20 Comedy Movies You Must See Before You Die

3. Airplane! (1980)

A ridiculous romp of a movie that seems to get better and better with age (despite being horribly dated), and perhaps the most quoted of all comedy flicks to have graced this good Earth, Airplane! was designed as a send-up of countless '70s disaster movies that dominated the era, and has been lodged into people's memories ever since.

We all know the best quotes ("Surely you're not serious?" "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley"), but Airplane! thrives on its sheer re-watchability - five, ten, a hundred viewings later, the jokes continue to feel fresh. And the gags here come fast and thick, some of which you still might find you've missed after multiple viewings, given the speed at which they're delivered.

But the beauty of Airplane! is that no "type" of gag is thought unworthy. There's wordplay (puns - oh, God, the puns), visual humor, slapstick, surrealness, and some stuff that makes no damn sense at all. But given the ratio of jokes per minute of screentime, there's never a sense of lagging. And it's no wonder this movie made a comedic star out of Leslie Nielsen; his hapless Dr. Rumack pretty much steals the film