7 Hilarious Comedies You’ve Probably Never Seen

In his long film career, Burt Reynolds was in a lot of terrible movies and a handful of great ones. Starting Over is probably his best. Reynolds is at his most charmingly human as a recently divorced man trying to date again. In addition to terrific supporting performances by Charles Durning and Candice Bergen, there is a phenomenal script by James L. Brooks (who went on to produce The Simpsons, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets and all other kinds of greatness), and steady, elegant direction by Alan J. Pakula.

In The Wrong Guy, Dave Foley plays a man on the run who actually isn’t being chased at all. For a good stretch, The Wrong Guy is the funniest Hitchcock homage since High Anxiety, packed with absurdly funny scenes (watching Foley crouched inside a dumpster while police officers sing around a trash can fire is worth the price of rental alone.) The ending is ungainly and slow-paced, but the first hour is full of solid laughs.

This Hollywood story scripted by Charles Grodin is the most imperfect movie on this list, but a fascinating specimen in and of itself. Grodin plays a screenwriter tasked with adapting a sex manual into a major motion picture and Walter Matthau plays a producer assigned to oversee the film. The story never quite takes off, but it’s worth seeing for Steve Martin’s cameo as an aging Latin lothario named Fabio so eerily similar to Billy Crystal’s Fernando, we can only assume the two comedians came up with similar characters at the same time Crystal’s was the one that stuck. (This one might take some tracking down because it’s not on DVD.)

Based on Jules Feiffer’s play of the same name, this comedy came out the same year as A Clockwork Orange and shares the same black-humored, risk-taking spirit. Directed by Alan Arkin and featuring a great performance by Elliot Gould, Little Murders was Feiffer’s reaction to a violent decade of assassinations. Forty years after its release, it can now be seen as a hilarious and shocking American classic.

Martin Short reprised the character of Jiminy Glick from his Comedy Central series to create a low budget, mostly improvised comedy. It’s a scattershot enterprise, but worth watching just to see Short’s David Lynch impression, one of the most esoteric moments I’ve ever seen in an ostensibly mainstream comedy.

One of the best movies not yet released on DVD, The Fortune features Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty as con men scheming to defraud a wealthy heiress. Imagine a Coen brothers movie before the Coen brothers were making movies. If you ever come across it on television, don’t skip it.

I hesitate mentioning this film because a lot of comedy fans are already acquainted with Real Life, but just in case you haven't seen Albert Brooks' prophetic masterpiece, track it down and watch it today. It is the perfect movie about reality television and it arrived nearly twenty years before the reality TV craze started. All in all, one of the best comedies ever made.