20 Comedy Movies You Must See Before You Die

4. City Lights (1931)

Talkies were all the rage when Charlie Chaplin stubbornly stuck to his guns and decided that his next film, 1931's City Lights, would be a silent movie. The move could have backfired and potential ended Chaplin's career, marking him out as a sad relic of a forgotten era.

And yet City Lights emerged as such a touching, funny, beautiful and seminal movie, it didn't matter; audiences lapped it up, and briefly ignored the changing trends of cinema to once again embrace Chaplin's iconic "Tramp" character in what is without a doubt his best and most affecting film. "Affecting" isn't a word we often associate with comedy, but rest assured: the laughs are here, too.

So as The Tramp falls in love with a beautiful - but blind - flower girl, he also finds himself thrown from one comical situation to another. The gags, more than 80 years old, haven't dated at all - you could find many of them in an episode of The Simpsons.

And who would have thought, too, that a silent comedy film could contain - according to critic James Agee, anyway, writing about the famous final scene - the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid"? Indeed.