15 Shameless Comedies That Just Don’t Care If You’re Offended

Blazing Saddles is filled dicey language — but uses it to ridicule bigotry. Written by a team that included Richard Pryor, the Mel Brooks classic is very much on the side of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little, above), a Black sheriff trying to bring progress to the Wild West.

The American Film Institute ranks Blazing Saddles as the sixth-funniest movie of all time, behind Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, and Duck Soup.

Brooks disagrees: “I love Some Like It Hot, but we have the funniest movie ever made,” Brooks told Vanity Fair in 2016.

With wall-to-wall gratuitous flesh and racial humor, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a perfect time capsule of the freewheeling 1970s: It spots and skewers genres from kung-fu to Blaxploitation to women-in-prison movies in quick-hit, take-it-or-leave it sketches that are perfect sendups of a whole slew of grindhouse classics.

It’s also an important movie, believe it or not — it was the breakthrough for its director, John Landis, and for its writers, the comedic team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would soon go on to make Airplane.

Kentucky Fried Movie is one of those comedies that Gen X kids spoke of in whispers because so many of their parents banned them from seeing it. It has a well-earned reputation for what we used to call a dirty movie. It really is, in a way that still feels subversive, wrong, and thrilling.

Billed as “a motion picture destined to offend nearly two thirds of the civilized world — and severely annoy the other third,” this Monty Python takes on the ultimate sacred cow: the story of Jesus.

It looks as magnificent as Hollywood’s biggest Biblical epics, which makes its takedown of pomposity all the more subversive and hysterical.

A great many great bits and routines darkly culminate in the deranged cheeriness of the final musical number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” It’s all quite sacrilegious, and that’s the whole point.

“I was born a poor Black child,” Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson explains at the start of this absurdist masterpiece, and it all builds up into a righteous kung-fu takedown at his hideously tacky mansion that features maybe the only time in history it’s been totally OK for a white guy to scream the most offensive of all racial slurs.

No one else could have pulled of the balancing act except for Steve Martin, whose special purpose is to make us all laugh.

We won’t pretend to be objective here: This is maybe our favorite movie out of all comedies, ever.

Written and directed by the same guys who wrote Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane gets away with some incredibly daring jokes by playing everything completely straight.

It’s loaded with great gags, but our favorite part will always be the “oh stewardess? I speak jive” sequence, in which June Cleaver herself (Barbara Billingsley) intervenes in a miscommunication, and gets her comeuppance.

Fast Times is the one of those comedies that is may be more offensive to religious conservatives than people on the left, because it takes the side of a high school student, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, above right, with Phoebe Cates), who has an abortion after a smooth talker gets her pregnant and then turns out to be a worthless deadbeat.

Like Porky’s, this was one of those movies that kids in school yards spoke of in whispers – as one of those ’80s comedies that parents definitely didn’t want them to see.

It may have just been because of the famous Phoebe Cates pool fantasy sequence, but we don’t think so. The movie’s presentation of teen realities was a much bigger threat to the Moral Majority, the religious fundamentalists who thrived through the 1980s. Written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, it’s one of the most essential teen comedies. Speaking of…

Are you Black, white, Jewish, Christian, African, American, young or old?

There’s something to offend you in the cartoonish grotesquerie of Coming to America, in which Eddie Murphy plays people fitting into almost all of the demographics we just listed, mercilessly mocking them all.

Coming to America takes shots at royalty, the nouveau riche, and the scrappy underclass, but is most focused on gender dynamics. It’s such a sharp judge of human behavior that the only appropriate reaction is awe.

Our favorite of the many funny Farrelly Brothers comedies is built around Cameron Diaz as the magnetic Mary, whose kindness, cool and beauty make her the obsession of almost every man she meets.

But the one we’re all rooting for is Ben Stiller’s Ted, who survives a harrowing high-school dance disaster involving franks and beans to remain Mary’s most devoted admirer.

The Farrellys once told screenwriter William Goldman that while some people think that bathroom scene is the one that makes audiences root for Ted, they think it’s actually his decision to seek out Mary even after Matt Dillon’s shady P.I., Pat Healy, has lied that she’s living a depressing life.

Pat provides many potentially offensive moments. And the hair gel scene is an all-timer.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut seeks out sympathy for the devil: We’re supposed to root for Satan himself as he tries to escape an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussein.

There’s also lots of violence against kids and flagrant anti-Canadian propaganda.

But of course, Canadians were too nice to get offended.

We saw this with a friend who was at his absolute low. It didn’t solve any problems, but many did we laugh hard.

A brutal but affectionate takedown of teen movies from Lucas to She’s All That to Fast Times at Ridgemont High to The Breakfast Club, Not Another Teen Movie is a blitzkrieg of offense filled with sex, bathroom jokes, insane violence and surprisingly acute social commentary.

Where else can you see Chris Evans misusing a banana, white kids who pretend to be Asian, and football players split in half? Not Another Teen Movie could cut every offensive joke and still be very funny, but it gets extra points for the sheer audacity of keeping them in.

When we say White Chicks make jokes about everyone, we mean everyone.

Marlon and Shawn Wayans play Black FBI agents who impersonate rich white socialites to infiltrate a pompous Hamptons social scene — and break up a conspiracy. Along the way they learn how white people act when they think no Black people are around, but also start to see the world from a woman’s perspective.

If you’re not offended by something in White Chicks, you aren’t paying attention. But the Wayans make smart points about our weird racial and sexual hangups along the way. White Chicks always keeps you guessing about how far it will go, and it goes pretty far.

It’s impossible to take any self-righteous actor seriously after watching this puppet-movie spy thriller that despises Kim Jong-Il, but hates Sean Penn even more.

Puppet love scenes, projectile vomiting that goes on much too long, unapologetic jingoism — Team America, from the creators of South Park, is a mockery of gung-ho nationalism, but also a compelling defense of American foreign policy at its best.

There’s also a fantastic metaphor involving three different body parts that we think about way more than we should.

Rebel Wilson, who appeared with Borat mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen in 2016’s The Brothers Grimsby, contends in her new memoir that he may not be the nicest person. To which we say: Did you see Borat? No one who has would ever think he’s nice. But he is ruthlessly funny.

Baron Cohen impersonates a sexist, anti-Semitic, generally clueless Kazakh journalist who makes Americans feel free to say things they wouldn’t ordinarily say. He’s gloriously ignorant, but his guilelessness brings out the worst in people who should know better. (And also, very occasionally, the best.)

Borat’s behavior is wildly offensive, but he’s so demented that you can’t help but feel sorry for him, and Baron Cohen and his team manage to strike a perfect mix of revulsion and vulnerability. What’s most impressive is how much of it Baron Cohen had to improvise on the fly, in tense and often dangerous positions.

Tropic Thunder always walks a thin line, but especially with Ben Stiller’s Simple Jack character and Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who really, really commits to playing a Black character.

The film mocks actors desperate for awards, and it’s uncomfortable — but also funny. Stiller has admirably stuck to his guns, standing by his movie.

“I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder,” Stiller tweeted last year when someone erroneously said he had apologized for the film. “Don’t know who told you that. It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it.”

People who think younger generations can’t handle a joke should watch the hilarious Bottoms. Director and co-writer Emma Seligman describes it as a story of “teen girls who start a fight club so they can try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders.” 

It shrugs off the recent tradition of LGBTQ+ characters being portrayed as either martyrs or saints and presents its protagonists as lovable dirtbags. The most shocking scene is one in which a member of the fight club takes on a male kickboxer, and girl power definitely does not prevail. 

Bottoms shares an absurdist, unapologetic vibe with Not Another Teen Movie and we love it.

You might also like these Behind the Scenes Stories from Kentucky Fried Movie (above) or this list of All 11 Mel Brooks Movies, Ranked.

Main image: Kentucky Fried Movie.