In a felicitous follow-up to the post below (and, come to think of it, my musings on Leslie Nielson of just the other day), I see where “researchers” have determined that the 1980 classick Airplane! is the Funniest. Film.  Evah.

Airplane – which features classic one liners such as ‘I am serious and don’t call me Shirley’ – came out top in research conducted by a panel of members of movie subscription service Lovefilm.

They calculated the precise number of ‘laughs a minute’ for the top 10 comedies chosen by Lovefilm members.

The panel recorded the total number of times each film generated a laugh, before dividing it by the films’ total length in minutes to calculate the precise ‘laugh a minute’ rating for each movie.

Here’s the complete rankings, together with my own gratuitous commentary on each.  (Feel free to turn this into a meme if you like.  We don’t see nearly as many of these as we used to.):

1. Airplane – 3 Laughs A Minute – No argument from Robbo.  The fact that I can sit here thinking of some of the lines and start laughing spontaneously even though I’ve seen the thing a zillion times and  have it pretty much memorized says it all.

2. The Hangover – 2.4 Laughs A Minute – I never quite got this one.  It was okay,  but I never thought it a side-splitter.  Well, the little dude in the trunk, maybe.

3. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad ! – 2.3 Laughs A Minute – It’s no accident that both this and Airplane!, both created by the same comedy trio of Jim Abrahams and David & Jerry Zucker, are Nos. 1 and 3 here.  High quality yucks, plus (in retrospect) it’s curiously pleasurable to see O.J. continually getting the stuffing beaten out of him.

4. Superbad – 1.9 Laughs A Minute – Never saw it.  I understand it to be rayther vulgar.

5. Borat – 1.7 Laughs A Minute – Never saw it.  This is one of those films the marketing of which inexplicably made me feel like I was being hustled and I avoid those on principle.

6. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy – 1.6 Laughs A Minute – Never saw it.  With the exception of his brilliant voice-over in Megamind, I’ve never liked Will Ferrell very much.

7. American Pie – 1.5 Laughs A Minute – Never saw it, not likely to.

8. Bridesmaids – 1.4 Laughs A Minute – I don’t get it.  I. Do.  Not.  Get. It.  Regardless of all the fawning it received from some critics and the Industry (more, I suspect, for political reasons than anything else), I thought this thing lame, tone-deaf and, in the end, really rayther pathetic. 

9. Shaun of the Dead – 1.3 Laughs A Minute – Never saw it, but I feel this one might be Netflix-worthy.

10. Life of Brian – 1.2 Laughs A Minute – I actually prefer Holy Grail, but Brian is arguably top ten-worthy, too.  (The nasty and bitter Meaning of Life never would have stood a chance.)  However, the panel must have been counting laugh clusters pretty liberally to arrive at this average because there are quite a few longos in this pic between the funny bits.

It seems to me that there probably are other movies of this same general ilk that didn’t make it into the final ten for whatever reason and which I bet would score just as high if not higher than some of these on the laugh-meter.  Porky’s comes to mind, as does The Forty Year Old Virgin.   Of course, it’s all highly subjective and your mileage may vary.   However, as I say, surely Airplane! deserves the crown here.  [Ed. – Agreed.  And don’t call me Shirley.]