Worst Comedy Movies Ever Made
Comedy is not an easy genre to pull off. It's not enough to tell a funny story well — it must also elicit laughter at regular intervals, without ever becoming expected, hokey, or dumb. Plenty of great movies nail this complex process, like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "Blazing Saddles," "Airplane!," "This is Spinal Tap," and "What We Do in the Shadows." Many of those titles are considered some of the greatest movies ever made, in fact, even beyond the limits of the genre.
But for every "Some Like it Hot" or "Young Frankenstein" that still have audiences holding their sides decades after they were released, there's a comedy that falls well short of getting a single chuckle out of the audience. Some are so bad, they bring the uniquely excruciating pain of watching a stand-up comic bomb on stage into viewers' living rooms. Some of these movies try desperately to get you to laugh through an overreliance on toilet humor. Others are just plain bizarre in a way that never manages to become interesting. None of them are even close to being funny. These are the worst comedy movies ever made.
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Of all the underachievers who cling to Adam Sandler's success like a life raft, Rob Schneider might be the most cluelessly unfunny. That cluelessness is evidenced by the fact that he felt the world was clamoring for a sequel to 1999's "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” despite no one in history ever recommending that film to anyone. The unfunny part comes from the fact that said sequel, 2005's "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo," doesn't have a single laugh to its name. But boy, does it try desperately to elicit one.
Business is bad for Deuce Bigalow, as a serial killer is out and about, murdering gigolos like himself. Deuce is forced to act as a decoy to lure the killer into the open. Along the way, he gets sneezed on by a woman with genitalia in place of a nose. Yeah. That's the kind of movie this is. There is one scene that's almost creative: Deuce gets high in a coffee shop and hallucinates being seduced by a beautiful woman in a painting on the wall. He proceeds to dive into it. That's where the creative part ends. What follows is pretty standard fare for a movie like this: The woman tells Deuce she's not attracted to handsome, successful men, but to dumpy losers like him. He then buries his face in her chest which, to no one's shock, turns out to belong to his pal T.J. Ha?
Movie 43
As many rock n' roll supergroups could tell you, simply having a bunch of big names involved in a creative project doesn't translate to success. We're using the term "creative" very generously when it comes to 2013's "Movie 43," a star-studded and thunderously inept comedic anthology. The assembled vignettes' brevity helps alleviate the suffering, but whatever reprieve you get when one short ends dissipates when you realize the next is just as bad.
The movie's 14 shorts all rely on the kind of "LAUGH, DARN YOU!" desperation that makes audiences squirm. Segments include "The Catch," in which Kate Winslet is shocked to discover that her date, Hugh Jackman, has genitalia on his chin, "Middle School Date," in which Chloe Grace Moretz gets her period and makes all the guys in the house think she's bleeding to death, and "Happy Birthday," in which Johnny Knoxville kidnaps a violent, foul-mouthed leprechaun for his roommate's birthday. If we've made any of these sound even a little bit funny, we deeply apologize.
The great mystery of "Movie 43" is how so many respected Hollywood big-timers were duped into appearing in it. It's not the craziest thing in the world to see Chris Pratt and Seann William Scott in something this dumb. But we're still scratching our heads at the inclusion of Halle Berry, Emma Stone, Julianne Moore, Gerard Butler, and Richard Gere. Luckily, if somewhat surprisingly, their careers all seem to have survived.
Miss March
Fans of Trevor Moore and Zach Cregger's work in the hilarious and supremely underrated sketch comedy group "The Whitest Kids U' Know" were left dumbfounded when none of their comedic wit made it into their first and only major motion picture, 2009's "Miss March." Eugene (Cregger) is injured when he drunkenly falls down the stairs at a prom party. When he wakes up from a coma four years later, his perpetually horny best friend Tucker (Moore) informs him that Cindi, his beloved high school girlfriend, is now a Playboy centerfold. Tucker convinces a distraught Eugene to accompany him on a cross-country road trip to the Playboy Mansion, where Eugene can hopefully win Cindi back.
When they finally arrive after a tumultuous (for them and us) journey, Hugh Hefner, playing himself, tells Tucker there's a "bunny" in every woman. Meanwhile, Eugene makes up with Cindi after realizing she only modeled for Playboy to make enough money to keep him in a nice hospital. Oh, and their old friend-turned-rapper Horsed**k Dot MPEG (Craig Robinson) has no genitals. Hyuk, hyuk. "Miss March" eschews creative, character-driven humor in favor of tired tropes, bad acting, and crass shock value. As a result, it never actually manages to get a single laugh out of its viewers.
Meet the Spartans
Just because it's popular doesn't mean it needs to be parodied. Relatedly, making a pop culture reference doesn't mean you've said anything funny. Writer-directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the sophomoric hacks behind "Epic Movie" and "Disaster Movie," should be forced to write both rules on a chalkboard 100 times each, until we can be sure they've learned their lesson. Even then, we're not confident it'd stick.
2008's "Meet the Spartans" parodies 2007's "300," the heavily stylized story of a few hundred Greek warriors defending a narrow pass against an invading Persian army. Somehow, Friedberg and Seltzer convinced themselves (and 20th Century Fox) that the movie could be deservedly taken down a peg with forced, desperate references to "Shrek the Third" and the "Rocky" movies. In one scene, after King Leonidas chases King Xerxes by playing "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," the king retaliates by using the "Transformer Cube" to become a robot and pull up the "Leave Britney Alone!" video. Get it? Because those are things that people talked about! And that makes it funny! Allegedly.
Maybe the only way to get through to Friedberg and Seltzer is a PSA video in their own language. Picture this: Olivia Rodrigo, Logan Paul, and Katie Mitchell from 2021's "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" beg them to stop trying to make comedy by nonsensically combining pop culture artifacts. It's a terrible image, but it might be the only thing that could work.
Holmes and Watson
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly usually produce pretty good work together. It's rarely award worthy, but hey — "Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby" looks like "Citizen Kane" compared to 2018's "Holmes and Watson." We suppose we should've detected signs of trouble when the movie wasn't pre-screened for critics (via The Hollywood Reporter), a precaution no good film feels the need to take. But some of us, to our peril, hoped anyway.
Ferrell stars as Sherlock Holmes, while Reilly plays Dr. John Watson — at least on paper. Their costumes check out, we suppose, but as you watch them bumble around with terrible accents, supposedly trying to solve a threat to Buckingham Palace, you'll struggle to find any other connection to the iconic fictional detectives. There are crass jokes, clumsy, oafish violence, and flat cultural references passed off as funny just because hey, they didn't take selfies in the 19th century! Ha, ha!
There are a few jokes that almost land. In one fascinatingly unfunny courtroom scene, Holmes offends Watson by casually claiming to have handled a crime scene investigation alone, even though the accompanying flashback clearly shows Watson helping out. But it just ... doesn't actually work. We're not sure why. Much like the rest of the movie, the pieces are all there for a funny bit, but it doesn't get a laugh. And being almost funny just isn't good enough.
Disaster Movie
There's a joke in here about the movie living up to its name, but we're too depressed to find it. That's because Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been successfully waging war against movie fans for years. "Scary Movie" has its moments, but as we've all found out the hard way, that formula simply doesn't work with other genres. Comedy is a great weapon to wield against things that go bump in the night, but it doesn't offer that much tonal contrast to action or romance. But this fact is lost on them. "Date Movie" is bad. "Epic Movie" is worse. And 2008's "Disaster Movie" is in a league of its own.
Once again, Friedberg and Seltzer confuse referencing things in pop culture with being funny. As is brutally evidenced by the failure of a bit in which a demonic Alvin and the Chipmunks bite guys in the nethers because "chipmunks love nuts," you need an actual observation to turn it into comedy. Other moments don't even go that far. Instead of limping in the direction of an actual joke, most scenes simply feature a recognizable character or figure — often not from a disaster movie, like Batman, Juno, and Hannah Montana — and expect the audience to laugh. Why? Because ... well, we're not sure why, actually. Let us know if you figure it out.
The Emoji Movie
Listen, getting in on a trend is par for the course in the entertainment world. Usually, the goal is to do it cleverly, so audiences get the impression you actually understand them. This was all lost on the makers of 2017's "The Emoji Movie," a vapid cash grab of a film whose very existence has so much densely packed "How do you do, fellow kids?" energy, it nearly collapses into a universe-destroying black hole. Such a fate would've been a mercy. Sadly, we have to go on living in a world that embraced the terrible reality that is "The Emoji Movie."
We follow Gene, a malfunctioning, multi-emotional emoji on a teenager's smartphone, who embarks on a quest to become a normal "meh" emoji, like his parents. Along the way, he meets several devastatingly unlikeable emoji characters. These include Poop, voiced by Patrick Stewart, who should have known better, and Hi-5, voiced by James Corden, whose very inclusion in a cast now acts as a siren indicating an incoming critical carpet bombing.
In the end, Gene embraces his ability to feel more than one emotion. It's a conclusion you probably saw coming from miles away. Which, incidentally, is where you would like to be while watching "The Emoji Movie."
Saving Christmas
Every year, people pretend that being told "Happy holidays" by the cashier at CVS is evidence of a plot against Christmas. The fact that Christmas is by far the United States' most popular holiday didn't stop Kirk Cameron from making 2014's "Saving Christmas," a movie based on the idea that he is oppressed, and that Jesus, who once protested the commercialization of God's house by chasing merchants from the Temple with a whip, wants us all to celebrate his birth by buying Gucci bags and X-Boxes.
In this magically unfunny movie, Cameron stars as a fictionalized version of himself, who tries to convince his Scrooge-y brother that Christmas ornaments and ham dinners are all part of God's plan. Any party pooper who doesn't participate has simply been brainwashed by the mainstream media. The arguments made by Cameron's brother — that many of our modern Christmas traditions have Pagan origins – are actually correct (via CBS). You'd think that anyone who really wants to "put Christ back in Christmas," as the film's tagline suggests, might learn a thing or two from this perspective. But of course, Cameron doesn't.
Unsurprisingly, this movie was obliterated by critics, as evidenced by its well-earned 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and four Razzie wins, including Worst Picture. Also unsurprisingly, Kirk Cameron thinks this too is evidence of a sinister plot against him that was supposedly hatched by "haters" and "atheists."
Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
Did you know that 2004's "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" was actually produced by the military for use in warfare? It's true. They once played it on a giant screen at full volume in the middle of the desert. It took six minutes for Saddam Hussein to turn himself in. The incident was later condemned as a war crime.
Jokes aside — and boy, did they set jokes aside for this movie — "Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2" is one of those films whose very existence is astonishing. It had to pass through multiple levels of studio approval. Financers got on board. Jon Voight is in it. How could this have happened? If you've only seen reviews calling it one of the worst films ever made, you might think director Bob Clark held everyone involved at gunpoint. If you've actually seen the movie, however, you understand why that makes no sense: Any rational person would have taken their chances with the bullet.
The movie, a sequel to 1999's superior and still hideously bad "Baby Geniuses," is about talking babies who team up with a legendary, ageless superbaby named Kahuna to stop a media mogul from using satellites to turn people into couch potatoes. When you stop laughing, we should make you aware that Kahuna once rescued a group of babies from an orphanage at the Berlin Wall that was run by Adolf Hitler. Are we kidding? You can't tell. It's in your own best interests not to find out.
Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star
2011's "Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star" stars Nick Swardson as the titular character, a buck-toothed yokel with a shaggy bowl cut who discovers his mild-mannered parents were once adult film stars. Bucky decides to follow in his parents' footsteps, despite the fact that he didn't inherit their genes. He's lacking in the pants department, is what we're saying.
Bucky misadventures his way into an actual job in the adult film world, where he finds success in an oddball way: His physical inadequacies make women appreciate their better-endowed partners. He eventually falls in love with a waitress named Kathy and plans to abandon his career to be with her. But Kathy dumps him after Bucky's boss, Miles Deep, asks her to, so he won't lose his star. Then they get together anyway, Miles apologizes, and Bucky opens a steakhouse. If we hadn't spent the last hour and change loathing these characters, we might have cared.
Unsurprisingly, one of the co-writers of this cinematic crime is none other than Adam Sandler. He did the movie a solid, though: The only reason "Bucky Larson" didn't sweep the 2012 Razzies is because he released "Jack and Jill," an even worse film, that same year.
Jack and Jill
It won't surprise anyone to learn that there were plenty of Adam Sandler movies that nearly made this list. But as bad as "Pixels," "Grown Ups," "That's My Boy," and "The Ridiculous Six" are, none are quite as offensively cynical in their approach to "comedy" as 2011's "Jack and Jill."
Many Happy Madison vehicles appear to be little more than excuses for Sandler and his friends to shoot a lazy film in an exotic location. So we will say this in the film's favor: It took at least a little effort for Sandler to portray both Jack and his screechingly obnoxious twin sister, Jill. Her unannounced visit is the film's main premise, which is packed with all the racist stereotypes, cruel jokes, bad slapstick, and toilet humor you can imagine.
Nobody in "Jack and Jill" tries as hard as Al Pacino, though. The "Godfather" and "Scarface" legend plays, with completely undeserved and inexplicable effort, a fictionalized version of himself, who refuses to appear in Jack's upcoming Dunkin' Donuts commercial unless he gets a date with Jill. Oh, and speaking of commercials, the product placement in this film reaches appalling levels of brazen soullessness, going well beyond simply displaying the logo on a Pepsi can. Sandler is talented, as evidenced by his extraordinary work in 2019's "Uncut Gems," but this laugh-less scam of a movie is simply unforgivable.