10 Great British Comedy Films Since 1980, Ranked

The first films that come to mind when thinking about British comedy are understandably those that have earned millions at the box office, domestically and internationally – Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire, and Shaun of the Dead.

There’s no doubt, they’re all great British comedy films. But of the box office smash hits, only one of my favourites really made a killing on the big screen – A Fish Called Wanda.

That might be because the best British comedy films are less broad than their American counterparts, easily polarising audiences into those that love them and those that don’t.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is one of British cinema’s biggest box office successes.

It’s why a number of the films listed here have found their admirers on the fringes, audiences willing to sidestep big studio comedy for the eccentricities, pathos and tragi-comic humour of satirists and alternative comedy writers, directors and performers like Chris Morris, Terry Gilliam, the Monty Pythons, Bill Forsyth and Bruce Robinson.

British comedy before the 1980s

The Monty Python comedy troupe produced such classics as Holy Grail and Life of Brian

Off the back of quality radio (the wit of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show, accompanied ably by the delightful antics of Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe) and television (the Monty Python team constantly obscuring the day-to-day British regime with side-splitting skits) there’s always been plenty of source material for British cinema to draw upon.

Even though the Ealing comedies of the 1950s had some success across the pond, it was the appeal of Monty Python and the subsequent release of films And Now For Something Completely Different, Holy Grail and Life of Brian during the 1970s that took British comedy to a world stage. John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Eric Idle became household names, and Terry Gilliam became one of the world’s most comically compelling and visually eccentric filmmakers.

The legacy of the Pythons

Living up to the Monty Python team’s best work – Holy Grail and Life of Brian – has been a difficult task since the end of the seventies, even for the Python’s themselves. They released The Meaning Of Life in 1983 but it never reached the same seminal heights of their previous big screen excursions. That said, it does feature my favourite sketch of theirs.

John Cleese, playing a schoolteacher, advises a class on sex education. Making no attempt to be subtle, he introduces his wife to the “children” (played entirely by the adult Python actors) and they proceed to get undressed so the teacher can educate the class on exactly how it should be done through a live demonstration. It’s a classic scene, however, one of only a few in the hit and miss Meaning of Life.

Cleese, Palin, Idle, Terry Jones, and Gilliam worked on individual projects, many allowing them to re-team for cameo appearances or writing stints. Some of their films didn’t work and failed to appeal to mainstream audiences, but some certainly did work. It’s these that make up a significant part our choices for best British comedy film since 1980.

What are the best British comedy films since 1980?

10. Another Year

Mike Leigh (2010)

Setting: London, England

Featuring shades of light and dark, comedy and tragedy, Another Year celebrates marriage, togetherness, friendship and love, yet is wary that life’s journey is never an easy one.

Writer-director Mike Leigh presents us with Gerri and Tom (Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent), a long-married couple who have a seemingly comfortable, contented and loving life.

Against the backdrop of this financially secure, healthy and happy couple are their various friends and family members who, through the secure, safe environment of Gerri and Tom’s home and friendship, live out their life’s traumas like an open wound.

9. Brassed Off

Dir. Mark Herman (1996)

Setting: Barnsley, England

It’s not just the music that pulls at the heartstrings in Mark Herman’s comedy-drama about the real life tragedy that befell Britain’s coal mining industry and the impact it had on the lives of those directly and indirectly part of it.

The performances of the ensemble cast, notably the brilliant Pete Postlethwaite, bring to heart-breaking life the destruction the industry’s collapse had on people, their families and the community.

The music, as depicted by the former coal miners’ brass band, is their antidote to this pain. The best moment is when Tara Fitzgerald’s Gloria performs a flugelhorn solo during a group performance of En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor.

8. Gregory’s Girl

Dir. Bill Forsyth (1981)

Setting: Cumbernauld, Scotland

Bill Forsyth’s most endearing film, this Scottish coming-of-age comedy-drama oozes a sweet-natured charm as gangly high school teen Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) falls for a girl who’s out of his league.

Observant about teenage life, love and football, it’s also a very funny story as Gregory learns about the pain of infatuation with the pretty girl who takes his place on the football team.

Forsyth’s breakthrough film features a wonderful sense of teenage awkwardness, capturing the foibles of growing up with a touching sense of innocence amidst the risque realities of school-age sex talk.

7. Educating Rita

Dir. Lewis Gilbert (1983)

Setting: Liverpool, England

Willy Russell adapts his own successful stage play for the screen in which Michael Caine and Julie Walters (who played Rita on stage prior to the film) take on the roles of dispassionate, alcoholic teacher and overzealous, mature student.

Caine is brilliant as perennially inebriated university professor Frank Bryant who begins teaching ditzy but bright Liverpudlian girl Rita (Julie Waters) literature for her Open University course.

There’s the instant imbalance of personalities that spark some wonderful scenes lifted from Willy Russell’s stage play as the mismatched pair work out their differences amid readings of D H Lawrence, TS Elliot and Shakespeare.

6. Clockwise

Dir. Christopher Morahan (1986)

Setting: Midlands, England

John Cleese is brilliant in this post-Monty Python era film about an overtly punctual school headmaster who conducts his life based on strict regimen and perfect time-keeping but finds his entire day, en route to a headmaster’s conference, disrupted by one mishap after another.

Boasting a wonderful sense of madcap farce which is perfectly matched by Cleese’s Basil Fawlty-like anarchic energy, Clockwise is one of those post-1980 British comedies to have fallen by the wayside. But it deserves a bigger audience.

Heading across country from Gloucestershire to Norwich, this formerly prim and proper headmaster ends up learning how to enjoy life outside of the constant time-checking and straightening of ties, albeit with the police on his tail for car theft, trespassing, kidnapping, vandalism and robbery.

5. Four Lions

Dir. Chris Morris (2010)

Setting: Sheffield & London, England

At face value, you’d think finding comedy in terrorism is impossible. That is unless Chris Morris is steering the ship. Part of what makes Four Lions so delightful is the ease at which the inherent fears we associate with the subject are turned around to expose the hilarious stupidity at its heart.

As relevant as ever, here we ridicule the flawed idealism, the unplugged fundamentalist factions interpreting religious scripture based on whim, and the futility of their actions. This is comedy at its darkest; a biting, contemporary social commentary that is as funny as it is provocative.

See also: 17 Great British Comedy Films Of The 2010s

4. A Fish Called Wanda

Dir. Charles Crichton (1988)

Setting: London, England

Michael Palin and John Cleese star in Charles Crichton’s manic crime-farce with both Python’s stealing the show. Although, Kevin Kline, as the delightfully sadistic Otto runs them close and Jamie Lee Curtis is also excellent.

There’s the distinct charm of Ealing’s heyday courtesy of director Crichton (who made The Lavender Hill Mob for Ealing Studios in 1951) with post-Monty Python eccentricities delivered in typically energetic fashion from Cleese (in a writer and actor role) and Palin.

Curtis gives the film a transatlantic flavour alongside Kline, together ensuring the film had a better chance of success in North America. She’s the eponymous Wanda – a tigerish go-getter with a penchant for deception and a wily wit – who uses her sexuality to mould the men in her life to her every whim. There hasn’t been a more sensuous yet funny performance by an actress before or since.

3. Time Bandits

Dir. Terry Gilliam (1981)

Setting: Various

This offbeat adventure from the minds of Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin mixes two wonderfully entertaining concepts – the treasure hunt and time travel.

An eleven-year-old child (Craig Warnock) joins a group of dwarfs as they use a stolen map to steal riches from a variety of historical figures as they travel through time.

This dark, comic tale is made all the more enthralling thanks to the wonderful imagination of its creators.

2. Brazil

Dir. Terry Gilliam (1985)

Setting: Fictional future city

A terrific mix of dark dystopia and playful comedy, Terry Gilliam’s brilliant Brazil draws its laughs from a nightmarish vision of the future. This weird, unsettling fever dream sees its Orwellian setting wonderfully realised, every detail painstakingly considered and each in place to tickle the funny bone while creeping you out.

Unpredictable and consistently startling in its visionary depiction of a near future, Brazil’s bustling imagination is never less than enchanting. That it finds plenty of laughs amidst its social and political commentary, its offbeat eccentricities making no concessions for audiences unwilling to accept Gilliam’s unconventional approach, Brazil is not just a great comedy film but one of the genre’s most inventive and outrageous.

1. Withnail And I

Dir. Bruce Robinson (1986)

Setting: London, England

Inspired by writer-director Bruce Robinson’s troubles as an out-of-work actor, his Camden Town squalor fuelled by booze, the film follows two unemployed Londoners living in similar “poverty” as they head off to the countryside for a much-needed holiday.

Mixing comedy with tragedy, Withnail and I provides a caustic, unapologetic and inherently truthful window onto this fringe element of London’s changing cultural and societal makeup. It distinguishes itself thanks to Robinson’s sparkling dialogue and some fine performances, particularly Ralph Brown’s spaced-out drug dealer and Richard E. Grant’s perennially drunk Withnail.

Pathos intensifies the humour; laughs that are often guttural, physical reactions – full-bodied like the wine they drink. If anything the film is funnier, more moving, more tragic, and more absorbing in subsequent viewings. At the very least, you can marvel at teetotaller Grant’s inebriated Withnail, the best performance of his career and the greatest drunk in cinema history.

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