The 25 best movie comedies of all time

What film is the funniest ever? Check out the full list.

14. 'Some Like It Hot'

The 1959 film directed by Billy Wilder stars Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as two musicians who are forced to dress as women to hide from mobsters in an all-girls band. Marilyn Monroe co-stars as Sugar Kane, the singer of the band whom they befriend along the way, while Joe E. Brown plays a millionaire who becomes enamored with Lemmon and George Raft portrays the leader of the mobsters.

Various stage versions of the movie, including a musical version titled "Sugar" after Monroe's character's first name, have been attempted, and a 2002 version featured Curtis taking on Brown's role.

The tony voice Curtis puts on when pretending to be a young millionaire to romance Sugar is widely acknowledged to be an imitation of actor Cary Grant. Lemmon pokes fun at this when his character hears the voice, telling Curtis's character, "Nobody talks like that!"

According to the Daily Mail, the film was shot in black-and-white because the film style was better for Curtis and Lemmon's heavy makeup.

14 of 25

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.