The Naked Gun Has Been Named The Best Comedy Of All Time

1988’s The Naked Gun has been named the greatest comedy film of all time by a new survey of Variety‘s reviewing staff.

The Naked Gun is funny as hell, but is it the funniest movie of all time? According to the good folks at Variety, the answer is yes. In a new survey of the venerable industry rag’s critics and pundits, the 1988 parody, born from the ashes of the failed 1982 TV series, Police Squad!, is hands down the greatest comedy movie of all time.

Now, comedy is arguably the most subjective genre of all – you boil it right down to its essential salts, and the only real metric is whether you laugh or not. You can’t argue someone into finding something funny, and if you disagree you’re both wrong and probably very annoying. But it’s useful to see what other people find funny, even if it’s just to know who to avoid. Of course, sometimes the consensus is wrong. There was a minute there when the whole world thought Tom Green was the future of comedy, but as history shows that was just an extremely virulent form of encephalitis that dropped everyone’s IQ by about 30 points for a year.

But back to The Naked Gun! Or The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, to give the film its full and illustrious title. As Variety note, “It’s a shamelessly uninhibited, anarchically observational drive-by comedy that will make fun of anything: global autocrats, stodgy film noir dialogue, safe sex, a professional baseball game, food left in the refrigerator for too long.” That’s a pretty accurate description; based solely on jokes-per-minute, it’s an absolute banger. Add in the late Leslie Nielsen’s brilliantly deadpan performance as Lieutenant Frank Drebin, hard-nosed cop and complete idiot, and it’s not difficult to see how it took home the gold.

Check out the complete list here, and be prepared to argue about it for hours afterwards.