1. Airplane! (1980)
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
Not all comedy needs to be high-concept or tightly written. Sometimes all you need is a commitment to relentlessly firing jokes and a relatively simple story. Airplane! has all that and more, and that’s why it’s the best spoof movie ever made.
It’s one of the simplest comedies ever made, but it’s consistently funny even decades later. Airplane!‘s use of visual gags and groan-inducing puns is genuinely worth commending, and it does all that with a liberal dose of satire thrown in. It’s largely inoffensive and it takes great delight in poking fun at general movie conventions. In that regard, it spoofs the whole industry, not any one genre.
Is Airplane! the best-written comedy movie of all time? Maybe not. But is it one of the funniest (and therefore best) spoof movies ever made? You bet.
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