The Best 80s Comedies
High-concept, quotable and built to rewatch: the 1980s comedy canon ranked by composite score across lists and registries.
Rain Man (1988) leads with a composite score of 5.43.
- 1Rain Man1988 · Barry Levinson5.43
Oscar Best Picture winner 1988 · Berlin Golden Bear winner 1989 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1989 #4
- 2Do the Right Thing1989 · Spike Lee3.72
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1989 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #24 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #29
- 3A Room with a View1986 · James Ivory3.66
BAFTA Best Film winner 1987 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1986 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1987 #6
- 4When Father Was Away on Business1985 · Emir Kusturica3.56
Palme d'Or winner 1985 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1986 #5 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
- 5Terms of Endearment1983 · James L. Brooks3.43
Oscar Best Picture winner 1983 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1984 #4
- 6The Ballad of Narayama1983 · Shohei Imamura3.39
Palme d'Or winner 1983 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1983 #5
- 7Driving Miss Daisy1989 · Bruce Beresford3.32
Oscar Best Picture winner 1989 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1990 #8
- 8The Purple Rose of Cairo1985 · Woody Allen2.63
BAFTA Best Film winner null · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1986 #2
- 9Tootsie1982 · Sydney Pollack2.18
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1982 · AFI 100 (2007) #69 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1983 #8
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- 11Where is the Friend's Home?1987 · Abbas Kiarostami1.78
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #157 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1993 #8
- 12Stranger Than Paradise1984 · Jim Jarmusch1.57
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1986 #1 · National Film Registry (inducted 2002) · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
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- 15Moonstruck1987 · Norman Jewison1.48
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1987 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1988 #10 · Criterion Collection spine #1056
- 16Hannah and Her Sisters1986 · Woody Allen1.40
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1986 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1987 #3
- 17Broadcast News1987 · James L. Brooks1.29
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1987 · National Film Registry (inducted 2018) · Criterion Collection spine #552
- 18The Dresser1983 · Peter Yates1.20
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1983 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1984 #9
- 19The Funeral1984 · Jūzō Itami1.16
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1984 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #1125
- 20Hope and Glory1987 · John Boorman1.13
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1987 · BFI Top 100 British films #90
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- 26Brazil1985 · Terry Gilliam0.74
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1986 #8 · BFI Top 100 British films #54 · Criterion Collection spine #51
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- 28Withnail and I1987 · Bruce Robinson0.60
BFI Top 100 British films #29 · Criterion Collection spine #119 · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- 29After Hours1985 · Martin Scorsese0.60
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1986 #9 · Criterion Collection spine #1185 · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- 30The King of Comedy1982 · Martin Scorsese0.56
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1983 #5 · Kurosawa's 100 favorite films
The high-concept decade
Eighties Hollywood comedy was an industrial product of unusual quality control. The ingredients were new: Saturday Night Live and SCTV had built a bench of performers with established personas (Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Candy, Murphy); the high-concept pitch — a premise you could state in one sentence and sell in one poster — organized production; and the multiplex plus VHS economy meant a hit comedy played for years, not weeks. Ghostbusters (1984) is the model: an effects-budget supernatural premise carried entirely by improv-trained deadpan, a theme song at #1 for three weeks, and a cultural footprint large enough that the Library of Congress eventually inducted it into the National Film Registry — the institution's acknowledgment that the era's commercial comedies are American film heritage.
The decade's other canonical comedies each fused the form with a neighboring genre. Back to the Future (1985) — Registry class of 2007 — is comedy welded to science fiction with a screenplay so tightly constructed it gets taught as structure; Zemeckis and Gale were rejected over forty times before Spielberg's imprimatur got it made. John Hughes ran a parallel operation in the suburbs of Chicago, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) became the teen comedy's most enduring statement — a film whose fourth-wall-breaking hero and one perfect truant afternoon have kept it in constant cultural circulation (and, since 2014, in the Registry).
Why these three, and what's missing
Comedy is the genre the traditional canon-makers handle worst: critics' polls skew solemn, and the Academy has never taken the form seriously (none of the films on this page saw a major Oscar nomination). That is why this page leans so heavily on the National Film Registry and community canons — the sources that measure endurance rather than prestige. The films that surface are the ones still being quoted, rewatched and referenced forty years on: the eighties comedy that became infrastructure. Treat the list as a floor, not a ceiling — the decade's bench (Airplane!, This Is Spinal Tap, Coming to America, A Fish Called Wanda) sits just outside the current library and will join it as coverage expands.