Most comedies don’t age all that well. The best ones, however, are timeless. These eight films will be funny forever.
A lot more comedies are given the label “timeless” than probably deserve it. They’re beloved long after they’ve come out but mostly by the people who they were made for all those years ago. If you were 20 years old in 1975 you’d be 64 now. If a person loved a comedy they saw in college and still loves it when they’re retired does that really make that comedy timeless? Shouldn’t the benchmark for timelessness be people from a younger generation loving that same comedy?
Our society’s dramatic sensibilities don’t change much. We like to see characters die and people who aren’t supposed to be having sex with each other have sex. (We’re still obsessed with Shakespeare 500 years later.) Comedic sensibilities, on the other hand, are ever-evolving. They change so quickly that it’s impossible to even label them generationally. “When were you in high school?” is probably a better question to ask if you want to know what someone finds funny. Most often, younger people will recognize that a comedy was beloved by an older generation and acknowledge that someone once revered it even though they themselves don’t find it all that funny.
These eight films, however, come as close to being objectively transcendent of the time in which they were made as any comedy can hope to.
This might be the most timeless comedy of all time, and this one scene in and of itself proves why. It contains multitudes. You have some slapstick with the film’s recurring horse bit and some bathroom humor.
