With a vast library at its disposal, Max (formerly HBO Max) features enough movies to provide a comprehensive history of comedic cinema. So if you’re looking for a laugh, here are the 10 funniest movies you can stream on Max.
Update, 7/3/23: We found in reviewing our guide that eight of our picks had left Max, so we’ve replaced them with eight new comedies.
13 Going on 30
Romantic comedy 13 Going on 30 is a top-tier entry in the body-swap subgenre, starring Jennifer Garner as a 13-year-old girl who makes a birthday wish and wakes up in the body of her 30-year-old self. Garner’s Jenna is thrust ahead 17 years in time, forced to face adult responsibilities but also face her friend Matt, who’s grown into a handsome, charming man played by Mark Ruffalo.
Within the predictable rom-com framework, director Gary Winick provides plenty of laughs and some heartfelt character moments, and Garner perfectly portrays the gawky teen who’s suddenly in an adult’s body.
Airplane!
The prototype for pretty much every spoof movie that followed, Airplane! has easily eclipsed its initial inspirations. Filmmakers Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker take on the trend of star-studded disaster movies with their story of a commercial flight endangered by food poisoning that takes out the entire flight crew.
Stars Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges make the comedy funnier by playing all the absurd moments completely straight, and the nonstop jokes hold up just as well decades later as they did when their satirical targets were fresh.
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Burn After Reading
One of the goofiest, most overtly comedic films from the Coen brothers, Burn After Reading is also a scathing satire about the lack of intelligence in the so-called intelligence community.
Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand play amusingly against type as a pair of dim-witted gym employees who attempt to blackmail a former CIA analyst (John Malkovich) after discovering a disc with his personal files. That sets off a chaotic series of events, combining ridiculous slapstick with morbid humor as the paranoid characters react violently to absurd, meaningless threats.
The Heat
Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock make for a perfect action-comedy team in this buddy-cop movie from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig. Bullock plays a straitlaced FBI agent who’s forced to team up with McCarthy’s uncouth Boston police detective.
In classic buddy-cop fashion, the two characters clash until they realize they work better as a team, and Bullock and McCarthy bring new life to the familiar formula. Feig stages some decent action alongside the comedy, giving The Heat just the right balance of thrills and jokes.
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I Married a Witch
The allure of classic movie star Veronica Lake is so strong that it’s easy to imagine that she’s actually magic. She plays the witch in I Married a Witch, who’s revived from a centuries-long stasis and sets her sights on the descendant of the Puritan who originally denounced her and her father. Planning to torture poor Wallace Wooley (Fredric March), she instead falls in love, and the good-natured movie treats supernatural curses as an opportunity for farce.
The Lego Movie
A movie based on a line of toys doesn’t sound like a high-quality prospect, but filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller proved all the doubters wrong with The Lego Movie. Lord and Miller use the ubiquitous building-block toys to create a sly comedy about the resistance to corporate conformity.
The movie is filled with corporate-owned pop-culture characters, furthering its subversive message while giving it wide mainstream appeal. The detailed animation is a consistent delight, and the characters are just as vibrant as the creatively realized visuals.
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Never Goin’ Back
Best friends Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Camila Morrone) belong in the stoner-movie pantheon alongside Cheech and Chong and Harold and Kumar, and Never Goin’ Back deserves to be considered a stoner comedy classic. It’s a hilarious and raunchy but also sweet and insightful coming-of-age story.
Roommates Angela and Jessie encounter a series of mundane yet seemingly insurmountable obstacles to their plan to take a beach vacation. Their constantly stoned state alternately bolsters and hinders their efforts to improve their lives, always in entertaining ways.
Safety Last!
Of the comedy stars of the silent film era, Harold Lloyd often gets overshadowed by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But if you watch Lloyd’s 1923 masterpiece Safety Last!, you’ll see why he deserves to be mentioned right alongside those comedy legends.
Lloyd is as soulful of a character actor as Chaplin, playing a downtrodden department store employee. And he’s as talented a physical comedian as Keaton, especially in a still-dazzling stunt sequence of Lloyd hanging from the hands of a giant clock on the side of a building.
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Wayne’s World
The best movie ever adapted from a Saturday Night Live sketch, Wayne’s World retains the spirit of the SNL characters created by Mike Myers while expanding their world. Slacker metalhead public-access TV hosts Wayne Campbell (Myers) and Garth Algar (Dana Carvey) get a shot at big-time stardom thanks to a smarmy TV producer (Rob Lowe), while Wayne romances a local rock musician (Tia Carrere).
The plot is basic, but the characters are funny and endearing, and the silly set pieces, including the iconic car headbanging to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” are joyful and fun.
Young Frankenstein
Mel Brooks demonstrates his deep knowledge of classic Hollywood with Young Frankenstein, his parody of vintage Universal monster movies. Gene Wilder plays the title character, a descendant of the notorious mad scientist, who wants to distance himself from the family name while engaged in his own twisted experiments.
Brooks expertly recreates the retro horror style and gets brilliant, extremely funny performances from the whole cast, including Peter Boyle as the monster and Cloris Leachman as the estate’s deranged housekeeper.