The Funniest Movie Scene Every Year Since 1990

"Gremlins 2: The New Batch" might not be the best movie to come out in 1990, or even the funniest. But there wasn't a single funnier character that year than the Brain Gremlin, and the scene in which he first appears makes "Gremlins 2" worth watching solely for its own sake.

Upping the stakes from the original "Gremlins" movie, this one has the titular monsters acquire special individual powers, most notably when one of them consumes "the brain hormone" and becomes extraordinarily intelligent — as demonstrated by his sudden acquisition of horn-rimmed glasses and voice actor Tony Randall's adoption of a delightfully terrible British (or possibly Australian) accent. The Brain Gremlin becomes the leader of his people and is the undisputed highlight of the film going forward, but it doesn't get better than him eruditely explaining the gremlins' mutation process to a baffled and horrified Christopher Lee.

Some of the funniest scenes in cinema come from horror films — though it's questionable whether "Army of Darkness," the third of Sam Raimi's beloved "Evil Dead" movies, is even trying to be anything but a comedy. Several scenes have resonated throughout history, but none more so than when the protagonist, Ash, finally locates the legendary Necronomicon. After a brief but hilarious gag in which Ash is tormented by a pair of decoy Necronomicons (one of them stretches out Ash's face while the other attacks him like a bat), he prepares to say the three words he's been told he must say before claiming the book: klaatu, barada, nikto.

Unfortunately, Ash can't remember the last one, so (in an iconic bit of acting by Bruce Campbell) he tries to cover by coughing loudly and pretending he said it. When no immediate repercussions occur, Ash smirks and takes the book, which, naturally, is when the dead rise.

When filmmaker Kevin Smith burst onto the scene in 1994 with "Clerks," a low-budget, black-and-white customer service comedy, every nerd and geek in the audience had the same thought: "This is how I talk with my friends." Smith is a master of dialogue, and his characters engage in the kinds of conversations that would later form the backbone of internet culture.

Case in point: the scene in "Clerks" when Randall and Dante discuss the possibility that a bunch of innocent construction contractors are killed when the second Death Star is blown up in "Return of the Jedi." This is exactly the kind of fan theory that litters the web today. It's not just funny, it's prescient — and it's also bizarrely heartwarming when an actual roofer joins them to counter that those contractors should have known better than to take work from the Empire. "A roofer listens to this," he says, tapping his heart. "Not his wallet."

You knew there was going to be at least one Adam Sandler scene on this list, and for our money, there was nothing funnier in 1996 than watching Sandler get his teeth kicked in by "The Price is Right" game show host Bob Barker. Barker appears as himself in "Happy Gilmore," the story of a former hockey player who finds himself becoming an unlikely golfing superstar despite his tremendous anger management issues. When Gilmore's biggest rival hires a heckler to get into his head during a celebrity pro-am event, it causes him to play terribly. Barker gets increasingly frustrated with Happy until he finally snaps, leveling his elderly partner with a haymaker.

The slapstick humor comes when Barker gets back up and beats the younger man into unconsciousness, at one point responding to Happy's headbutt with a white-gloved choke-hold and a hilarious expression of crazy-eyed rage.

In the Coen Brothers' 1998 comedy masterpiece "The Big Lebowski," there are almost too many classic scenes to choose from. In the end, we have to go with Walter Sobchak pulling a gun on his bowling opponent, Smokey, demanding that Smokey's latest bowl be marked as zero due to a minor rules infraction. He might not be the title character, but Walter is the engine that makes the movie run (it arguably falls off whenever John Goodman is offscreen).

This scene contains several of his most quotable lines, from "Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling, there are rules" to "You're entering a world of pain." It's the sheer absurdity of Goodman's character that makes the whole thing so funny, particularly after a terrified Smokey finally relents — at which point Walter puts the gun away and almost apologetically mutters, "It's a league game, Smokey."

Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, the co-writers of the 2000 mockumentary "Best in Show," both make hilarious appearances in their own film. The year 2000 was a loaded one for comedies, however: The competition included classics like "Snatch," "High Fidelity," "Almost Famous," and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" To beat that slate, "Best in Show" needed something special, and this came in the form of the legendary Fred Willard, who absolutely steals the film as color commentator Buck Laughlin.

Completely oblivious to the rules of dog shows and willing to say pretty much anything that comes to mind, Laughlin remarks tactlessly on the judge examining a dog's testicles, asks if the dogs are allowed to wear costumes, and makes hopeless football references, much to the confused dismay of his fellow commentator. (That unfortunate companion is Jim Piddock, playing the stuffy British straight man to Willard's increasingly ridiculous dialogue.)

"Barbershop" is such a legendary comedy that it spawned two sequels, a spin-off, and a television series. In its premiere year of 2002, Cedric the Entertainer was the funniest person on the silver screen. As the cantankerous Eddie Walker, Cedric owns a film whose cast includes Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson, Keith David, and Eve, with the best example being his rant taking down Rosa Parks.

Beyond Cedric's delivery, by far the funniest aspect of the scene is the way Eddie plays on the outraged responses of his audience, slowly escalating his critiques as the other men in the room get increasingly angry. As well as being intensely funny, the scene also plays into the themes of the film as Eddie defends his words on the grounds that a barbershop is a space for speaking freely. Best of all, it ends with a customer happily proclaiming, "Man, I love this place."

If you're looking for the funniest zombie movie parody ever made, look no further than Edgar Wright's directorial debut, 2004's "Shaun of the Dead." This was another stacked year for comedy: "Mean Girls," "Napoleon Dynamite," and "Anchorman," among others, all came out in 2004. However, none of those movies feature anything quite as hysterical as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost trying to kill zombies with vinyl records.

Wright stays true to the time-honored concept of zombies as a metaphor for consumerism, as demonstrated by the fact that Pegg and Frost actually go through the records individually. They take the time to decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw at the zombies despite the life-or-death stakes at play. The ultimate punchline, of course, is that the records are entirely ineffectual as weapons, and the whole idea was stupid in the first place.

It's always nice when a comedy film's climax is also its funniest scene. In this case, it's also the funniest scene of 2006. "Little Miss Sunshine" is the story of a dysfunctional family coming together to support its youngest member, Olive (a 9-year-old Abigail Breslin), in her quest to compete in a beauty pageant, despite not looking like a typical child beauty queen. It's a scathing critique of the institutionalized application of traditional female beauty standards to children.

This dynamic comes to a head when Olive begins performing, revealing that the dance taught to her by her grandfather (who died en route to the pageant) is a burlesque striptease. Audience members — who have been fine with the hyper-sexualization of young girls until Olive's act — leave in disgust, but Olive's family dances alongside her in a moment that will make you laugh and cry at the same time.

"Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is one of the great modern romantic comedies, with an all-star cast that includes Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, and Jonah Hill. Each of them has their moments: Segel's protagonist, Peter Bretter, encounters all manner of strange people during his post-breakup trip to Hawaii. None of them, however, steals the show like Paul Rudd, whose turn as oddball surfing instructor Kunu is the most memorable part of the movie, particularly the scene where he teaches Peter to pop up on a surfboard.

He repeatedly insists that Peter is "doing too much," at one point telling him, "Remember, don't do anything. Nothing." When Peter obliges and just lies facedown on the surfboard, Kunu replies, "Well, you ... No, you gotta do more than that." It's such a delightfully weird scene, such simple but effective comedy, that we can't imagine anything else from 2008 topping it.

"Hot Tub Time Machine" sees three friends (Adam, Nick, and Lou, played respectively by John Cusack, Craig Robinson, and Rob Corddry) accidentally go back in time and inhabit the bodies of their younger selves. In order to get back to the present, they have to retrieve a Russian energy drink called Chernobly. Unfortunately, it's fallen into the hands of Lou's old nemesis, a bully named Blaine (played by a bizarrely young-looking, pre-MCU Sebastian Stan).

The highlight of the confrontation between Lou and Blaine is Adam's totally ineffective motivational speech. "He's humiliated you," Adam says. "Emasculated you! The wheel of fate has stopped and dumped you here again, utterly defeated!" When Lou tells Adam this isn't helping, he replies, "I know, I know, it's coming, it's coming right now," and Nick hilariously whispers "Patience." The rest of the speech doesn't work, either, but it's an amazingly funny scene.

The reasons why Drew Goddard's "Cabin in the Woods" is brilliant could fill their own article: It's the funniest horror movie and the scariest comedy you're ever likely to see. Goddard's seamless blend of laughter and fear, along with his skill at subverting horror tropes for comedic purposes, is on display in 2012's funniest scene, in which the operators of the mysterious control room speak on the phone with Mordecai, whom they call "The Harbinger."

Mordecai's role in the movie is funny enough on its own: The control room essentially orchestrates real-life horror stories, whose tropes require a weird old guy — Mordecai — to tell the ignorant kids they should turn back. But Mordecai's dislike of being on speakerphone, combined with the operators' total unwillingness to take him seriously, provides a truly hilarious moment while feeding beautifully into the film's central conflict of traditionalism vs. modernity.

2014 kicked off a new era in top-shelf comedy: the era of Taika Waititi. The New Zealand comedian introduced himself to international audiences, alongside longtime collaborator Jemaine Clement, with "What We Do in the Shadows," a mockumentary about four vampires living together in Wellington (which was recently spun off into a popular series on Hulu).

The film's sketch comedy nature lends itself well to entertaining individual scenes, but the first is the funniest. It opens on the image of a hand reaching out of a coffin to hit the snooze button and moves on to a flat meeting called by Waititi's fastidious vampire, Viago, who wants everyone to keep up on their chores. The flat meeting introduces us to the main characters and sets the general tone of the movie, which starts in a place of insane ridiculousness and never leaves.

Not to be outdone in the realm of superhero comedy, 20th Century Fox decided to one-up Marvel in 2016 with the distinctly R-rated "Deadpool," an "X-Men" spin-off featuring Ryan Reynolds in the role he was born to play. It's probably still the funniest comic book movie ever made (with the only competition being its own sequel), and it's hard to choose a single funniest scene when even the opening credits are a contender.

With the understanding that Deadpool himself would certainly want us to bend the rules a bit, we're going to go with the entire highway scene. This jam-packed sequence includes the bit where Deadpool forgets his ammo bag and has to count his bullets; his first interactions with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead; and lines like "This guy's got the right idea, he wore the brown pants," "All the dinosaurs feared the T-rex," and of course, "You ever see 127 Hours?"

Words can't fully express our feelings about Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You," one of the strangest, darkest, and funniest films in cinematic history. Starring Lakeith Stanfield as Cassius Green, a telemarketer who finds success through his use of an affected "white voice," the movie initially appears to be a character piece about a man torn between selling out for his career and keeping his friends and relationships.

As the film continues, however, it becomes clear that something else is going on. The funniest, weirdest part of the film — and the funniest, weirdest moment of 2018 — is when Cassius accidentally discovers that his company is turning people into human-horse hybrids to increase their profits. The jaw-dropping reveal is enhanced by Armie Hammer's turn as the company's laid-back but clearly insane CEO. Whether you're laughing because it's actually funny or because you just don't know how what else to do, you're definitely laughing.

2020 was a weird year for movies, since the coronavirus pandemic shut down Hollywood for most of the year. Fortunately, prior to the pandemic, Cathy Yan gifted us with "Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)," one of the best DC movies ever and absolutely the funniest film of the year.

After breaking up with the Joker, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) finds herself targeted by everyone she's ever wronged, many of whom show up during the scene in which the cops chase Harley down after she spends the last of her money on an egg sandwich. Tragically, after dodging numerous would-be killers, Harley is knocked down by Detective Renee Montoya, and the sandwich splatters across the pavement.

The image of Harley crying out in slow-motion grief for her lost sandwich amid a swell of dramatic, mournful music would have made this the funniest scene even in a normal year. In 2020, it was just the comic relief we needed.