The REAL 15 Best Comedy Movie Stars of All Time

goldenstateservicesj
Sep 11, 2025
3 min read

This exercise is due to the fact that Looper recently published a listicle they called the 15 Best Comedy Movie Stars of All Time, Ranked — and it was so dreadful it was downright risible. So I wrote my own.

I only single out that particular list because it touches on one of my areas of specialty. The truth is that it reflects a serious decline in the quality of media in general which was already in motion prior to the advent of the internet and has simply picked up steam since then. As a matter of course, contemporary writers are entrusted with critical pieces who clearly aren’t expert in what they’re writing about. They plainly don’t know the history prior to two minutes ago. They don’t know the mechanics of the art form. On and on. So that list is merely indicative of the general decades-long trend. It’s full of recency bias, ignorance of film history, lack of international perspective, and a corruption of the assignment (by including several people who were actors as opposed to “Comedy Stars”, as well as including people who are far too recent to merit the claim for immortality which “All Time” signifies).

My list ends about 50 years ago. I wish it included more women and any people of color at all, but the brief is “Comedy Movie Stars” — which is very narrow indeed. You could widen it by privileging the given qualifier “Best” and it is tempting to do so, for there are many women and artists of color who were certainly better comedians and actors than several of the people on the list. But the title says “Comedy Stars”, does it not? STARS. There are plenty of others (MANY others) I would include if we went more recent (Eddie Murphy and Melissa McCarthy just for obvious starters), but that’s another list. And I could also easily make this list way more diverse if I opened it to something like “50 Best Movie Comedians of All Time”. But that’s not what the list is called. If the result in my version is too basic, we need to build a list that’s called something else. Is this list too white and male? It’s because the history is. I have written THOUSANDS of tributes to women and people of color on this blog. I’m not going to attempt to rewrite our sexist, racist history for you. It speaks for itself. Better artists than some of these were denied opportunities. We know that.

Also: since the Looper list seems limited to American comedy movie stars, I have placed the same limitation on my own list. If it were not so, I’d want Max Linder and Jacques Tati here, even on this short list.

One tweak I’ve made: I have interpreted “Comedy Stars” broadly enough to include TEAMS, something the writer of the weak Looper list neglected to do. The closest she came was including Groucho, and her appreciation of him seems pretty poor indeed.

Lastly: “Best” is subjective, but it is also vague. Naturally my critical judgment plays a part, but in discussions of comedy one must always take the public into account. There are two or three entries on this list who I’m lukewarm about at most, but who were wildly successful at pleasing audiences. So some are the best at artistry, others are best at making everyone laugh (whether I’m laughing or not).

Oh also, the “ranking” on their list stinks. I find it impossible to rank comedians anyway (in many cases you’re comparing apples and oranges) so I’m not ranking them, just presenting them chronologically.

Without further ado, the REAL 15 Best Comedy Movie Stars of All Time. (I’m not going to give you new essays on them. They all have entire sections with numerous articles about them at the links).