Eight Comedies That Got Me Through 2021
Had a horrifying year? Put these movies and TV shows on your list.
When I think of 2021, I think of having a HUGE laugh. Just a chuckle riot, a never-ending cacophony of joy.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that any TV show, film, or special that made me genuinely experience humour is pretty special. Here’s a couple from a non-exhaustive list that genuinely brought me delight this year.
There are a few notable comedies that AREN’T on this list, and are instead on the Best TV list I wrote – including Hacks, Preppers, and Starstruck. Why? Because I’m sick and tired of all your questions.
Girls5Eva
A certain era of millennial has been waiting for this comedy their entire lives — the millennial who experienced and most likely enthusiastically engaged with Spice Girl fever back in the nineties/naughties. Girls5Eva is basically the story of a girl band getting back together as middle-aged women, which creates essentially the setup for the humour and the plot. It’s a great premise, and once it’s set up, it creates fertile ground for a lot of rapid-fire jokes. It’s great, and has some wonderful comedic performances.
Watch on Stan.
Bo Burnham: Inside
OK so it might be a stretch to say this feature-length Netflix special brought me “joy”, as it seemed more akin to watching someone musically document your own pandemic breakdown – but Inside was very funny and very, very clever. The songs are impeccably constructed, and I think the sometimes “dark” emotional journey he takes us through, of his own depleting mental health and his concerns about the world, sometimes obscure the simple comedy of more sketch-like songs like ‘White Woman’s Instagram’.
Watch on Netflix.
Only Murders in the Building
A vaguely camp murder whodunit with an inexplicable Selena Gomez involved? Sure, yes. The fact that it’s all ludicrously revolving around a true crime podcast never stopped tickling me, I don’t know why. Anyway, I loved it, it’s very Steve Martin, it stinks of him, and he is funny.
Watch on Disney+.
I Think You Should Leave
Nobody does TV sketch like I Think You Should Leave with Tom Robinson. Season 1 was one of my favourite shows in the world, and Season 2 continues the trend. Each sketch is a perfect little moment of character comedy, that basically teaches you everything you need to know about how you can escalate a simple moment. It’s SO funny, and so aggressively stupid, but so very clever.
One of my favourite sketch formats they use is when the set-up is basically someone saying “it’s fine”, but so insistently, or at such a volume, that you realise immediately that it’s not fine. You then proceed to watch someone aggressively be the cause of their own problems. One of my favourite sketches from Season 2 that exemplifies this is the one where a guy thinks a baby is crying when he holds it, because “he used to be a piece of shit”. It’s a bizarre meditation on the idea of people being able to change, with utterly deranged standout moments like the idea of “sloppy steaks”, a steak “with a whole bunch of water poured all over it, it’s delicious”.
Watch on Netflix.
The White Lotus
The satire of the year, White Lotus is both tragic and funny, and a biting exploration of wealth, class, and white exploitation, all set in a luxury resort in Hawaii.
There is a lot going on — including opening the show with an unidentified body being loaded onto a plane, but it isn’t structured as a whodunnit. Instead, we watch as terrible people painstakingly build their own holiday from hell. The most compelling scenes come from the friction between the wealthy guests and the hotel staff, the inequality inherent in their relationships revealing a portrait of class and wealth power structures around the world, made stark by the microcosm we’re watching.
Also, Jennifer Coolidge plays a more subtle character than she often does, and she’s a scene-stealer.
Watch on Binge.
Ted Lasso
Season 2 of the award-winning and ferociously loved Ted Lasso became the subject of almost insane levels of discourse, which I think was partially motivated as a reaction against the glowing praise heaped upon the first season, and a rocky start to Season 2, including a much-maligned Christmas episode. It’s an easy show to poke fun at because it pursues wholesomeness as a goal and as a method of storytelling. Ted himself is designed to be an overwhelming folksy nightmare, and a lot of the humour comes from people finding his psychotic dedication to wholesomeness cringeworthy and offputting.
Some of the early episodes of S2 suffered because Ted became too powerful, too beloved — the show didn’t seem to acknowledge his behaviour as noteworthy anymore. But it’s rescued later on, and Ted Lasso continues as one of the most delightful feel-good comedies I’ve ever seen.
Watch on Apple+.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
One of my favourite types of comedy film tropes is “doofuses abroad” and Barb and Star might just be a masterpiece of the genre. In this film, two happy weirdos, friends Barb and Star, live a quiet but happy suburban middle-aged life together in Nebraska, stuck in a dorky routine. However, they are forced to take a risk and go on holiday to the gaudy excitements of Vista Del Mar in Florida, where they discover themselves, get mixed up in a supervillain terrorist plot, have a bunch of sex with Jamie Dornan, and just kinda escalate things from fun into absurdity.
Kristen Wiig not only plays two parts, but she wrote the screenplay with fellow star Annie Mumolo, and the conceit is basically taking the kind of sketch characters that Wiig is renowned for, and giving them ample space to live and breathe and grow in a feature-length film, rather than be constrained by the sketch format. It’s kind of like free-range sketch characters. It does weird things, all that space for silliness, but I think it’s beautiful and very very very silly.
I think you can buy it in Australia? Idk.
The Other Two
The Other Two is maybe the most consistently funny show, an actual joke factory, which probably explains why it’s so hard to watch in Australia. The original premise is about two siblings in their twenties, who have to examine their own lives and notions of success after their teen brother becomes a mega popstar.
Season 2 basically continues down that road, with all the characters trying out new things, but still ultimately remaining themselves (agents of chaos) so nothing truly changes.
Watch on iTunes.
Patrick Lenton is a journalist, author, and former editor of Junkee. His new book Sexy Tales of Paleontology is out now. He tweets @patricklenton.