3 Comedies Funnier Than Bridesmaids — Including Walk Hard

It has been 15 years since Bridesmaids hit like a confetti cannon and helped launch Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Rose Byrne into full-on movie stardom. I like it. I laugh at it. I also don’t think it’s the funniest comedy ever made. If you want to see what I mean, here are three movies that, in different ways, outclass it — one from the 90s that’s pure chaos, one brand-new micro-feature that never wastes a second, and one parody so sharp it basically ruined an entire genre’s cliches for everyone else.

Clifford (1994)

Yes, that’s Martin Short playing the worst 10-year-old alive — and yes, it absolutely works. The movie opens mid-disaster: Clifford is on a flight to Hawaii with his parents and manages to derail the entire trip so badly the plane has to land in Los Angeles. Dad (Richard Kind), out of options, pawns the kid off on his estranged brother Martin (Charles Grodin). Martin says yes mostly to convince his girlfriend Sarah (Mary Steenburgen) that he’s ready for marriage and kids. He is not ready. What he is, it turns out, is babysitter to a pint-sized supervillain fixated on one goal: get to Dinosaur World, no matter who burns.

The real magic here is the duel between Grodin’s slow-boil frustration and Short’s gleefully sociopathic energy — it’s two pros pushing each other to funnier places scene after scene. And for the craft heads, the Dinosaur World set piece is a flex: lush matte paintings, chunky animatronics, the whole practical-effects buffet that 90s studio comedies almost never got. It’s one of those films that somehow gets funnier every time you rewatch it.

Rap World (2024)

File this under: how is this only 56 minutes long and funnier than most studio comedies? In Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, three would-be rappers set out to pull an all-nighter and record a life-changing album. They even bring their buddy Ben (Danny Scharar) along to document the moment while Matt (Conner O’Malley), Casey (Jack Bensinger), and Jason (Eric Rahill) hole up at Casey’s mom’s house. Then they proceed to do everything except make music: roam parking lots, pick up Matt’s sister (Edy Modica) from work, score some weed, hit a house party — classic big-dreams, low-output energy.

Co-directed by O’Malley and his frequent collaborator Scharar, it takes the small, unhinged ambition of O’Malley’s YouTube- era shorts and threads it into a loose story about the suburban guys you remember from the mid-2000s. It feels tossed-off, but it’s meticulously built — a joke density that keeps your head on a swivel. Barely feature-length, somehow maximum funny.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) is about to go onstage — but first, as he would say, he has to think about his whole life. We flash back to a hardscrabble childhood on a farm, where a machete accident literally slices his younger brother in half and leaves Dewey without a sense of smell. He marries young (Wiig plays Edith), has kids, and then bolts to chase country-rock stardom. Fame follows. So do every vice on the menu and a supersized ego.

This is the rare parody that didn’t just clown a genre — it rewired how you watch it. It skewers the inspirational biopic formula of movies like Walk the Line and Ray so thoroughly that, nearly two decades later, new music biopics still stumble into the same corny beats this movie torched. Even when the plot takes a breath, the jokes don’t. It is wall-to-wall absurdity delivered with deadly accuracy.

So sure, raise a glass to Bridesmaids on its big anniversary. But if you want to see how wild, weird, and ruthlessly funny the genre can get, cue up Clifford, Rap World, and Walk Hard. That’s the triple feature that makes most modern comedies look like warm-ups.