4. Evan Almighty
Here's a sobering statistic: Evan Almighty is the most expensive comedy film ever made. Its $140 million budget was stretched by another $60 million by set construction (although how much wood does an Ark really need?) and the difficulties that one would expect when bundling together over one hundred different species of animal. Thankfully, digital animation kept the food chain intact. And so for that sort of money, it wouldn't be remiss to expect a few laughs. Instead, you can see just why Jim Carrey abandoned ship. A modern retelling of the Biblical story of The Deluge, with news anchor turned Congressman Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) becoming -groan- the 'Noah of New York', Evan Almighty wasn't simply awful, it was Razzie-nominated awful (losing out to Daddy Day Camp). But, for the purposes of this article, we'll look at the in-joke that survived. As Evan drives past a cinema, we can see that it is advertising 'The 40 Year Old Virgin Mary'. It's not quite a $200 million joke, but...oh, well. I suppose you can always pretend that Baxter got his name from Ron Burgundy's dog. Yeah, think of cuddly, little Baxter instead. Actually, no. Don't.