Of the top 25 movies at the box office in 2024, precisely one could be classified as a comedy: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. And even that was a big-budget spectacle with special effects, a huge cast, and a A-list director returning to a beloved franchise. Anything else that sort of qualified as a comedy was also something else: Deadpool & Wolverine was a superhero movie that was also funny; Bad Boys: Ride or Die was an action sequel that was also funny, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire was a sci-fi sequel that was also funny, and so on. Of course, if you don’t produce and release comedies, it’s very hard for them to show up on a list of the top-grossing films of the year. Hollywood has basically abandoned comedy. People don’t like to laugh anymore, right?
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1990s, comedy was one of the studios’ most reliable genres. Solid new films came out almost every single month — and sometimes every single week. The list below picks the single best comedy of each year of the ’90s, which was honestly tough to do, because there were so many qualified contenders. (I had such a hard time deciding, I decided to several honorable mentions from each years as well.)
How to define the “best” comedies of the year provided tricky too. For example: The Truman Show is one of my favorite movies of the 1990s. Technically, it would qualify as a comedy, but I don’t necessarily think of it as a great comedy; I think of it as a great film about reality television, pop culture, religion, and so on. It’s not necessarily a gut-busting laugh riot. For this list, I decided to focus on the funny, at least in this one writer’s subjective opinion. And here it is…
The Best Comedy Movie Every Year of the 1990s
The best comedies, year by year, throughout the 1990s. No joking.
READ MORE: The 10 Best Comedies of the Last 10 Ten Years
The Worst ’90s Movies
We love the ’90s. But not all ’90s movies.
