The horror show of a year that has been 2025 is quickly coming to an end, so, in the spirit of the old cliché, it’s time to laugh rather than cry and hope that things can’t possibly get any worse. With Variety recently joining the long list of publications that release a “100 best, 50 best, 93 best comedies of all time list” and the enforced feel-good spirit of the festive season, here are three funny films for the ages from the “oldies but still goodies” aisle.
One takes aim at tinpot dictators — hardly an irrelevant theme more than 80 years later; another darkly skewers the ignorance and self-serving nature of the rich in situations where everyone but them is suffering, a criticism that anyone who watches the rampant egomania and madness of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos can get behind; and the last makes madcap hi-jinks silent comic fun of the lengths we’ll go to get ahead.
The world remains serious, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take some time to laugh at its absurdity, as these classics remind us to.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
The Exterminating Angel — YouTube
Spanish surrealist pioneer Luis Buñuel had a special place of hate in his heart for the bourgeois class. That may have been because he was one of them. The son of a self-made wealthy hardware businessman, Buñuel was raised as a strict Catholic and attended a Jesuit school before attending university in Madrid, where he became friends with artistic agitators like Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca and began the long love affair with cinema that would define the rest of his life.
This dark-humoured attack on the ignorance and selfishness of Spanish elites living during Gen Franco’s dictatorship was filmed in Mexico, where Buñuel moved to after the end of World War 2, and which remained his home until his death in 1983. In protest against Franco, Buñuel had renounced his Spanish citizenship and become a Mexican citizen, and it was there that he filmed this simple but darkly comic and effective drama, which premiered to critical acclaim at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival.
After a night at the opera, a wealthy aristocratic couple invite 18 friends to a dinner party at their mansion. As the night and then days progress, the guests find that they are unable to leave the party, leading to a series of increasingly chaotic and sometimes tragic events that reveal these wealthy elites to be savage, ruthless and incapable of real empathy for anyone other than themselves.
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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
The Great Dictator – YouTube
Charlie Chaplin’s first full sound film was made when, despite overwhelming evidence of the racism, fascism and antisemitism of Mussolini and Hitler, the US still refused to enter the war in Europe. There were still plenty of Americans and members of the English upper classes who called for appeasement rather than confrontation with Hitler and the Nazis, and Chaplin, an English-born Jewish immigrant to the US, was furious enough about these attitudes to use his popularity and star power to say something.
The resulting film remains a lasting classic of political satire, much copied and still an influence for generations of filmmakers 80 years later. In later life Chaplin would say that had he known the true horrors of the Holocaust at the time, he would never have made the film because how could one satirise something so unimaginably terrifying and brutal?
Inspired by a viewing of German director Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will, Chaplin set about studying his target intensely to make it plainly obvious that The Great Dictator’s tinpot caricature Adenoid Hynkel could not be mistaken for anyone other than Hitler.
Featuring Chaplin in two roles — as Hynkel and a bumbling Jewish barber who loses his memory and regains it just in time to save the world by pretending to be Hynkel and deliver a famous speech pleading for tolerance — it’s still a cleverly funny film about a deeply unfunny and horrifyingly real subject.
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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
Safety Last – YouTube
While not as famous as his fellow silent-era comedic colleagues, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd was a prolific and hugely popular star of the golden age of the early funnies, and this frenetic romantic comedy from 1923 remains his masterpiece. Its image of the hapless Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock on a skyscraper long ago immortalised in popular cultural iconography.
The bespectacled and boater-hat wearing Lloyd plays himself as a young man from the country seeking his fortune in the big city, where he’s determined to make enough money to marry his sweetheart. Things, of course, don’t work out quite as the dictates of the American Dream would have him believe ,and soon he’s in a world of escalating trouble that neither the audience nor the star are sure he’ll get out of until the film’s last, loudly ticking minutes.
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