Spoof comedies can sometimes feel like a scarce resource. They tend to appear in brief, market-saturating feasts, as in the early ‘90s or the mid-2000s, before disappearing for lengthy periods of famine, as in the past decade-plus of film comedy recession. But the history of the form, defined here as broad comedies structured to poke fun at familiar genres while prioritizing a great volume and variety of jokes, goes back nearly as far as cinema itself. (The boundaries are always debatable. For example, this piece considers Monty Python a whole other thing, even though their joke-packed features have elements of both parody and satire.)
With the release of a long-discussed, finally-produced Naked Gun reboot and the announcement of new Spaceballs and Scary Movie installments, the subgenre may be about to undergo another renaissance. But all spoofs are not created equal (anyone yearning for 80 minutes of non-stop jokes and clever cultural parodies will be in for a rude awakening when they throw on Epic Movie and get a bunch of YouTube-level skits where imitations of all the biggest movie characters of 2004 get crushed by rocks). If Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun has you yearning for more 10-gags-a-minute spoof extravaganzas and you’ve already cycled through the old Naked Gun trilogy on Paramount Plus, here’s an easy top five (plus five more alternatives) that represent the best these sometimes-awful, sometimes-brilliant films have to offer, in chronological order.
Young Frankenstein (1974)
So many great filmmakers released double features in 1974: Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and, of course, Mel Brooks, who had the western parody Blazing Saddles in February and followed it up with Young Frankenstein for the holidays later that same year. It’s difficult to choose between the two. Blazing Saddles is both more gleefully raunchy and socially conscious. As much as it gets dragged out as an example of a movie that “couldn’t be made today” (of course it couldn’t; most of the actors are dead), it’s the more influential of the pair.
So why does the entry above say Young Frankenstein? There’s just something particularly glorious about the lengths Brooks went to reproduce the classic monster movies of the 1930s, shooting in black and white with an era-appropriate aspect ratio, and even repurposing old sets. (Full disclosure: When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand that Young Frankenstein was a full spoof. I just thought it was a funny sequel to Frankenstein. And honestly, in terms of cinema history, it’s more essential than most of the Frankenstein sequels.)
Meticulous accuracy isn’t always the name of the game in parody films. Sometimes great jokes are more important. But Young Frankenstein has those, too, delivered by Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn at their peaks. The movie’s shticky comedy (an abnormal brain mistaken for belonging to someone named “Abby Normal”) and inspired set pieces (Gene Hackman has a cameo as a blind man accidentally menaced by The Creature) really are funnier for looking a lot like the real thing.
See Also: Blazing Saddles (1974), obviously.
Airplane! (1980)
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker made names for themselves through The Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch anthology in 1977 that spoofed movies, TV shows and advertisements. But they became the singular entity known as ZAZ through their breakthrough with Airplane! three years later, which capped a decade of disaster movies (including four Airport installments) with one of the most joke-dense comedies ever made.
The ZAZ boys closely modeled their fake potboiler on the 1957 B-picture Zero Hour!, focusing on Ted Striker (Robert Hays), a traumatized war pilot who must confront his fears when the crew of a commercial airplane falls sick. Naturally, his ex, Elaine (Julie Hagerty), is a flight attendant, while Leslie Nielsen gives one of the great spoof-movie performances as a stone-faced doctor advising the beleaguered couple. Mel Brooks put more of his own personality into his spoofs, and later practitioners would have more specific targets. But for sheer virtuosity of joke-stacking, no one (including ZAZ themselves) has ever really flown higher than Airplane!
See Also: Top Secret! (1984) was the only ZAZ flop, probably because its hook — it’s a parody of spy films, and also of Elvis movies — is so much more obtuse than goofing on disaster movies. But as much fun as the Naked Gun movies are, there’s something special about watching a young Val Kilmer in such a loopy comedy. It may be the most ambitious ZAZ spoof, with a few set pieces that turn borderline experimental: One plays out entirely backwards to fake a foreign language, and another sets a bar fight impossibly underwater.
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
Perhaps the defining comedy success story of the 2000s, Wet Hot American Summer went from barely-released curio (it wasn’t even on the big board listing movies at the AMC Empire Times Square when I saw it there in the summer of 2001) to beloved cult object to nearly overexposed, thanks to a Netflix-produced prequel and sequel series. The movie itself, however, remains a stone cold classic, as well as a pre-rebuke to that same year’s Not Another Teen Movie. The latter scores some laughs at the expense of hoary teen tropes, yet its reference points barely stretch further back than 1998, missing the forest for the trees when treating disposable movies like Can’t Hardly Wait as iconic.
Wet Hot filmmakers (and alumni of sketch comedy series The State) David Wain and Michael Showalter, on the other hand, reach back to junky 1980s summer-camp comedies, an insanely specific target that they nonetheless nail. Plus, as mentioned, sometimes it’s more about the quality of the jokes at hand, and Wet Hot American Summer has some of the funniest lines, performances, and sequences (the trip into town!) of any spoof… or any comedy, really.
See Also: They Came Together (2014) is essentially a Wet Hot American Summer reunion, with Wain returning to direct, co-writing again with Showalter, and Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd (supporting players in the earlier film) promoted to leads. Truth be told, Poehler and Rudd were both slightly too familiar for a pitch-perfect imitation of modern romantic comedies. Poehler has done so many comedy sketches, and Rudd so many actual rom-coms, that the movie’s most parodic elements sometimes feel like they’re just hanging out in quotes, rather than generating their own material. Still, it’s got plenty of indelible absurdist moments, and is probably the best spoof movie of the 2010s.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
Though it was shamefully outgrossed by Meet the Spartans a month later, this feature-length parody of pop-music biopics may be the most purely necessary spoof movie of the past 20 years because it’s making fun of an extremely active genre. Indeed, plenty of musician biographies have since been dinged, perhaps unfairly, for their resemblance to Walk Hard, as if the first job of a spoof is to kill off the genre in question for good.
If anything, this all-star project from director Jake Kasdan, writer-producer Judd Apatow, and star John C. Reilly walks the line between savaging shopworn biopic tropes and reveling in how perversely satisfying it can be to see a movie make that foolhardy attempt to sum up an entire career. Reilly, so often a crucial second banana in silly comedies, makes a perfect Cash-meets-Dylan frontman here (with a dash of tragic Ray Charles backstory inspiring the immortal line: “This was a particularly bad case of being cut in half.”). If a few of the comedy-world cameos are a little self-satisfied, the detailed and catchy music parodies add plenty of value (and a higher degree of difficulty than your typical spoof).
See Also: This Is Spinal Tap (1984), if you haven’t already. A mockumentary feels like a whole other subgenre from the traditional spoof movie, but between Walk Hard and Spinal Tap, a wide spectrum of pop-history antics get satisfyingly mocked.
Black Dynamite (2009)
While Mel Brooks was painstakingly recreating the sets of Universal Monsters pictures in the early 1970s, blaxploitation pictures were bringing much-needed Black action heroes to audiences, often on a tight budget. So it’s only fitting that 35 years later, one of the best-looking modern spoofs would recreate the vibe of those films.
Conceived by star Michael Jai White, director Scott Sanders, and co-writer Byron Minns as a simultaneous spoof of and tribute to the blaxploitation boom, Black Dynamite toys with its form by building some of its jokes around a typically wobbly production that only has time and money for single takes – hence visible boom mikes and intentional dialogue fumbles, including one actor accidentally reading stage directions. Those intentional flubs play like a more comedy-forward version of Grindhouse, and as with that Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez project, faking a cheap exploitation aesthetic gives the movie genuine texture. But the movie is laugh-out-loud funny, too, and the comedy has plenty of variety, from verbal gags to the balletic slapstick of White’s over-the-top ass-kicking.
See Also: I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), another blaxploitation spoof/tribute, was a bigger mainstream success than Black Dynamite, featuring not just blaxploitation stars like Jim Brown, Antonio Fargas, and Bernie Casey, but what now looks like an all-star cast of Black comic talent, including writer-director-star Keenen Ivory Wayans (with his siblings Damon, Kim, Marlon, and Shawn in various capacities) and roles for Chris Rock, David Alan Grier, John Witherspoon, and Robin Harris.
