As we’ve reached the end of the decade, movie buffs are tallying up their end-of-the-decade lists. The 2010s marked a serious decline in comedy movies, both in volume and in quality. At the beginning of the decade, the Apatowian R-rated comedy reigned supreme. By the end of it, the comedy film was all but dead as the best writers jumped ship into television and streaming and the people who were left making comedies started phoning it in.
Of course, there are always great filmmakers refusing to compromise their vision, so there were still a few brilliant comedies every year. Here is the funniest movie from each year in the 2010s, ranked.
2015: Vacation
Between Pixels, Get Hard, and The Wedding Ringer, 2015 wasn’t a great year for comedies. But the Vacation reboot, which starred Ed Helms as an all-grown-up Rusty Griswold taking his own family on a road trip to Walley World, had a lot more laugh-out-loud moments than its unfairly negative reviews would suggest.
It’s more of a string of vignettes than a cohesive plot, but the cast is great and almost all of the gags land. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo return as Clark and Ellen for one particularly hilarious sequence.
2012: 21 Jump Street
No one in 2012 had really heard of the old 21 Jump Street TV series, and so they didn’t really care that a movie reboot was being made. Fortunately, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were aware of this, and made a movie with a hilariously meta play on itself.
This provided the movie with its brain, and Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum’s charming chemistry provided it with a heart. Ted and The Dictator were pretty funny, but no 2012 comedy felt as fresh and inspired and laugh-out-loud as 21 Jump Street.
2018: Game Night
With a sense of humor that’s surprisingly pitch-black for a Hollywood studio comedy, Game Night is a hysterical parody of David Fincher’s dark thrillers helmed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
Its setup of a kidnapping on game night that the attendees think is part of a game establishes a comic irony that drives the story forward. The cast all give fun performances – including Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, and Sharon Horgan – but the clear standout is Jesse Plemons as Gary, the creepy neighbor.
2010: Four Lions
Although The Other Guys, Get Him to the Greek, and Hot Tub Time Machine were all hilarious, 2010’s funniest movie was the searing satire Four Lions. Riz Ahmed stars as an aspiring terrorist planning an attack on the London Marathon.
Directed and co-written by Chris Morris, one of Britain’s foremost satirists, Four Lions is as smart as it is silly, giving a rounded portrait of a timely political issue by lampooning both sides.
2016: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
From the collective minds of The Lonely Island, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a musical mockumentary starring Andy Samberg as Conner4real, a former boy band member trying to establish a solo career while reconciling with his old bandmates. The gags have a delightfully absurdist sensibility, and there’s a clear narrative throughline that prevents the movie from meandering.
In true Lonely Island fashion, Popstar features a boatload of high-profile cameo appearances by everyone from A$AP Rocky to Paul McCartney, Seal to Martin Sheen.
2011: Bridesmaids
Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids is a thousand times better than the average romantic comedy. Upon release, critics compared Bridesmaids to an all-female The Hangover, but it’s something else. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s Oscar-nominated script has the gag rate of a well-made Hollywood comedy, but the honesty of an indie movie.
The cast carries the whole movie, from lead performances by Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, and Rose Byrne, to improv-heavy supporting turns from such comics as Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, and Wendi McLendon-Covey.
2017: Thor: Ragnarok
After the first two Thor movies were kind of a drag, somehow managing to make stories about Norse gods and interdimensional travel boring, Taika Waititi figured out the missing ingredient: humor. He made Thor: Ragnarok as a space opera inspired by Flash Gordon, but he did so through the lens of a zany slapstick comedy.
Comedy is one of the greatest assets in Chris Hemsworth’s acting toolbox, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t make full use of it until Waititi gave him the freedom to ad-lib dialogue and get really out there with the character.
2013: The Wolf Of Wall Street
Martin Scorsese’s movies always have a healthy dose of humor; Goodfellas has as many jokes as it does gruesome mob hits. But The Wolf of Wall Street is a rare Scorsese movie that’s more comedy than drama.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who shamelessly conned working-class investors out of their money and used it to live an insane life of excess. Some critics accused Scorsese of reveling in this excess with pitch-black humor, but it all comes crumbling down in the end.
2019: Booksmart
A lot of 2019’s Oscar darlings had strong comedic elements: Jojo Rabbit, Parasite, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood etc. But the year’s funniest movie was a full-blown comedy, Booksmart, the directorial debut of Olivia Wilde.
Booksmart’s U.S.P. is its stars, Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, whose chemistry anchors the movie. Their characters, Amy and Molly, feel like genuine childhood friends. The movie has laugh-out-loud moments at every turn, but there are also plenty of emotional scenes that hit you in the feels.
2014: What We Do In The Shadows
Written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary that hysterically lampoons vampire mythology. With an 85-minute runtime, the movie is bursting at the seams with jokes, sketches, and character moments.
The writers clearly had no shortage of material, and cut the movie down to only the very best stuff. Instantly shaking the soft image that Twilight gave vampires, What We Do in the Shadows harkens back to the days of Dracula and Nosferatu.