Withnail And I & 9 Other Classic British Comedies

Withnail And I & 9 Other Classic British Comedies

Withnail and I is a classic British comedy and has gone down in movie history alongside these other great examples of hilarious movies from the UK.

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From Peter Sellers to Monty Python to Stewart Lee, the UK has a rich history of comedy. In addition to hours upon hours of classic sketches and sitcom episodes, the British comedy community has spawned some of the funniest movies ever made. Ranging from mainstream romcoms to biting satires, a lot of Britain’s greatest cinematic output has been in the comedy genre. Some have even become international crossover hits, like Edgar Wright’s Cornetto movies.

Britain’s comedy movies haven’t all been timeless classics, but for every crass Carry On entry, there’s a dark, visionary masterpiece like Bruce Robinson’s underrated gem Withnail & I.

10 Withnail and I (1987)

Bruce Robinson’s pitch-black comedy masterpiece Withnail & I sees two unemployed actors – “I,” a neurotic wreck played by Paul McGann, and Withnail, a carefree wino played by Richard E. Grant – taking a spontaneous trip to Withnail’s gay uncle’s country house.

Richard Griffiths, best known as Vernon Dursley from the Harry Potter movies, gives an unforgettable supporting performance as Uncle Monty.

9 Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

Guy Ritchie’s directorial debut, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, is a British take on a Pulp Fiction-esque darkly comic interconnected crime anthology movie.

The director assembled a stellar ensemble cast filled with hilarious performances by actors like Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones. He later followed up Lock, Stock with the similarly brilliant Snatch and RocknRolla.

8 Four Lions (2010)

The challenging premise of Four Lions is very on-brand for Brass Eye’s Chris Morris, whose no-holds-barred style of satire has drawn as much praise as it has controversy. Riz Ahmed stars as a young radicalized man who plots a terrorist attack at the London Marathon.

The movie gets a lot of dark laughs out of crossing the real threat of terrorism with the bumbling ineptness of Frank Drebin, while also digging to the root of a lot of the issues at hand.

7 The Full Monty (1997)

Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty would be a one-note high-concept comedy in the hands of the Hollywood studio machine. Its premise of unemployed blue-collar workers becoming male strippers to make ends meet sounds like it could be an instantly forgotten direct-to-Netflix release.

But Simon Beaufoy’s Oscar-nominated script uses its farcical premise to explore a lot of serious subjects under the surface, including fathers’ rights, working-class life, and mental health.

6 A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

John Cleese wrote the screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda in addition to starring in it as barrister Archie Leach, who gets unwittingly swept up in a pulpy crime plot involving stolen diamonds and a femme fatale played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

This movie is so funny that a Danish audiologist named Ole Bentzen died from laughing so hard at a screening. (Technically, his cause of death was heart fibrillation, but his increased heart rate may have been caused by laughter.)

5 Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994)

Richard Curtis would go on to strike romcom gold several times over with Notting Hill, Love Actually, and About Time, his finest work is still his breakout movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Its episodic storytelling keeps the plot moving along at a brisk pace with plenty of opportunities for non-sequitur gags and wacky characters within the overarching storylines, and Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell are perfectly matched in the lead roles.

4 The Ladykillers (1955)

The Coen brothers remade this Ealing classic and set it in the American South, but it didn’t come close to matching the original. The Ladykillers stars Alec Guinness as a thief who rents out some rooms from an old lady for the crew of a heist he’s planning. Unbeknownst to him, one of the woman’s hobbies is reporting suspicious behavior to the cops.

Guinness and his band of robbers, including the great Peter Sellers, masquerade as a string quartet and successfully pull off the job – but then, the old lady catches them. They decide to murder her, but they’re all so inept that they end up turning on each other instead.

3 Hot Fuzz (2007)

Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost defined their particular style of genre parody with 2004’s zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead, another must-see British comedy. After the success of Shaun, they brought the same sensibility to the buddy cop subgenre of action cinema.

The result is Lethal Weapon meets The Wicker Man, with a big-city cop being transferred to a sleepy village where something sinister is afoot and being partnered with his polar opposite. The script is airtight, and the movie wrings countless laugh-out-loud moments out of Pegg and Frost’s unparalleled on-screen chemistry.

2 Dr. Strangelove (1964)

The plot of Dr. Strangelove revolves around U.S./Soviet tensions and it has an American director, but it was produced in England and it stars British comic legend Peter Sellers in three hysterical roles.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove is arguably the greatest political satire in movie history (although Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator gives it a run for its money).

1 Monty Python’s Life Of Brian (1979)

After making their big-screen debut with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a near-perfect masterpiece, the Pythons were constantly asked what their next movie would be. Eric Idle, bored of the question, joked that they were making a movie called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory.

This seed of an idea eventually became Life of Brian, a spot-on spoof of religious epics and, more importantly, a sharp satirical takedown of organized religion.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/withnail-and-i-most-classic-british-comedy-movies/

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