PopGap #08 Re-cap: Comedies Since 1970

The 20 movies on my PopGap list for the month of August 2015 added up to 35-and-a-half hours of comedy, during which I laughed 448 times, making my Time-Laugh-Content count a decent .21, which is enough to make me legally drunk in just about any country. Yes, I counted my laughs during August, because I was curious to see how my rankings would differ at the end of the month if I sorted the movies by my overall appreciation versus the raw number of successful jokes.

1. Day for Night (1973); Dir.: François Truffaut
2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972); Dir.: Luis Buñuel
3. Breaking Away (1979)(*); Dir.: Peter Yates
4. The Last Detail (1973)(*); Dir.: Hal Ashby
5. The Station Agent (2003); Dir.: Thomas McCarthy
6. Austin Powers (1997)(*); Dir.: Jay Roach
7. Back to the Future Part III (1990); Dir.: Robert Zemeckis
8. The Tenant (1976); Dir.: Roman Polanski
9. Clue (1985)(*); Dir.: Jonathan Lynn
10. Withnail & I (1987); Dir.: Bruce Robinson
11. Sleeper (1973)(*); Dir.: Woody Allen
12. Slap Shot (1977)(*); Dir.: George Roy Hill
13. Snatch. (2000)(*); Dir.: Guy Ritchie
14. The Sandlot (1993); Dir.: David M. Evans
15. Men in Black (1997)(*); Dir.: Barry Sonnenfeld
16. Naked (1993); Dir.: Mike Leigh
17. Spaceballs (1987)(*); Dir.: Mel Brooks
18. Amarcord (1973); Dir.: Federico Fellini
19. Delicatessen (1991)(*), Dir.: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
20. Big Fish (2003), Dir.: Tim Burton

While my three least favorite movies of the month were among the ones in which I laughed the least, The Last Detail was both my fourth favorite overall and my fourth least funny, as it wasn't really a comedy. Spaceballs, on the other hand, had a high laugh count, but a poor good:bad joke ratio, and I didn't appreciate it very much aside from the good jokes.

It turned out that my three favorite movies of the month varied greatly in laugh counts, but they were all made in  the 1970s and two of them were predominately in French, so maybe I need to watch more French comedies from that era.

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