The comedy genre saw some major highs and lows throughout 2022. While some major attempts at lighting up the box office with comedy failed massively, there are some cases of comedic movies producing quality that will be remembered for many years to come.
From the completely ridiculous to the sobering satires, 2022 saw a variety of major comedy films taking the world by storm. Animated movies, streaming releases, and some big cinematic works have all lit up reviews from critics and fans alike. These are the best laugh-out-loud films the year had to offer.
7 Ticket To Paradise
George Clooney and Julia Roberts feel like a pairing that must have worked together hundreds of times. Modern cinema isn’t built upon famous pairings like old Hollywood was, but even so, these two have starred opposite each other five times now. Ticket to Paradise is every bit as snarky and charismatically brilliant as any of them.
A divorced couple gets thrown back together in a desperate attempt to stop their only daughter from getting married in a sudden fling of romance. When forced back together, they realize, as everyone realizes with Clooney and Roberts, that they are great together. Ticket to Paradise is easily one of the top rom-com films of the year.
6 Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Biopics have become a large piece of modern cinema, with drama-filled, epic-length tales about stars like Marilyn Monroe and Whitney Houston making splashes this year alone. However, it is especially unusual for a biopic to be an outright comedic film like Weird: The Al Yankovic Story turned out to be.
Weird stars Daniel Radcliffe in the role of the famous comedian as he stumbles through a vaguely correct collection of the events of Yankovic’s life. The film is mostly meant as a satire of other biopics, and did an excellent job at parodying them while becoming a hilariously fun tale in its own right.
5 Bros
Billy Eichner’s LGBTQ+ romantic comedy is about an odd pairing of men that manage to get together despite turbulence in their early dating. It's a hilarious look at how gay dating is different from straight dating. Eichner stars alongside Luke Macfarlane as a podcast host trying to open an LGBTQ+ history museum.
He isn’t into serious relationships, but when he meets Aaron, the two slowly form a bond in a most unusual way. It is a hilarious film that didn’t manage to land on its feet at the box office, but is quickly becoming a potential cult hit as one of the few LGBTQ+ romance films to get a major worldwide release.
4 Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
This recent Netflix release continues the flair and style of Knives Out, the comedic whodunit hit, with an almost entirely new cast and a fresh island setting. Glass Onion features Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc getting mixed up in the mystery of a murder that occurs during a COVID weekend getaway for a group of old friends.
The mystery and the glamour of the island shots are only topped by the hilarious manner in which Blanc unravels the mysteries surrounding the friends. From his frustration with how simple so many of the clues are to the astounding number of notable cameos, Glass Onion became one of the hits of the year when it was released on Netflix in December.
3 Good Luck To You, Leo Grande
Another film with an interesting and comedic look at a different kind of love, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a sex comedy starring Emma Thompson as a retired widower who hires a sex worker to try and help her have her first-ever orgasm.
The film has dramatic moments and speaks a great deal about serious issues like body image and self-love, but it also has a series of great laughs and is surprisingly tender. Despite these powerful messages and deeper themes, the film still managed to be one of the most hilarious of the year, and is a great deeper dive for cinema fans that have missed it thus far.
2 The Bad Guys
For fans of animation, one of the best new films this year was The Bad Guys. DreamWorks Animation decided to do its own take on the comedic heist movie. The Bad Guys is about a gang of animals that, stereotypically, nobody likes. This gang ends up engaging in huge heists because everyone considers them bad anyway.
But after getting caught, they realize that they don’t necessarily have to be so bad after all. The film is a sweet fable on the nature of change, as well as a hilarious heist film that plays with the tropes of the genre, deconstructing them and making something that kids and adults can enjoy equally.
1 The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent
The strangest idea for a comedic film this year belongs to Nicolas Cage, who decided to play himself, or a version of himself, in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. In the film, Cage becomes the guest of a recluse fan that is obsessed with him, played by the ingenious Pedro Pascal.
When the CIA turns up and convinces Cage to help them, he becomes embroiled in a wild sequence of events. The film is a strange bromance, a hilarious action-comedy, and possibly the most meta film ever to exist. While it may not be the best film of the year, it is one of the most hilarious in recent years.