Best Comedy Movies of 2017, Ranked: 14 Funniest Films Worth Revisiting
March 23, 2026 | Film Chop
Here’s a theory about 2016 and 2017: those two years produced more genuinely rewatchable comedies than the entire half-decade that followed. Before streaming platforms started commissioning content by algorithm, before the R-rated comedy was declared dead by every trade publication, there was a weird two-year pocket where indie comedy found prestige cred (Lady Bird, The Big Sick), blockbuster comedy got its groove back (Girls Trip), and genre hybrids got strange in the best possible ways (Baby Driver, Swiss Army Man).
This is Film Chop’s ranked list of the best comedy movies of 2017 — with the best comedy movies of 2016 appended at the end, because the two years bleed into each other in search results and in taste. Every entry comes with streaming info so you can watch tonight. For the full ranked canon across all eras, see our best comedy movies of all time.
The ranking criteria: how funny is it now, not how funny critics thought it was then. Rewatch value matters. So does whether it has something to say beyond the punchline.
The Best Comedy Movies of 2017, Ranked
1. The Big Sick (2017)
Director: Michael Showalter | Writers: Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon | Streaming: Amazon Prime Video
The best romantic comedy in years, and it’s based on a true story. Kumail Nanjiani plays a version of himself — a Pakistani-American stand-up comedian navigating his immigrant family’s expectations while falling for a white woman named Emily (Zoe Kazan). When Emily is put into a medically induced coma, Kumail finds himself stranded with her parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, both extraordinary) negotiating love, culture, and the exhausting performance of identity.
The Big Sick is laugh-out-loud funny for two hours and then quietly devastating. It earns the crying. Holly Hunter’s rage is a comedic instrument — she wields it with more precision than most dramatic actors. Judd Apatow produced, but this doesn’t feel like Apatow product; it has more specificity, more cultural texture than most mainstream comedies attempt.
If you’re looking for the ideal date night movies pick, The Big Sick tops the list — funny, warm, and genuinely moving.
Humor style: Observational, cultural, earnest-cringe
2. Girls Trip (2017)
Director: Malcolm D. Lee | Streaming: Peacock, Amazon Prime Video (rental)
Girls Trip grossed over $140 million worldwide on a $19 million budget, which makes it one of the most successful comedies of the decade. That number is a vindication, not just a statistic: the film is genuinely funny in the loud, R-rated, physical tradition that Hollywood kept insisting female-led movies couldn’t sustain.
Four friends — played by Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Tiffany Haddish — reunite for Essence Fest in New Orleans. The setup is thin, but the execution is full-throttle. Tiffany Haddish’s breakout performance as Dina is the kind that reminds you what star power looks like when it’s operating at full blast. The movie knows exactly what it is and does it with commitment.
Humor style: Slapstick, R-rated ensemble, big-swing physical comedy
3. The Disaster Artist (2017)
Director: James Franco | Streaming: Max, Amazon Prime Video (rental)
A film about the making of The Room — widely considered the best bad movie ever made — should not work. It works. James Franco directs and stars as Tommy Wiseau, the mysterious, apparently immortal figure behind The Room, and his performance is either brilliant or completely deranged (possibly both, which is the point). Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, Wiseau’s best friend and co-lead of The Room, and the brotherly chemistry carries the film through its stranger passages.
What The Disaster Artist understands is that Tommy Wiseau is, against all logic, a sympathetic character — someone who wanted to make art, got mocked for it, and somehow turned the mockery into a cult legacy. The film is funny and then unexpectedly moving, in that order.
Humor style: Dry, character-driven, meta-textual
4. Logan Lucky (2017)
Director: Steven Soderbergh | Streaming: Tubi (free), Amazon Prime Video (rental)
Steven Soderbergh came out of a two-year retirement to make a redneck heist comedy set during the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race, and it is extremely good. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play the Logan brothers, who plan a robbery of the Charlotte Motor Speedway with the help of a bomb-expert convict played by Daniel Craig doing the best comedic work of his career.
This is the kind of movie that trusts its audience to keep up — the plotting is intricate, the humor is bone dry, and the character work is affectionate without being condescending. Soderbergh treats his blue-collar characters with the same intelligence he brings to his slick crime films, which turns out to be the exact right call.
Humor style: Dry wit, deadpan ensemble, heist-comedy plotting
5. Lady Bird (2017)
Director: Greta Gerwig | Streaming: Max
Technically a coming-of-age drama, but classified widely as a comedy-drama hybrid by awards bodies and audiences alike — and the film earns the classification. Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut follows Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) through her senior year in Sacramento, and every scene between her and her mother (Laurie Metcalf) contains more compressed emotion and comedic timing than most films manage in two hours.
Lady Bird is funny in the way that great coming-of-age films are funny: the humor comes from recognition. You’ve been this person. You’ve had this exact fight. The specificity of detail — Sacramento in 2002, the drama club, the boy who turns out to be gay — is what makes the universal feel personal.
Humor style: Deadpan, observational, tragicomic
6. Baby Driver (2017)
Director: Edgar Wright | Streaming: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video (rental)
Edgar Wright’s action-comedy-musical hybrid about a getaway driver with tinnitus who syncs every job to a custom playlist. The premise sounds like a pitch meeting joke; the execution is immaculate. Ansel Elgort’s performance as Baby — quiet, contained, communicating mostly through earbuds and steering wheels — is the comedic straight man at the center of a movie full of people taking themselves extremely seriously.
The humor in Baby Driver is largely architectural: the way the gunshots sync to the music, the way violence keeps interrupting normal life, the way criminals keep having to explain themselves to each other. Jon Hamm and Jamie Foxx as the heist crew provide most of the explicit laughs. Wright provides the rest through precision film grammar that treats everything as a genre routine being performed.
Humor style: Action-comedy, musical timing, dry genre subversion
7. Brigsby Bear (2017)
Director: Dave McCary | Streaming: Amazon Prime Video (rental), Tubi (free)
The most underseen film on this list. Kyle Mooney plays James, a man-child who was kidnapped as an infant and raised in an underground bunker by a cult-like couple who produced a single educational TV show — Brigsby Bear — for him to watch. After being rescued, he becomes obsessed with finishing the show himself.
Sounds dark. It is, a little. It’s also extraordinarily sweet and genuinely funny, in the way that only films about wholehearted obsession can be. Brigsby Bear is about fan culture, art-making, and the strange dignity of taking something seriously that nobody else takes seriously. It’s weird and specific and completely worth finding.
Humor style: Quirky, earnest, deadpan surrealism
8. Ingrid Goes West (2017)
Director: Matt Spicer | Streaming: Peacock, Amazon Prime Video (rental)
Aubrey Plaza plays Ingrid, a mentally unstable social media obsessive who becomes fixated on a California lifestyle influencer (Elizabeth Olsen) and moves to LA to infiltrate her life. Ingrid Goes West is a dark comedy that’s genuinely dark — Plaza commits to the uncomfortable moments without telegraphing a redemption arc — but it’s also intermittently hilarious in its satirical takes on influencer culture, which were prescient in 2017 and feel obvious now in the best possible way.
O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Ingrid’s Batman-obsessed landlord provides most of the warmth. He’s the reason the film doesn’t collapse under its own bleakness.
Humor style: Dark comedy, satirical, cringe
9. Game Night (2018 — produced/set 2017)
Note: Technically released February 2018 but filmed in 2017 and widely grouped with this era.
Directors: John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein | Streaming: Max
Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play a hyper-competitive couple whose murder mystery game night goes sideways when a real kidnapping gets mistaken for part of the game. The premise is perfectly calibrated: escalating consequences that the characters keep misreading as fiction.
Game Night is the platonic ideal of the studio comedy — slick, well-cast, better-directed than it needs to be, and genuinely funny from beginning to end. Jesse Plemons as the unsettling neighbor is the comedic MVP.
Humor style: Escalating misunderstanding, ensemble, high-concept
10. Band Aid (2017)
Director: Zoe Lister-Jones | Streaming: Amazon Prime Video (rental)
A couple (Zoe Lister-Jones and Adam Pally) decide to channel all their relationship arguments into song, forming a band as a form of couples therapy. Mumblecore-adjacent but with actual musical commitment. Band Aid is the kind of small, funny, wise indie that gets swallowed by the algorithm — it deserves more attention than it got.
Humor style: Indie mumblecore, musical, domestic
The Best Comedy Movies of 2016, Ranked
2016 is the companion year — most of these films appear in “best comedy movies 2017” searches anyway, because the audience experience of cinema is never as calendar-tidy as release dates suggest.
1. The Nice Guys (2016)
Director: Shane Black | Streaming: Netflix, Max
Shane Black’s 1970s LA buddy comedy starring Russell Crowe as a hired enforcer and Ryan Gosling as a bumbling private eye investigating a conspiracy that connects a missing girl, the porn industry, and the Department of Justice. It is one of the funniest films of the decade, full stop.
Gosling’s physical comedy is revelatory — the toilet scene alone would make most comedians retire — and Crowe plays the straight man with exactly the right amount of barely-suppressed amusement at everything happening around him. The Nice Guys was a box office disappointment and a critical darling and it’s right that the critics were right.
Humor style: Buddy comedy, period pastiche, slapstick
2. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
Director: Taika Waititi | Streaming: Tubi (free), Pluto TV (free)
Before Taika Waititi was a Marvel director, he made this New Zealand comedy about a delinquent boy (Julian Dennison) and a reluctant foster uncle (Sam Neill) who accidentally become fugitives in the wilderness. The film is both legitimately funny and genuinely moving — Waititi has the rare ability to earn emotional moments with comedy rather than selling them separately.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople still holds up as the purest distillation of Waititi’s sensibility before the studio system got its hands on him.
Humor style: Deadpan, offbeat, adventure-comedy
3. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)
Director: Akiva Schaffer & Jorma Taccone | Streaming: Peacock, Amazon Prime Video (rental)
The Lonely Island made a documentary parody about a Justin Bieber-adjacent pop star (Andy Samberg) on a disastrous solo tour, and it is somehow one of the most underrated comedies of the 2010s. Popstar has all the DNA of a great mockumentary — real music industry cameos, a structure that mirrors actual music docs, and songs that are funny and genuinely catchy. It bombed on release. It deserves its cult.
Humor style: Mockumentary, musical parody, rapid-fire
4. Swiss Army Man (2016)
Directors: Daniels (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert) | Streaming: Amazon Prime Video (rental)
Paul Dano as a stranded man using a flatulent corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) to survive on a deserted island — the corpse gradually regains limited speech and curiosity about the world. The Daniels went on to direct Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is where you can see exactly what they were becoming: filmmakers willing to follow any premise to its absolute logical extreme regardless of how uncomfortable it gets.
Swiss Army Man is gross, earnest, strange, and occasionally beautiful. The fart jokes are the delivery mechanism for a surprisingly tender meditation on loneliness and performance.
Humor style: Absurdist, deadpan, prestige-weird
5. Keanu (2016)
Directors: Peter Atencio | Starring: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele | Streaming: Max
Key & Peele’s feature debut is a kitten-rescue action comedy in which two mild-mannered cousins infiltrate a drug kingpin’s gang. Jordan Peele — who would win an Oscar for Get Out the following year — is here playing absurdist comedy as hard as he ever would. The comedic premise (two Black men performing “hood” for a white gangster audience) has layers that the film doesn’t always lean into, but when it does, Keanu is legitimately sharp.
The kitten is, objectively, the greatest comedic prop in cinema since It’s a Gift‘s blind man sketch.
Humor style: Action-comedy, absurdist, buddy
What’s the Funniest Movie of 2017?
The Big Sick takes the title on merit — it’s the film with the most laughs per minute that also leaves you genuinely moved. But if pure comedy-first is the criteria, Girls Trip with Tiffany Haddish is the answer. No film that year committed harder to being funny or hit the mark more consistently.
Where to Stream the Best 2017 Comedies Tonight
- The Big Sick → Amazon Prime Video (included with Prime)
- Girls Trip → Peacock
- The Disaster Artist → Max
- Logan Lucky → Tubi (free), no subscription needed
- Lady Bird → Max
- Baby Driver → Netflix
- Brigsby Bear → Tubi (free)
- Ingrid Goes West → Peacock
If You Liked These, Watch Next
If the 2017 comedy era hooked you, Film Chop has more:
- Dark comedy movies that go further than you expect — if Ingrid Goes West was your favorite, start here
- Best comedy movies of all time — the full ranked canon, from Some Like It Hot forward
- Best psychological thriller movies — for the films on this list where the comedy got a bit too real
- Best comedies of the 2010s — the full decade ranked, including everything 2017 kicked off
- Best comedy movies on Netflix — which of these are still streaming and what to watch next