely love to unfurl with a poignant, profoundly human mood that deftly juggles somber relatability with a ridiculous, though thematically-loaded, narrative concept. —Ryan Heffernan
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