16. HIS GIRL FRIDAY Howard Hawks had a bright idea: Turn Broadway's The Front Page on its head by making one of its newspapermen a woman. The result is probably Hawks' purest view of romance as mutually delighted verbal slugfest — and Cary Grant's performance is nimble enough to leave you gasping.
17. SPLASH Finally, a fish-out-of-water comedy about a fish out of water. Tom Hanks is a lonely Everyguy, and Daryl Hannah is a mermaid who grows legs for love: Together they create a cross-species romance so infectious it makes Manhattan feel like a small town.
18. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT The opening salvo in the screwball-comedy war of the sexes — and the classes — with the rich always crazier than the rest of us. Reporter Clark Gable and heiress Claudette Colbert are a perfect mismatch, and Frank Capra gives their cross-country coupling emotional pull — something that few of the imitators managed to achieve.
19. THE GRADUATE The movie that reinvented comedy for the '60s generation, The Graduate crystallized the bemused contempt with which the under-30s regarded the over-30s. Dustin Hoffman's debut film is satiric, surreal, and a little self-absorbed — in other words, a perfect reflection of its audience.
20. TO BE OR NOT TO BE Hammy Jack Benny and gloriously scattered Carole Lombard head a group of Polish actors trying to outwit the Nazis in Ernst Lubitsch's unlikely, feathery comedy. ''I hope you'll forgive me if I acted clumsy, but this is the first time I ever met an actress,'' gushes infatuated fly-boy Robert Stack. ''Lieutenant,'' replies Lombard, ''this is the first time I met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes. Bye.''
21. BANANAS Here's the Woody Allen yuk buffs miss — a rude prankster with a mind on fast forward and no time for Art. He's Fielding Mellish (the name could have been a gift from Groucho or Fields), a product tester who ends up president of a Communist banana republic.
22. BACK TO THE FUTURE Who said one of those '80s teen comedies couldn't be well written, ingeniously structured, and resonating with pop-Oedipal dementia? Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd are the time-traveling boy and his Doc, but it's director Robert Zemeckis who makes Future move like a rocket.
23. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN Not to mention Dracula and the Wolf Man in this surprisingly atmospheric — and apt — vehicle for the screen's most consistent comic duo. As the vampire who tries to put Lou's scattered brain into Frankenstein's monster, Bela Lugosi deftly parodies the role that made him infamous.
24. VICTOR/VICTORIA Blake Edwards' finest moment and certainly the most fun Julie Andrews has had on screen. James Garner is fine as a gangster drawn to Andrews while remaining befuddled as to exactly what sex she is, but it's Robert Preston, as the lady's camp follower, who steals this dizzy show.
25. THE GOLD RUSH Charlie Chaplin caught at the moment when he teetered — like that shack on the cliff — between pratfall élan and future bathos. It's the actor-director's confident peak, with hilarious set pieces like that filet of boot-sole dinner, as well as an epic feel for the Alaskan frontier.
26. USED CARS In Robert Zemeckis' filthily funny satire on greed and salesmanship, Jack Warden plays the Fuchs brothers (one good, one meaner than sin), whose warring car lots face each other, while Kurt Russell, in clashing polyester, delivers diarrhea-like spiels of sales-speak.
27. BLAZING SADDLES Bringing the borscht belt to Black Rock, Mel Brooks' raunchy Western about a black sheriff's efforts to tame a town overflows with surreal gags and groaners and contains something to offend absolutely everyone. Shameless in its political incorrectness, this is a picture Hollywood wouldn't dare remake.
28. LOCAL HERO In Bill Forsyth's droll, enchanting movie, a Texas oil executive (Peter Riegert) hies to a sleepy Scottish village where he encounters a single pay phone, the aurora borealis, and a population for whom the word eccentric is tame. It'll leave a smile on your face for days.
29. IT'S A GIFT Masterful mumbler W.C. Fields, who turned foul moods and a hatred for children into genius, is at his drawliest and nastiest as a store owner and family man (''Don't let the posy fool ya'') whose crosses include a customer requesting kumquats, a careless blind man in his shop, and Baby LeRoy, who makes a persuasive case for infanticide.
30. RAISING ARIZONA Before they got serious (Miller's Crossing) and seriously weird (Barton Fink), the brothers Coen spun this cartoony tale of an infertile couple who decide to steal a baby. Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter shine as the loony pair, but John Goodman and William Forsythe are unforgettable as a pair of chicken-fried, coop-flying jailbirds.
31. A NIGHT AT THE OPERA ''A thousand dollars a night! Just for singing? Why, you can get a phonograph record at Minnie the Moocher's for 75 cents. For a buck and a quarter you can get Minnie,'' remarks Groucho as Otis P. Driftwood, who, along with Chico and Harpo, tears into Il Trovatore and scourges pearl-strung Margaret Dumont, who's not having much luck getting into society or ships' staterooms.
32. REPO MAN As the prototypical suburban punk, Emilio Estevez deadpans his way through a surreal landscape of repo-philosophers, fascist scientists, infantile rockers, and aliens in the trunk. Alex Cox's fantasy brilliantly captures subdivision anomie in the epigram for the blasé-and-proud generation: ''Let's go get sushi...and not pay!''
33. NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE The halls of academe were forever defaced by this lewd and crude frat-house farce, which captures John Belushi (as bloated future senator Bluto Blutarsky) in all his disgusto glory. Irony alert: Despite siring countless pretenders to the throne, this royal treatment of truly gross jokers never begat a sequel.
34. M*A*S*H Robert Altman's innovative, free-for-all Korean War comedy (really about the Vietnam War) was the first time an audience was invited to laugh at the absurdity of violence while geysers of blood sprayed all over makeshift operating rooms and a medical unit attempted to carry on with life as if nothing unusual were happening.
35. A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM It's the borscht belt on the Tiber, with songs by Sondheim and a siblings-mixed-up-at-birth plot out of Plautus, the Neil Simon of 200 b.c. Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Jack Gilford provide the rim shots in the original toga party.
