When it comes to ranking the funniest movies of all time, everyone has a different opinion — and anarchy can break out pretty quickly.
In our team’s Slack channel alone, contenders for the funniest movie included Anchorman, Borat, Hot Fuzz, Airplane! (nominated twice), Naked Gun, The Party, and Booksmart.
Well, it turns out “science” (and we use that term loosely in this instance only) has declared Superbad — the coming-of-age comedy starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill — the funniest movie of all time. We’d understand if you were confused. It’s like one of our editors said: “Superbad is good but funniest of all time is a big claim.”
As for how science even reached this conclusion? It wasn’t the most legitimate of experiments. OnBuy, an online marketplace, analysed the top 125 comedies on IMDB based on reviews, titles rated above 6.0 and with a certain amount of keywords synonymous with the word “funny”.
As reported by Boss Hunting, it was Superbad that nabbed the top spot with an aggregate score of 7.6 — across 528,021 ratings and 250 reviews. Deadpool actually had a higher aggregate score — 8.0, across 918,739 ratings — but had fewer reviews with keywords synonymous with “funny”.
See what we mean about the method being a bit iffy?
Taking out third place was Scott Pilgrim vs the World, while Mean Girls nabbed the fourth spot, and Ghostbusters (the original) ranked fifth.
If you don’t quite agree with this list, there is a slightly older one from 2012 that came from a London-based streaming and DVD service called Lovefilm.
Forbes explains that Lovefilm polled their members for the 10 films that made them laugh the most, convened a panel to watch those movies, and came up with a ‘Laugh a Minute” score. Their top three? Airplane!, The Hangover, and Naked Gun. In this list, Superbad came in fourth.
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