The American Film Institute's three-hour "100 Years... 100 Laughs" program was broadcast on June 13, 2000. Its goal was to choose America's 100 Funniest Movies. As they have in the past, AFI asked a jury of leaders from the film community to vote on their 100 favorites from a list of 500 nominated films. The films had to be feature-length American productions, and had to be funny, regardless of genre. (There are many films on the list that are not primarily comedies.) They are mostly classics, although there are quite a few from the 80s and 90s.
In order to make sure that the voices of classic film fans were heard, though not in an official capacity, we offered you a chance to vote during the past three months or so. Here are the final results of that voting, now with a list of the final AFI results right next to it.
Before you write to complain, please remember that these are supposed to be "American" films, which explains the absence of the Monty Python movies, as well as 60s classics such as Tom Jones and The Wrong Box. In any case, I didn't choose the nominees!
Based on the results of our survey, I predicted that Bringing Up Baby would be the #1 film in the AFI list, but as you can see, it was actually Some Like It Hot. Appearing in the most films is Cary Grant, with an amazing eight, followed by the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, with five each. Katharine Hepburn and Margaret Dumont (thanks to the Marx Brothers) are tops among women, with four appearances each. Mel Brooks, as predicted by our survey, is the director with the most top 20 appearances, with three. He beat out Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton in terms of ranking, but they both had 4 films on the list. There were quite a few films in our top 20 that appeared in AFI's top twenty, some in similar positions, including Some Like it Hot, Duck Soup, Blazing Saddles, It Happened One Night, A Night at the Opera, His Girl Friday, Dr. Strangelove, Bringing Up Baby, Young Frankenstein, The Philadelphia Story, M*A*S*H, and The Producers. Others were in quite different spots on the two polls, including Arsenic and Old Lace, The Thin Man, and My Man Godfrey, which we ranked higher, and Annie Hall, Airplane!, and The Odd Couple, which AFI ranked higher. One pleasant surprise was The General, which appeared at #18 on the AFI list, but was left off our list!
Among the other surprises, in the opinion of the people in our chat room during the program, was The Graduate ranking in the top ten (funny, but not among the biggest laughers of all time; it wasn't even on our list). There was general agreement that It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Moonstruck, Shampoo, Broadcast News, Private Benjamin, and 9 to 5, though enjoyable, didn't belong in the top 100, and that a number of films were ranked too low, including The Court Jester, Sons Of The Desert, Auntie Mame, Ball Of Fire, Dinner At Eight, The Navigator, The Freshman, Sherlock, Jr., Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek, and Ninotchka, all of which were in the bottom 50. But, of course, they can't all be in the top ten, right? I was personally disappointed that the marvelous Jean Shepherd comedy, A Christmas Story, did not make the list, though it was 11th on ours (and I didn't vote). In fact, it was the only film in our top 20 that didn't show up on the AFI list at all.
All in all, however, I think the list is fairly balanced, and will probably serve the purpose of introducing many new people to some of the great American film comedies. The fact that almost a fifth of the films on the list are from the great comedians of the Golden Age, such as Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Harold Lloyd, is a pleasant surprise. It almost makes up for the paltry showing on the original AFI list of all films.
You can print out both lists so you can compare them offline.
