The 10 Best 90s Comedies That Are Still Funny Today

Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) drive a dog-shaped van across America to return a briefcase to a woman they don't really know. That's the plot. The plot was never the point.

This is the platonic ideal of broad 90s comedy — committed, physical, and absolutely shameless. Carrey was inarguably at his peak in 1994, and Daniels matches him beat for beat in a performance that mostly gets remembered for the toilet scene but actually does subtle work throughout. The Farrelly brothers had a feel for sweetness underneath the gross-out that their imitators never figured out.

Most of the era's broad comedies have aged poorly. Dumb and Dumber aged because it's mean to nobody but itself. Lloyd and Harry are idiots, but the movie genuinely loves them.

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The cast of a long-canceled Star Trek–like show keeps getting paid to do conventions when actual aliens — who've been watching the show as historical documents — show up and ask them to save their planet. Tim Allen plays the Shatner. Sigourney Weaver plays the Nichols. Alan Rickman plays the Spock, in what may be his single best performance.

This is genuinely one of the most underrated comedies of the decade. It's an affectionate genre satire, which ages much better than mocking satire because affection doesn't curdle the way contempt does. The script (by David Howard and Robert Gordon) is clean — no flab, no dead scenes, every line earning its place.

If you've never seen it, here's the test: it's commonly called the best Star Trek movie ever made by Star Trek fans. It's not a Star Trek movie.

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Craig (Ice Cube) gets fired on his day off. He spends the rest of the day on his porch with his friend Smokey (Chris Tucker), surveying the chaos of his block in South Central Los Angeles. The plot is barely there. The hangout is everything.

Friday was made for $3 million by F. Gary Gray, who's gone on to direct Straight Outta Compton and The Fate of the Furious. It's still his loosest, funniest film. Tucker is a comedy supernova here — this is before he started getting paid $20 million per Rush Hour sequel — and John Witherspoon, as Craig's father, delivers one of the great supporting performances in any 90s comedy.

It holds up because it's specific. Specificity is what comedy actually trades on, and "Bye, Felicia" is in the cultural water supply because of Friday.

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Civics teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) decides to stop overachieving high school student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) from winning class president, for reasons he can't quite articulate to himself. Things go badly.

This is the differentiation pick on most "best 90s comedies" lists. It's nasty in a way most 90s comedies refused to be — a precise satire of ambition, resentment, and the small-stakes politics that turn adults into petty children. Witherspoon has never been better. Broderick plays the kind of guy who thinks he's the protagonist of a moral parable when he's actually the villain of one. Tracy Flick is now permanent political shorthand.

Alexander Payne went on to direct Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Holdovers. Election is his sharpest film and his funniest. It's also why most lists that skip it feel slightly cowardly.

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Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives a perfect suburban life. He doesn't know that everyone around him — his wife, his best friend, his coworkers — is an actor, and the entire town is a TV set, and his life has been broadcast to billions of viewers since the day he was born.

Reality TV had barely been invented in 1998. The first season of Survivor was still two years away. Yet Peter Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol nailed every detail of the genre before it existed, then nailed every detail of the parasocial-celebrity, surveillance-economy, content-as-life world we actually live in now.

It's also Carrey's most controlled performance. He plays Truman with a credulity that would feel naive if it weren't true to every viewer who's ever sat down to watch a "reality" show. The film gets funnier and more disturbing in equal measure on every rewatch.

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Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone), a wealthy Beverly Hills teenager, decides to make over a clueless new student and accidentally improves everyone's life around her. Loosely adapted from Jane Austen's Emma by writer-director Amy Heckerling.

The fashion has dated. The social satire has not. Clueless is smarter than it looks — Cher's voice is a deliberate construction, the script is studded with verbal jokes that play better the more times you've seen it, and the whole movie is doing Austen with more affection than most straight-faced Austen adaptations.

Every smart teen comedy since (Mean Girls, Easy A, Booksmart, Lady Bird in part) is paying Clueless royalties. It's also one of the few 90s comedies whose central friendship — Cher and Dionne, played by Stacey Dash — gets the texture of actual female friendship instead of using it as set dressing.

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A Minnesota car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two criminals to kidnap his wife and split the ransom her wealthy father will pay. Pregnant Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) investigates the bodies that pile up.

This is one of the most precisely calibrated dark comedies ever made. The Coen brothers have made many great films and this is somewhere in the top three. McDormand won the Best Actress Oscar for it, and the performance fully earns it — Marge is funny, capable, and morally clear in a way that most movie cops aren't.

What makes Fargo hold up is restraint. The Coens don't push. They let scenes play. Steve Buscemi's character (the smaller, weasely kidnapper) gets some of the best line readings of the decade. The accent comedy could feel mean and doesn't. The violence is sudden and ugly without being gratuitous. Comedy that respects its audience usually does.

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Software engineer Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) hates his cubicle job at Initech, gets accidentally hypnotized into not caring about it, and starts living his life. His coworkers Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir Nagheenanajar (Ajay Naidu) eventually decide to embezzle from the company in protest. It does not go smoothly.

Mike Judge wrote and directed this, and it bombed in theaters. Then HBO and DVDs happened, and Office Space slowly became one of the most-quoted comedies of the decade. Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole) is now permanent shorthand for every passive-aggressive boss. The TPS reports. Milton (Stephen Root) and his red Swingline stapler. The phrase "I have eight different bosses right now."

Here's the wild part: the film has actually gotten more relevant. Open-plan offices, Slack pings, performance reviews, productivity software, the slow corporate erosion of the soul — Office Space called all of it twenty-five years before LinkedIn made it inescapable. It's the rare comedy that ages by becoming more accurate.

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Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles slacker, is mistaken for a different Jeffrey Lebowski — a millionaire whose wife owes money to dangerous people. The Dude wants compensation for a rug some thugs ruined while looking for the other guy. From there, things spiral.

This is the most quotable comedy ever made, and there isn't a close second. Every scene has a line you'll catch yourself saying for the rest of your life. The Dude is one of the great fully realized characters in any 90s film. John Goodman as Walter, the Vietnam-haunted bowling teammate who can't stop turning every situation into a war story, is doing some of the best comedic acting of the decade. Sam Elliott shows up as a literal cowboy narrator and somehow makes it work.

The plot is a deliberate mess, which is the joke — it's a Raymond Chandler noir starring people who don't have the attention span for a Raymond Chandler noir. The Coens released The Big Lebowski the year after Fargo and it bombed. Now there are Big Lebowski festivals. There is a religion (Dudeism) with hundreds of thousands of ordained members. The film keeps growing.

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Cynical Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) goes to Punxsutawney to cover the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. He hates the assignment, hates his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), and hates the town. Then he wakes up the next morning and it's February 2nd again. And the next morning. And the next.

Groundhog Day might be the best comedy ever made. Not just the best of the 90s — the best, full stop. The high concept is perfect, the screenplay (by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis) is mathematically tight, and Murray gives one of the great pieces of acting in any genre, in any era. He moves through every emotional register — irritation, despair, hedonism, suicide, kindness — without ever winking at the audience or pulling focus from the bit.

The film is structurally unimprovable. Phil tries every approach to his situation in turn: manipulating people, indulging himself, ending himself, then finally improving himself. The comedy gets funnier as it gets sadder. By the third act, you've forgotten you're watching a comedy at all, which is exactly when the laughs land hardest.

Every "stuck in a time loop" film since — Edge of Tomorrow, Palm Springs, Russian Doll, Source Code, Happy Death Day — is in Groundhog Day's shadow. None of them have surpassed it. None of them will.

If you've never seen it, watch it. If you have, watch it again. It only gets better.

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