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10 Movies That Make Us Miss the PG Comedy

By Riley Webster · March 23, 2013

I love profane comedies but when looking at how 90% of movie comedies these days are stretching the R rating as hard as they can, am I the only one who remembers a time when movie comedies didn't have 75 f-bombs and extreme close-ups of our more private areas? 

It's really only kinda recently where every major comedy was extremely rude and crude; and now, with the huge success of movies like The Hangover, that trend seems to be an inescapable norm.  But there was a time, not so long ago, that most comedies were easier on the ears.  Where films managed provide funny, hilarious lines without resorting to a stream of swear words or over-the-top sex-sploitation.

I dunno.  I'm far from a prude, and again, I love me my raunch-fests from time to time.  But here on this list, there are 10 great comedies that aren't of that variety.  True, many of these are technically PG-13 (but all are PG here in Canada, so they still count, damn it).  They're all smart, clever, and hilarious, without resorting to a torrent of body functions and c-words.

As always, my list is prefaced with a couple that just barely missed it, mostly because of them being more of some other genre than comedy, such as Back to the Future (more sci-fi), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (more noir), Catch Me If You Can (more drama) and Scott Pilgrim (more, umm…well, it's kind of a mix of EVERYthing).  And then a bunch of my favourite comedies were just not quite great enough, like Liar Liar, The Mask, Flipped, Muppets, Crazy Stupid Love, and The Breakfast Club

Ok, all done now.  And let us not forget that what I might find hilarious, you might find completely idiotic….

10. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

The first time I saw Anchorman, I laughed a lot, scoffed quite a bit, and carried on with my life the second it was over.  Fun, and entertaining, but nothing much more.  But, as with almost all Will Ferrell comedies, it kept coming back.  I'd quote it without even realizing.  I'd wake up in the middle of the night pissing myself laughing because I remembered the "glass case of emotion".  I'd bore everyone at a dinner party by endlessly saying "I own many leather bound books…and my apartment smells of rich mahogany!"

Simply put, Anchorman grows on you, as it did every time I watched it.  While it loses a bit of it's comedic steam near the end, it's mostly zany, ridiculous hilarity almost non-stop, and Will Ferrell is honestly just so darn good at playing a lovable, clueless jerk.  The supporting cast (and behind-the-scenes players) are filled with up-and-comers — Steve Carell in one of his first big roles, Paul Rudd, director Adam McKay, and producer Judd Apatow.  They succeeded in making a sharp satire of newscasting, and then completely covered it in goofball antics and hilarious silliness. 

Anchormanis not a perfect film, but it's a perfect one to quote (much like Ferrell's later Step Brothers; a movie I absolutely hated the first time I saw it, and now rarely does a day go by where I don't quote it, and laugh heartily).  A very fun flick. 

9. City Slickers (1991)

Long have I loved City Slickers, and long have I wondered why it hasn't received more acclaim in the years since it's release.  For me, Slickers is the perfect combination of comedy and pathos — yes, there are several scenes of teary-eyed men and genuine emotion, but they're never far in between some great zingers, sight gags, and side-splitting dialogue.  The screenplay is so well-developed that it becomes a great STORY, regardless of the comedy, and you care about the characters more than in most Oscar-winning drama's.

Billy Crystal front-lines as the middle-age-crisis father and husband who is sent to a dude ranch with his two best friends to "find his smile again".  A fish-out-of-water comedy that never gets too bogged down in dramatic muck, Slickers starts off very funny (the scene where Crystal talks to a group of kids about how bad their lives will all turn out is just one great highlight), and finishes just as funny, despite the characters going through some really deep shit.

City Slickersis just honestly a really brilliant screenplay, perfectly cast and shot with a solid eye.  It makes you laugh and it makes you care — something most filmmakers these days are still clueless about doing.

8. The Graduate (1967)

There's a moment in The Graduate that I find one of the funniest scenes ever, and I have absolutely no idea why.  It's when Dustin Hoffman is waiting in a hotel lobby to meet Mrs. Robinson for a secretive affair, and then he stumbles upon a party.  The man at the front asks if he's with the Singleman Party, and Hoffman, as awkwardly as ever, coughs and blinks and says "Oh, yes.  The Singleman Party."  I can't do it justice.  And I don't know why it's so hilarious to me.

But it encapsulates why The Graduate is so effective — it takes the most awkward young Jewish man of the 60's, places him in surroundings that intimidate him, and lets us watch how he expertly, and quietly, bumbles his way out of it.  The Graduate is world famous for the Mrs. Robinson sub-plot of the middle-aged woman seducing the young boy, who then falls for her daughter.  And yes, the songs by Simon and Garfunkel made the film the huge success it was (as well as simultaneously forever dating it as a 60's flower child).

But apart from all that, Graduate is still a wonderful screenplay with great acting and truly bizarre editing.  It took a story that should've been scandalous and made it heartfelt and true, and also just plain really funny.  It's subtle how they handle all the sex, but it makes it a more effective flick than, say, if Mrs. Robinson was treated like Stifler's Mom.

7. Groundhog Day (1993)

I believe I've already talked about the wonders of Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day on this site before, but hey, let's do it again — Groundhog Day is freakin' genius, and probably Bill Murray's finest hour.  Rarely do you find a comedy that is not only this funny, but this clever, original, inventive, philosophical, romantic, dramatic, emotional, and strangely beautiful.  The fact that it's now also entered the pop culture lexicon ("I'm having a Groundhog Day moment!") is proof of it's staying power.

Groundhog Dayfeatures Bill Murray as an asshole weatherman who is stuck in small-town Puxhataney, and then the exact same day starts repeating in time, over and over, and he can't escape no matter what.  Perhaps the greatest strength of the screenplay is how perfectly metaphysical it all becomes; writer/director Harold Ramis takes a plot that could've been a trippy Charlie Kaufman-esque descent into depression, and fills it with so much humour and warmth.

It's interesting to see Groundhog Day today, and watch a movie character near the end of his rope not screaming out obscenities.  It's the perfect role for Murray — quiet and restrained, but with a not-too-subtle hint of douchebaggery.  His redemption in Groundhog Day is one of modern cinema's most successfully engaging.

6. A Christmas Story (1983)

It's a rare thing to see a film set in a time decades before your own childhood, and yet it fills you with immense nostalgia.  Bob Clark's A Christmas Story is like that.  Despite being set in the 40's, there isn't a second of the film I can't relate to with a mixture of the warm fuzzies as well as "man, childhood freakin sucked sometimes".  Yes, it's a Christmas staple, and it's one I demand to see every single holiday season.  But the main reason it's so successful is that it's first and foremost a really brilliant comedy — a black one, true, but hilarious nonetheless.

The best aspect of Christmas Story is Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, which might be my favourite child performance of all time (primarily because, unlike most child actors today who treat everything so seriously, he never stops acting like a kid).  He really, really wants a Red Rider BB Gun for Christmas, and he'll stop at nothing to get it.  A Christmas Story ingeniously cuts through the standard "Christmas movie feel-good-eries" and realizes that, yes, as a kid, the most important part of Christmas is what presents you're gonna get from Santa.

The film is hilarious from start to finish.  As a kid, I actually found much of it hitting too close to home, and several scenes made me quite uncomfortable.  But despite having watched it probably close to 20 times, the flick never ceases to make me smile, and it deserves mention alongside all the major holiday classics.

5. Rocketman (1997)

Never heard of it?  Not surprising — the Disney live-action film crashed and burned at the box office in '97, and Disney promptly tried to forget it's existence.  Critics and audiences alike gave Rocketman the short thrift almost immediately, and endlessly.  But y'know what?  I think Rocketman is one of the most wackily brilliant comedies ever made, PG rated or otherwise.  Imagine a Family Guy episode directed by Frederico Fellini on a budget of 20 bucks, starring a baked hamster in the lead role, and you'll come close to what Rocketman has to offer.

The story is paper thin — weirdo Fred Z. Randall gets an unlikely chance to be an astronaut for the first mission to Mars, and wacky, mad-cap hilarity ensues.  The lead performance by Canadian stand-up comic Harland Williams is, in a very demented way, absolute genius.  He takes an immature oddball and rapidly turns him sympathetic and loveable.  The rest of the cast make a decent impression, including Beau Bridges and two actors from The Shawshank Redemption.  But this is Williams' film all the way, and I think he's perfect in it.

Ultimately, your appreciation for Rocketman will completely depend on how willing you are to laugh at the most ridiculous inanities around.  Nothing in the film is supposed to be taken very seriously (hell, the budget was so low that half the time on Mars, the helmets don't even have glass in them!)  But for me, any screenplay with lines like "Sweet Alaskin asparagus tips!" and "Fun is my Chinese neighbour's middle name!" deserves recognition on the Comedy Hall of Fame.

4. Mystery Men (1999)

Ohhh, what a woefully underrated film Mystery Men is!  What a disaster it become upon it's release — losing tons of money, hated by critics, a career destroyer of it's debut film director, and one that even Ben Stiller would later admit to regretting (which is saying a lot coming from the guy that did Envy and Along Came Polly).  But, quite frankly, they all missed the boat.  While Mystery Men is indeed an absolute chaotic mess, it's just about the most entertaining and hilarious chaotic mess you'll ever witness.

Starring Stiller, William H. Macy, and Geoffery Rush among many others (most of whom had a definite career stoppage from the flick), Mystery Men follows the struggles of a group of superhero "wannabe's" who just can't get their big break against the major villains of Champion City.  At the time, the film was mostly criticized for it's loud and shabby special effects trumping the story, especially in the later passages (and director Kinka Usher's bizarre canted angles throughout didn't help either).  But looking back on Mystery Men today (perhaps because we now see a superhero film every month), I think it's even stronger, and more timely, than it was before.

Some of it is very sharp satire — lines where characters talk about Lance Hunt not being Captain Amazing because one wear's glasses and the other doesn't, are something that you don't have to be a comic book nerd to understand.  Other moments are hilarious wether you know your comics or not, such as WIlliam H. Macy's perfectly stoic lines "I shovel well!  I shovel very well!" and "We've got a blind date with destiny — and it looks like she just ordered the lobster!"  For me, Mystery Men is one of the top overlooked films of all time.  Give it another chance; look past the fart jokes and lame CGI, and you might be impressed with what the world missed out on.

3. About a Boy (2002)

When the world heard that the writers and directors of the American Pie films were going to adapt Nick Hornby's delicate and delightfully British book About a Boy, the basic consensus was…."Oh, great, Hugh Grant's gonna hump a pie and poo on everything".  No one expected the Weitz brothers to pull off an adaptation so tricky, in that it needed to be gentle yet surprising, hilarious without being obvious, cute without being cloying.

Well, they did, and even won an Oscar nomination for their work.  About a Boy has long been one of my favourite feel-good films; a touching look at two strangers becoming unexpected friends, and how a simple relationship with someone far from your age group can make you grow and mature as a person.  About a Boy has just a damn wonderful script — the friendship between Hugh Grant and the young Nicholas Hoult is restrained and honest; the romance between Grant and Rachel Weisz is lovely; and the humour is perfect British dead-pan.

I love everything about this flick, and always have.  It even turns the cliched "Parent Comes Late to School Play" type of scenario, and makes it a winner.  The music by the band Badly Drawn Boy is particularly lovely, a soundtrack I still frequently listen to.  Wether you generally like British comedies or not, it's hard to find a better one than this.

2. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

When I list my favourite Stanley Kubrick films, I almost always forget Dr. Strangelove — not because it isn't among his best and most brilliant (it is), but because it just plain doesn't feel like Stanley Kubrick.  When I think of Kubie Boy, I think of long disturbing zooms coming out of a violent killer's eyeballs.  I think Clockwork Orange, 2001, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining.  But despite his penchant for deeply troubling suspense films, Kubrick had a wicked sense of humour, and Dr. Strangelove is among the funniest films ever made.

A truly biting political satire that manages to make perfect sense in both the Cold War era as well as today (which maybe says more about global politics than Kubrick), Dr. Strangelove is a bizarre war film about a deranged general forcing a nuclear plane to go bomb Russia, to preserve "our bodily fluids".  Peter Sellers gets all the acclaim as three different characters, and all are brilliantly played.  But to me, George C. Scott gives the best, and funniest, performance as the hot-headed American general, always smacking his gum, his eyebrows hugely contorted.  He also gives the movie's best line — "But…they'll see the big board!"

Unlike some of the other flicks on this list, Dr. Strangelove has gone down in history as one of Hollywood's finest satires, and comedies.  It's stature will likely never be tarnished, considering that it's pointed barbs (and delightfully nihilistic ending) seem more prevalent than ever.

1. Airplane (1980)

I'm not sure if there's any movie out there that is more funny, more consistently, than Airplane.  It was a revolutionary film at the time; apart from a couple Mel Brooks films, no one had made a parody movie quite this racous, random, and gut-busting silly.  Airplane gives absolutely no pretensions to high art, which is probably what makes it the very best low-art.  Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker wrote and directed, and despite creating many parody films afterwards (such as Naked Gun), they never got close to the pinnacle of hilarity that Airplane achieved.

The story is a great send-up of the popular disaster films of the 70's, most especially Airport.  It follows Robert Hays (pitch perfect — check out his reading of the line "What a pisser") and Julie Hagerty as doomed lovers who come together when the pilots on an airplane get sick, and he has to conquer his fears to land it.  But a plot description of Airplane is pointless.  The film exists entirely for skits, puns, and ridiculous sight gags.  No attempt is to ever make the film feel realistic or suspenseful.  It's pure silliness from beginning to end.

And that's what I love most about Airplane.  Nowadays, most comedies are either totally for kids, or completely for adults.  Airplane skirted the line by giving us some of the most random and hilarious scenes imaginable that anyone, of any age, could understand (the disco bar scene comes immediately to mind, or Hays' drinking problem).  But Airplane is also infused with an adult edge that never crosses into R-rated territory; not only are the most quotable lines deliciously dark ("Billy…have you ever seen a grown man naked?") but some scenes exist only to make you laugh uncomfortably, much like Family Guy perfected later ("I take it black…like my men").

I could quote Airplane all day and not get the point across.  It's possibly the greatest movie comedy of all time.  You might be saying "Surely you can't be serious!"  But I am serious……and don't call me Shirley.