These shameless ’80s comedies had a rowdier sense of humor than the films of today. They didn’t worry if you were offended — they just wanted to make you laugh.
Porky’s (1981)
It will never stop amusing us that the guy who made Porky’s, the great director Bob Clark, also made A Christmas Story. (He also made the horror movie Black Christmas and the kids movie Baby Geniuses. Talk about range.)
Porky’s is one of those ’80s comedies that kids were often shielded from, which in retrospect makes sense: Though it was presented as a freewheeling comedy, it’s filled with weird humiliations, often of a sexual nature, and of course includes a peeping scene that doesn’t meet modern standards of consent.
But to call back A Christmas Story, Bob Clark didn’t give a fuuuuuuuuuuudge.
Trading Places (1983)
At one point, Dan Aykroyd disguises himself as a Jamaican. That isn’t great. And some people have objected to the scene where a gorilla takes a bad guy as his mate. Maybe that isn’t so funny in retrospect.
But other elements ofTrading Places are incredibly good, including the film’s very smart take on nature vs. nurture, and its smart observations about all the assumptions our society makes about who deserves to be rich.
We love it’s then-modern update on the screwball comedies of the 1930s, and Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy and Jamie Lee Curtis are all extremely good. It’s one of our favorite ’80s comedies.
Better Off Dead (1985)
John Cusack plays Lane Meyer, a teenager who attempts, repeatedly, to remove himself from this earth after he’s dumped by his girlfriend, Beth Truss (Amanda Wyss) for cocky blonde guy Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier).
The whole plot would never fly today, nor the slapstick jokes around a teenage boy trying to end himself. But the entire movie is such masterful absurdist comedy that no thinking person could possibly take it seriously.
Also, like many of the movies of the time, it features some dicey Asian characters, but at least they’re good at racing and have girlfriends. We’d say they’re much cooler, at least by high school standards, than poor Lane is.
Finally, Diane Franklin (above, with Cusack) is excellent as Monique, a notably smart, capable and cool dream girl. So there’s that. This is maybe the most ’80s of all ’80s comedies.
The Man With Two Brains (1983)
The whole setup of this dark screwball comedy will feel a tad misogynistic to some: Steve Martin plays a mad neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, who falls in love with femme fatale Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner), then builds up resentment as she declines to consummate their marriage.
Meanwhile, he falls in love with a disembodied brain, Anne (voiced by Sissy Spacek) and begins searching for a body in which to house her. Along the way, he roots for one attractive woman to die, and ponders killing another. It all crescendoes in a joke at the expense of compulsive eaters.
It’s not in the same league as The Jerk, a previous collaboration between Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner, but it has some very funny scenes.
Heathers (1988)
Heathers is the most pitch black of ’80s comedies, and embodies fatalistic Gen X cool. It was written by Daniel Waters as a kind of counter-point to the generally sunnier John Hughes comedies of the day.
The film stars Christian Slater as a charismatic teen lunatic who enlists popular girl Veronica in his plot to start offing popular kids, and staging things to make it look like they did themselves in — enlisting nefarious props like mineral water to makethe crime scenes more convincing.
Remember, this was the ’80s, when the idea of deadly suburban high-school kids seemed hilariously absurd. A recent attempt to revive Heathers as a TV series was delayed and derailed by multiple incidents of real-life school violence that may the idea seem very unfunny to modern viewers.
Coming to America (1988)
There’s something to offend everyone in the brilliant comic grotesquerie of Coming to America, a movie that goes after almost every demographic but respects all variety of hustles. Eddie Murphy takes the Richard Pryor trick of playing several characters in the same scene and, with the help of make-up, perfects it.
Coming to America has countless jokes that young, modern audiences may find shocking, but hey: They were also shocking when the movie came out. Eddie Murphy and his collaborators just didn’t care. They wanted hard laughs, and they got them.
Airplane (1980)
Airplane is loaded with questionable jokes, including June Cleaver herself speaking jive. It’s deeply inappropriate — and also one of the funniest things that has ever happened in a movie.
Kudos to David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — synonymous with ’80s comedies — for coming up with the idea of Barbara Billingsley delivering the line, “Oh stewardess? I speak jive.” And also for the 7,000 other great jokes in Airplane, one of the all-time greatest comedies that don’t care if you’re offended.
The ZAZ team also came up with two more of the all-time great comedies on this list.
More on Airplane (and the Next Two Movies on This List)
“When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today,” David Zucker, one-third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, recently said in an interview with PragerU. “The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.’”
He also complained that modern Hollywood is “destroying comedy because of nine percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humor.”
Top Secret (1984)
This film, the second Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classic on our list, features muscle-bound, gun-totin’ Black French character named Chocolate Mousse. At one point a bad guy is mounted by a bull. An extreme facial disfigurement gets one of the movie’s biggest laughs.
Top Secret is also, for our money, maybe the funniest movie ever made: It’s an absurdist caper that crosses a Cold War spy thriller with an Elvis movie, with perfectly orchestrated sight gags that get better with ever watch. The backward bookshop scene? Mesmerizing.
Top Secret also includes one of the all-time best jokes of ’80s comedies: “My uncle was born in America. But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency.” That’s a great setup and payoff, whatever your politics.
The Naked Gun (1988)
The final Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker film on our list, The Naked Gun features a dizzying, hilarious array of risque jokes, all of which are terrific. The building statues sequence is a standout.
It’s also the only film on this list to co-star a man once accused of double homicide — a rarity among ’80s comedies.
No one is apologizing.
Sixteen Candles (1984)
John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles has gotten a lot of criticism, in retrospect, for the stereotypical Long Duk Dong character (played by Gedde Watanabe) and a scene that makes Anthony Michael Hall’s character seem predatory, in retrospect.
Watanabe told NPR in 2008 that he was a “a bit naive” about taking on the role of Long Duk, though he still has affection for him.
As for the other thing: Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), who is presented as the dream guy of our heroine, Samantha (Molly Ringwald), passes off his unconscious girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), to another guy, Ted (Anthony Michael Hall, with Morris, above). Jake tells Ted, “Have fun.”
The next day, Caroline and the Ted conclude that they had sex. He asks if she enjoyed herself, and she says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” which is the movie’s way of justifying the guys’ behavior.
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