Nice simulpost.
I had the show on for a while. What I find harder to figure out than their selections is their broadcasting schedule. The show was broken up into 4 one hour segments, and they then ran the whole thing eight times in a four day period! They ran four hours of it on Friday (also running five hours of The 100 Greatest TV Characters). Twelve hours on Saturday and eight hours each day on Sunday and Monday.
Yikes! What’s the matter, Bravo? Was the tape library destroyed in a fire and this was the only show you had left, or what?
*Arsenic and Old Lace
1,2,3
Some Like It Hot
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The Awful Truth
. . . . . . *
I don’t know why we need to applaud your hole. A lot of people have holes that could put together a better list of comedies than this one. I am sure Eve’s nostrils and some of my pores could do better, for example.
It would be hard to make a “50 Great Movies on Bravo’s List” List.
BTW, in re: Otto’s first post, heck, one thing that was specially irksome was the large amount of pieces for which they apparently could not even get rights to show anything but publicity stills (e.g.: Stripes; MAS*H). This was too lame for words.
These lists are always silly, but this one sets new records for stupidity.
Plenty of oversights, of course: Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Great McGinty, The Inspector General, M. Hulot’s Holiday, Playtime, Love and Death, The Bank Dick, etc. They list The Bird Cage but ignore the vastly superior original La Cage au Folles. No mention of The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe. Eddie Murphy’s bland Nutty Professor is there, but Jerry Lewis’s is missing. No Chaplin, no Keaton, no Marx Brothers,
And the rankings: There is no way in hell that The Wedding Singer and Ace Ventura deserve to be in the top ten.
This is a list for and by twelve-year-olds.
Bravo is indeed owned by NBC Universal. Because I love useless research, I’ve decided to tally up the list by current owning studio (thanks, Birdmonster!) Both Paramount and Dreamworks are owned by Viacom due to a recent purchase, and both Columbia and MGM are owned by Sony due to a recent merger. New Line is a division of Time Warner. Instead of listing the various brand names they’ve released films under, I’ve clumped all Disney films under “Disney.”
- Anchorman (Dreamworks)
- The Birdcage (MGM)
- School of Rock (Paramount)
- Happy Gilmore (Universal)
- Four Weddings and a Funeral (Universal)
- Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (New Line)
- Waiting for Guffman (Sony)
- The Aristocrats (ThinkFilm)
- Father of the Bride (Disney)
- Revenge of the Nerds (Fox)
- Clueless (Paramount)
- Slapshot (Universal)
- Team America (Paramount)
- The Kentucky Fried Movie (Anchor Bay)
- Zoolander (Paramount)
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (MGM)
- Silver Streak (Fox)
- Sister Act (Disney)
- Tootsie (Columbia)
- Half Baked (Universal)
- Lost in America (Warner)
- Three Amigos (MGM)
- Bananas (MGM)
- Flirting with Disaster (Disney)
- Ghostbusters (Columbia)
- Dumb and Dumber (New Line)
- Trading Places (Paramount)
- City Slickers (Columbia)
- Moonstruck (MGM)
- Roxanne (Columbia)
- The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy) (Universal)
- The Blues Brothers (Universal)
- Broadcast News (Fox)
- Kingpin (MGM)
- Dazed and Confused (Universal)
- Office Space (Fox)
- This is Spinal Tap (MGM)
- Manhattan (MGM)
- The Pink Panther (MGM)
- Election (Paramount)
- When Harry Met Sally (MGM)
- Police Academy Series (Warner)
- Private Benjamin (Warner)
- Swingers (Disney)
- Young Frankenstein (Fox)
- Bull Durham (MGM)
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Paramount)
- Dr. Strangelove (Columbia)
- Meet the Parents (Universal)
- National Lampoon’s Vacation (Warner)
- The Princess Bride (MGM)
- American Pie (Universal)
- American Graffiti (Universal)
- 9 to 5 (Fox)
- The Incredibles (Disney)
- Raising Arizona (Fox)
- Sixteen Candles (Universal)
- What About Bob? (Disney)
- Harold and Maude (Paramount)
- Austin Powers (New Line)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Columbia)
- Mrs. Doubtfire (Fox)
- Best In Show (Warner)
- Dodgeball (Fox)
- Good Morning Vietnam (Disney)
- Beetlejuice (Warner)
- Rushmore (Disney)
- Clerks (Disney)
- Groundhog Day (Columbia)
- The Big Lebowski (Universal)
- The 40 Year Old Virgin (Universal)
- Legally Blonde (MGM)
- Annie Hall (MGM)
- A Fish Called Wanda (MGM)
- Wayne’s World (Paramount)
- Meet the Fockers (Universal)
- Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (MGM)
- Big (Fox)
- Beverly Hills Cop (Paramount)
- Shampoo (Columbia)
- The Jerk (Universal)
- Wedding Crashers (New Line)
- Stripes (Columbia)
- MAS*H (Fox)
- Old School (Dreamworks)
- Fast Times At Ridgemont High (Universal)
- Napoleon Dynamite (Paramount/Fox)
- Naked Gun Series (Paramount)
- The Producers (MGM)
- Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Warner)
- Arthur (Warner)
- Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Warner)
- Blazing Saddles (Warner)
- The Wedding Singer (New Line)
- Airplane (Paramount)
- South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut (Paramount)
- There’s Something About Mary (Fox)
- Shrek (Dreamworks)
- Caddyshack (Warner)
- Animal House (Universal)
That makes 17 for Universal, if my count is correct.
Seeing as there is at least one film on the list from every major studio, I’m guessing they couldn’t obtain the rights to show clips from all of them. Usually, in the case of shows like this, they usually show clips from the films or TV shows they have the rights to, while they just show stills from the ones they don’t. (This was the case of an earlier Bravo TV special about the 100 greatest TV characters.)
And reading JJRDelirious’s post shows my guess was right.
I demand cake, and fine wine… and Withnail & I!
The other glaring oversight, in addition to older movies, is the near-total exclusion of any foreign films. Of the 100 on Bravo’s list, only **Monty Python & The Holy Grail ** and Dr. Strangelove qualify as foreign, and both from the UK, although there were many American actors in the secondary roles even in the latter.
OTTOMH, Johnny Stecchino [Italy], The Gods Must Be Crazy [South Africa], and The Magic Christian [UK] probably deserve to make any world’s funniest 100 list… **A Taxing Woman ** [Japan], maybe.
My sister and I watched this program for all of five minutes or so.
The exact moment that we saw what #52 was on the list, compared to #53, we both screamed at the television, and turned it to another channel.
Everyone else has already stated my complaints about this list (namely, the fact that this shows an understanding of film history equal to that of the common mayfly), so I’ll just sum it up as an utter disgrace.
Not even recent foreign comedies, that got a reasonable amount of exposure in the US, like {b]Amelie{/b] and Love Actually.
My favourite older movie, Arsenic and Old Lace, has already been mentioned, but another unforgivable omission is Harvey.
Adam Sandler had good bits(opera man ) and shaving your grandmothers beard on SNL. Since then I have been watching for him to do something funny. I am still waiting.
- Naked Gun Series
What the…? Isn’t combining three movies cheating? Okay, the baseball scene in the first movie was hilarious. I cannot recall a single joke from either of the other two movies. Which one had Ricardo Montalban? Why not the Airplane! series? Or the Pink Panther series?
ACE VENTURA???!!! This list just raised my blood pressure by 30 points.
Yeah, but most lists do it. It lets them allow for more diversity and I guess it avoids hard decisions.