11 genuinely hilarious gags in otherwise unfunny movies
Some comedies are a laugh a minute. Others have barely a minute's worth of laughs. All too often, you have to sift through a sludge of badly timed slapstick, lame pop-culture satire and fart gags before you discover the film's single glimmer of comedy gold. (Unless you're watching The Love Guru, in which case there's no gold at all.)
So, feeling all public-spirited, here we've extracted the funniest bits from 11 of the not-so-funniest movies, for your chuckle-making benefit…
1.The Bieber death-selfie (Zoolander 2, 2016)
Hopes were high for Ben Stiller's second outing as pea-brained male model Derek Zoolander. But even those with the lowest expectations of this 15-years-in-the-making sequel were let down by its painfully forced attempts to deliver all the same punchlines.
Still, it starts out well, with this sequence in which an improbably parkour-tastic Justin Bieber is assassinated by a helmeted gunman, and uses his final breaths to post a selfie… Though he still can't help being fussy about his choice of filter before he expires. "Peace out, world. Peace out."
2."I would like to buy a Hamburger" (The Pink Panther, 2006)
Bumbling French detective Inspector Clouseau was a role that only Peter Sellers could play well, as Steve Martin so effectively reminded us in the 2006 remake of original Clouseau adventure The Pink Panther.
Still, Martin's own 'Wild And Crazy Guy' shtick at least served him well in this one scene where the inept Inspector attempts to learn an American accent, confounding his dialogue coach with his inability to pronounce the simple phrase, "I would like to buy a Hamburger". Sometimes things do get funnier the more you repeat them…
3.The head-shiv (Get Hard, 2015)
"Is my eye twitching?"… When millionaire businessman James King (Will Ferrell) faces a prison sentence for fraud, he enlists Darnell Lewis (Kevin Hart) to train him to survive jail, mistakenly believing Darnell to be a former convict.
Comic chemistry was largely lacking between the two stars, except in the scene where Darnell accidentally shivs James right in the forehead. Squirmy laughter ensues as a panicked Darnell drives his student to the hospital, and the latter understandably freaks out. And no-one freaks out quite like Will Ferrell.
4.The rhino birth (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, 1995)
Jim Carrey's second go-round as the mad-quiffed Ace Ventura, in which he heads to an African country to search for a sacred white bat, was wince-inducing for its sheer cultural insensitivity. But Carrey's aptitude for physical humour is gainfully employed in the scene where a sweltering Ace, staking out inside a fake rhino (don't ask), makes an emergency escape through the creature's backside. Some passing tourists think they're witnessing a birth. Instead it's the stuff of comedy nightmares.
5."Dude… Sweet…" (Dude, Where's My Car?, 2000)
The Ashton Kutcher/Seann William Scott idiot-stoner comedy Dude, Where's My Car? is so OTT silly it could justifiably be filed under guilty pleasure. Just. But even those who just think it's guilty must agree that this scene – in which Jesse (Kutcher) and Chester (Scott) discover they both have back tattoos – deserves the yuks it elicits.
Chester reads Jesse's: "Dude". Jesse reads Chester's: "Sweet", then each asks the other what their tattoo says, not realising that they're both actually answering each other. Over and over it goes, until the two doofuses lose it and start scrapping.
6.The Principal's office rant (This Is 40, 2012)
Judd Apatow's "Sort-Of Sequel" to big hit Knocked Up was itself a bit of a miss, a film that meandered too much and went on for way too long. But it featured an amazing extended cameo from Melissa McCarthy as Catherine, mother to a kid who's been harassing the daughter of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) online.
As Catherine (accurately) condemns the couple's earlier behaviour towards her at a meeting with the school Principal, their fake obliviousness pushes her into a hilarious rage, featuring some fantastic improv from McCarthy. "This is what happens when you corner a rat," she shrieks. "You corner me, I chew through you!"
7.The Jaws gag (1941, 1979)
Steven Spielberg's whopping-budget World War II comedy 1941 turned out to be his biggest flop, despite its big cast (John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Christopher Lee) and even bigger set-pieces. But kudos to Spielberg for spoofing himself with the opening sequence, in which he recreates the first scene of his career-making blockbuster Jaws.
He even recasts the same actress, Susan Backlinie, as a skinny-dipping swimmer, except this time it's not a shark that attacks her. Instead, she finds herself clinging, screaming, to the raised periscope of a Japanese submarine.
8.Anton's useless charity (The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, 2013)
Steve Carell's Vegas stage magician comedy didn't exactly work magic on cinema audiences, but it wonderfully satirised clueless celebrity charities with this skit featuring Steve Buscemi's Anton Marvelton bringing "hope" to poverty-suffering children in the useless form of the Operation Presto Magic Set. "I go to places where the children have neither food nor clean water," he explains. "And I give them magic." Not food. Not clean water. Just magic sets.
9."Never go full retard" (Tropic Thunder, 2008)
Ben Stiller's action-movie mickey-take saw a bunch of actors lost in the jungle and forced to become soldiers as real as the ones they're pretending to be for a Vietnam epic. It was a great concept, but didn't quite live up to its promise beyond the occasional rib-ticklish scene.
In particular, this Hollywood-skewering, abandon-all-political-correctness moment where Robert Downey Jr (as a blond Australian lost in his African-American character) chides his co-star for putting off the Academy with an over-the-top performance as a man with a learning disability.
10.Meeting Dr. Leacher (National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, 1993)
With Charlie Sheen doing so well in action spoof Hot Shots!, his brother Emilio Estevez was cast (alongside Samuel L. Jackson) in this considerably less successful cop-movie parody. Fortunately, it does feature this cameo by respected character actor F. Murray Abraham, who puts the ham in Hannibal with his deliciously silly take on Silence Of The Lambs' Dr. Lecter. Best exchange?
"Quid pro quo, Mr. Colt"
"What's that mean?"
"It means I'm pretentious."
11.The Waterfalls sing-along (We're The Millers, 2013)
This Jennifer Aniston-fronted comedy involved a quartet of disrespectable types who fake it up as an all-American nuclear family on a road trip, so they can smuggle drugs across the Mexican border. It didn't really work.
But if one moment deserves applause, it's when TLC's Waterfalls is played as "victory music" and dweeby kid Kenny (Will Poulter) gets so into it, he pulls off a word-perfect falsetto rap - to the surprise and discomfort of his fellow faux-family members.
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