Comedy had a wonderfully chaotic year in 2025. Instead of relying on one dominant formula, filmmakers delivered buddy adventures, romantic misfires, painfully awkward friendships, science-fiction satire, horror-comedy, and sports stories powered by characters whose confidence vastly exceeded their common sense.
The best comedy movies of 2025 also proved that “funny” does not have to mean lightweight. Several of the year’s sharpest films found humor in grief, loneliness, ambition, financial panic, toxic relationships, and the uniquely human talent for making a bad situation dramatically worse. Critics’ year-end selections reflected that range, recognizing both crowd-friendly studio releases and smaller independent films that mixed laughter with unexpectedly serious ideas.
The following ranking considers critical reception, originality, performances, emotional impact, and rewatchability. Some choices are broad comedies built for a group movie night. Others are darker, stranger, or more uncomfortable. All ten offer a memorable reason to laughand occasionally to hide behind a pillow while laughing.
10. The Baltimorons
A warm Christmas comedy about two imperfect strangers
The Baltimorons begins with the kind of holiday emergency Hallmark rarely explores: a struggling comedian named Cliff chips a tooth on Christmas Eve. His search for help leads him to Didi, a sharp, recently divorced dentist who reluctantly agrees to treat him after hours. One dental problem soon becomes an unpredictable journey through Baltimore.
Directed by Jay Duplass and co-written by Duplass and star Michael Strassner, the film keeps its scale refreshingly small. Cliff and Didi are not polished romantic-comedy mannequins living in suspiciously enormous apartments. They are lonely, complicated adults trying to remain functional while life keeps changing the itinerary.
The comedy comes from conversation, personality clashes, awkward pauses, and the strange intimacy that develops when two people spend an unexpected night together. Liz Larsen gives Didi enough intelligence and restraint to balance Cliff’s nervous energy. The result is a modest but winning comedy that earns its warmth instead of dumping artificial holiday cheer over every scene.
9. Companion
A romantic getaway with a technological nightmare attached
Companion is best approached with as little advance information as possible. The basic setup involves Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, traveling with her boyfriend Josh, played by Jack Quaid, to a secluded lakeside home for a weekend with friends. It looks like a familiar relationship thrilleruntil the film begins rearranging the rules.
Writer-director Drew Hancock combines science fiction, horror, relationship satire, and dark comedy without allowing any single genre to take complete control. Thatcher is especially effective as Iris, whose emotional evolution drives both the suspense and the humor. Quaid enthusiastically leans into the less charming side of the seemingly harmless modern boyfriend.
What makes Companion one of the most entertaining new comedy films of 2025 is its understanding that controlling behavior can become absurd when pushed to its logical extreme. The jokes are sharp, but they never erase the danger. This is the pick for viewers who like their comedy clever, violent, unpredictable, and served with a suspiciously perfect smile.
8. Bugonia
Conspiracy culture receives the full Yorgos Lanthimos treatment
In Bugonia, two conspiracy-obsessed men kidnap Michelle Fuller, the powerful chief executive of a pharmaceutical company. They are convinced she is an alien preparing to destroy Earth. Michelle insists she is human. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, certainty quickly becomes a luxury nobody can afford.
Emma Stone plays Michelle with cool authority, while Jesse Plemons brings unsettling conviction to Teddy, the beekeeper and amateur investigator leading the kidnapping. Will Tracy adapted the screenplay from the South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, preserving its genre-hopping energy while sharpening its focus on corporate power, online paranoia, and the collapse of shared reality.
This is not a relaxing comedy. It is tense, macabre, sometimes brutal, and interested in the terrifying possibility that everyone involved may possess one small piece of the truth. Its humor comes from escalating arguments, power reversals, and the enormous confidence people display while working with microscopic amounts of reliable evidence.
7. Sorry, Baby
A funny, compassionate story about surviving the “bad thing”
Eva Victor writes, directs, and stars in Sorry, Baby, an intimate comedy-drama about Agnes, a college professor attempting to rebuild her life after a traumatic experience. The film moves through time rather than presenting recovery as a neat, inspirational staircase. Agnes improves, struggles, jokes, withdraws, connects, and continues.
The humor does not minimize what happened to her. Instead, it demonstrates that trauma does not eliminate the rest of a person’s identity. Agnes still has an academic career, an affectionate friendship with Lydie, an uncertain romantic connection, irritating colleagues, and a cat with considerably fewer emotional complications than the humans.
Naomi Ackie brings warmth and directness to Lydie, while Lucas Hedges and John Carroll Lynch contribute to several of the movie’s most quietly humane scenes. Victor’s tonal control is the main attraction: an uncomfortable moment can become funny without becoming cruel, and a joke can reveal pain without turning into a speech. Among 2025 comedy movies, few handle difficult material with this much patience or emotional intelligence.
6. The Ballad of Wallis Island
A folk reunion where nostalgia refuses to behave
Charles, an eccentric lottery winner played by Tim Key, lives alone on a remote island and dreams of reuniting his favorite folk duo. He offers musician Herb McGwyer a very large fee to perform a private concert, but neglects to explain that Herb’s former musical and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer, will also be attending.
Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan give Herb and Nell the believable chemistry of artists who once created something beautiful together but no longer agree on what it meant. Charles floats around them with boundless enthusiasm, terrible puns, and the social instincts of a golden retriever carrying three tennis balls at once.
Director James Griffiths lets the comedy develop naturally from embarrassment, resentment, artistic ego, and Charles’s refusal to recognize that his dream reunion may be painful for everyone else. Beneath the jokes is a thoughtful examination of nostalgia. Remembering the past can be comforting, but trying to force it back into existence may leave everybody standing in the rain with damaged instruments.
5. Twinless
Grief, identity, and one extremely complicated friendship
Roman, played by Dylan O’Brien, attends a support group after losing his identical twin. There he meets Dennis, played by writer-director James Sweeney, and the two form an intense friendship based on their shared loneliness. Explaining much more would spoil a film that takes several bold narrative turns.
Twinless begins with the emotional outline of a grief drama, but gradually introduces dark comedy, romantic tension, deception, and psychological suspense. Sweeney understands how loneliness can make a person both deeply sympathetic and dangerously selfish. The characters want connection, but they also want control over the form that connection takes.
O’Brien gives a remarkably layered performance, shifting between broad physical comedy and raw grief without making either feel artificial. Sweeney complements him with anxious intelligence and carefully concealed desperation. The movie is funny because its characters recognize one another’s weaknesses with frightening precisionand tragic because recognition does not automatically produce honesty.
4. Friendship
The middle-aged bromance from social-anxiety hell
Craig Waterman, played by Tim Robinson, is a suburban husband and office worker whose ordinary life changes when he meets Austin, a charismatic local television weatherman played by Paul Rudd. Austin has interesting friends, plays in a band, explores underground tunnels, and appears to move through adulthood without asking permission. Craig immediately decides they should become best friends.
That decision goes about as well as expected.
Director Andrew DeYoung builds Friendship around Robinson’s unmatched ability to transform mild embarrassment into a five-alarm social disaster. Craig cannot accept rejection, interpret boundaries, or leave a room before making everything worse. Rudd, meanwhile, uses his natural charm as a weapon. Austin seems effortlessly cool, although the film gradually reveals that his confidence may be another performance.
The movie works as absurd cringe comedy, but it also understands the genuine isolation underneath Craig’s behavior. Adult friendship can be difficult, especially for men taught to communicate through activities, jokes, or alarming quantities of emotional suppression. Friendship examines that problem and then launches it down a hill in a shopping cart.
3. The Naked Gun
A gloriously foolish return to big-screen parody
Legacy sequels frequently arrive carrying an instruction manual, a tribute plaque, and several tons of nervous nostalgia. The Naked Gun arrives carrying Liam Neeson in a schoolgirl uniform.
Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen’s spectacularly incompetent detective. Pamela Anderson co-stars as novelist Beth Davenport, while director Akiva Schaffer restores the rapid-fire visual jokes, literal-minded dialogue, ridiculous background action, and shameless wordplay associated with the original series.
The smartest decision is allowing Neeson to remain completely serious. He approaches idiotic situations with the grave authority of a man negotiating the release of kidnapped diplomats. Anderson matches him with excellent timing and an understanding that parody works best when performers behave as though absolutely nothing unusual is happening.
Not every joke lands, but another one arrives before the audience can file a complaint. In an era when many studio comedies hesitate to appear silly, The Naked Gun proudly sprints in the opposite direction, slips on a banana peel, crashes through a window, and somehow solves the case.
2. One of Them Days
Keke Palmer and SZA revive the great buddy comedy
Best friends and roommates Dreux and Alyssa discover that Alyssa’s boyfriend has spent their rent money. With eviction approaching, they race across Los Angeles searching for cash, credit, favors, and any solution that does not involve admitting they trusted the wrong man.
Director Lawrence Lamont and screenwriter Syreeta Singleton build the film as a fast-moving chain of disasters. Each possible escape creates a larger problem, from predatory lending to unfortunate encounters with neighborhood characters. Yet the movie never loses sight of the friendship at its center.
Keke Palmer is a first-rate physical comedian, capable of turning a suspicious glance or exhausted walk into a complete punchline. SZA, making her feature acting debut, gives Alyssa a dreamy unpredictability that pairs perfectly with Palmer’s urgency. Their chemistry makes the wildest developments feel emotionally grounded.
One of Them Days is funny, energetic, and specific about the financial pressures facing its characters. The movie knows that being broke can be frightening, humiliating, and absurdsometimes within the same five minutes. It also understands a classic buddy-comedy truth: the only person who can help you survive a terrible day may be the friend who helped cause it.
1. Marty Supreme
An adrenaline-fueled comedy about ambition without brakes
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a Lower East Side shoe salesman in 1952 who believes he is destined to become the greatest table-tennis player in the world. Unfortunately, talent is only one ingredient in Marty’s plan. The others include relentless salesmanship, irresponsible risk-taking, romantic chaos, borrowed money, and the assumption that consequences are primarily a problem for other people.
Chalamet gives Marty enough charisma to explain why people follow him and enough selfishness to make them regret it. The performance is fast, funny, abrasive, and physically committed. Odessa A’zion, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler Okonma, and a sprawling supporting cast populate a world that seems to expand every time Marty invents another scheme.
The film treats ping-pong with the intensity of a heavyweight boxing match and Marty’s personal hustles with the tension of a crime thriller. Safdie’s restless filmmaking turns ambition into a contact sport. The comedy comes from the gap between Marty’s heroic vision of himself and the wreckage visible to everyone nearby.
Several year-end critics placed the film among 2025’s strongest releases, praising its propulsive energy and Chalamet’s performance. It earns the top position here because it is not merely funny; it is an overwhelming cinematic experience about dreaming big, behaving badly, and refusing to notice that the door marked “greatness” may actually lead into a storage closet.
How to Get the Best Experience From These 2025 Comedies
Choose the movie according to your group’s sense of humor
A successful comedy night starts with audience selection. Showing The Naked Gun to viewers who love visual gags, terrible puns, and nonstop absurdity is an excellent plan. Showing it to someone who pauses every five minutes to explain why the police procedure is unrealistic may become a test of the friendship.
For a lively group, begin with One of Them Days or The Naked Gun. Both move quickly and generate frequent, accessible laughs. For viewers who prefer quiet character comedy, choose The Baltimorons or The Ballad of Wallis Island. A crowd comfortable with uncomfortable humor will probably embrace Friendship, while fans of darker material should start with Companion or Bugonia.
Create a double feature with contrasting styles
Watching two similar comedies in a row can make the second one feel less surprising. A contrasting double feature usually works better. Pair the frantic financial chaos of One of Them Days with the gentle melancholy of The Ballad of Wallis Island. Follow the broad parody of The Naked Gun with the painfully specific social discomfort of Friendship.
For a darker evening, combine Companion and Bugonia. Both examine control, technology, power, and distorted perceptions, but they approach those ideas from different directions. Sorry, Baby and Twinless also make a thoughtful pairing because both explore grief while refusing to let sadness eliminate humor.
Put away the phone and allow the comedy to build
Many of these films reward attention. A background joke in The Naked Gun may disappear in seconds. A suspicious pause in Twinless may become important much later. The escalating discomfort of Friendship works because the audience watches Craig ignore one warning sign after another.
Comedy depends heavily on rhythm. Checking messages during the setup and looking up during the punchline is the cinematic equivalent of entering a conversation halfway through and laughing because everyone else did. Silence notifications, lower the lights, and give the movie a genuine opportunity to control the pace.
Avoid spoilers, especially for the genre-blending films
Trailers and social-media clips can reveal too much. This is particularly risky with Companion, Twinless, and Bugonia, which use shifting information to reshape the audience’s understanding of their characters. Reading a detailed plot summary first may save time, but it also removes the pleasure of discovering that the movie you started is not the movie you thought you were watching.
Read enough to understand the tone and content warnings, then stop. Let the filmmakers deliver the surprises in their intended order.
Leave room for conversation afterward
The strongest comedies often become funnier after the credits because viewers begin trading favorite lines, imitating performances, and debating character decisions. A movie such as Marty Supreme can inspire an argument about whether ambition is admirable, destructive, or simply exhausting to witness. Sorry, Baby may lead to a more reflective discussion about friendship and recovery. Bugonia might result in everyone cautiously checking whether the host is an alien pharmaceutical executive.
That shared experience is part of comedy’s appeal. Laughter is immediate, but the best funny movies to watch also leave behind characters and situations that grow more interesting once the room becomes quiet again.
Final Thoughts on the Best Comedy Movies of 2025
The top comedies of 2025 were not united by one style. They ranged from studio parody and friendship disasters to tender independent romances, psychological thrillers, science-fiction nightmares, and a table-tennis epic moving at the speed of an unpaid debt collector.
That variety is exactly what made the year exciting. One of Them Days delivered joyful buddy-comedy chemistry. The Naked Gun defended the endangered art of unapologetic silliness. Sorry, Baby and Twinless demonstrated that painful experiences can coexist with honest humor. Meanwhile, Marty Supreme transformed one man’s unreasonable confidence into a breathless portrait of ambition.
Whether you prefer warm, weird, dark, romantic, or aggressively foolish comedy, this list offers at least one movie capable of rescuing an otherwise ordinary evening.
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