10 great films about comedians

Films about comedians are often not very funny. Cinema has long been a fan of the old ‘sad clown’ trope: the tragic irony of someone who earns their living from making people happy being far from happy themselves. That juxtaposition of emotions, combined with the potent image of an individual alone on stage, vulnerable in front of an expectant audience, has made the stand-up comic fertile cinematic territory. 

Comedians are performers, and movies about them frequently interrogate the relationship between them and their audiences. At a comedy show, those audiences can only know what the comedians tell them about their lives. In a film, we can see all the encounters and travails that go into constructing a hilarious set. This ability to see behind the curtain is a big part of what makes them so appealing.

Although movies that centre comics are often full of struggles with addiction, trauma, despair and self-loathing, they aren’t all bleak. Sometimes, they can focus on the joy of camaraderie with fellow stand-ups. While those friendships can be complicated by competition, these colleagues build each other up far more than tear each other down. 

And many – like Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, out this week – show how baring your soul and having people laugh with you can be cathartic in a life-enhancing, or even changing, way. Even if we’ve never been brave enough to stand on stage ourselves, the best films about comedians can translate the fragile magic of that catharsis into something tangible and relatable.

Director: Tony Richardson

Music hall comedy is a dying art, but Archie Rice (Laurence Olivier) hasn’t gotten the memo. This adaptation of the John Osborne play follows the Rice family through some terribly dark days. As Archie’s infidelities and the unlawful avenues he’s taken to fund his unpopular shows start to catch up with him, and his youngest son (Albert Finney) becomes a prisoner of war overseas, his daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) tries to hold things together.

Bleak and bruising, The Entertainer treats Archie’s need for the spotlight as a sickness – and one that runs in the blood: he’s been following in his father’s (Roger Livesey) footsteps, as his other son (Alan Bates) hopes to do in his. Archie doesn’t even seem to enjoy his time on stage as anything but an escape from his increasingly harsh reality. Though Olivier is the headliner, The Entertainer is effectively an ensemble piece, with the stellar cast wrenchingly portraying the damage a performer’s one-track-mind can have on the ones they love. 

Director: Bob Fosse

In Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All That Jazz (1979), Roy Scheider’s director surrogate painstakingly oversees the editing of a movie about a stand-up comedian. That was Lenny, Fosse’s barnstorming black-and-white biopic of Lenny Bruce (Dustin Hoffman), who changed the stand-up game forever with his eviscerating satire on societal hypocrisy, while getting arrested on numerous unjust obscenity charges along the way. As well as his burgeoning fame, the film charts his loving but complex relationship with his wife, burlesque dancer Honey (Valerine Perrine). 

Fosse’s all-too-brief directorial career specialised in sleazy milieus, flawed fathers and striving showgirls, which made him a perfect fit to tell the tale of Lenny and Honey Bruce. An honest but eminently sympathetic portrait, Lenny portrays its star as an imperfect man who told vital truths that America wasn’t yet ready to hear. Fosse’s notorious perfectionism results in a thrilling filmmaking precision, made all the better by Hoffman and Perrine’s searing performances.

Director: Herbert Ross

Willy Clark (Walter Matthau) and Al Lewis (George Burns) were a popular vaudeville act, ‘The Sunshine Boys’, for over 40 years. Changing tastes and a fierce disagreement split them up. Willy’s nephew and agent Ben (Richard Benjamin) has struggled in the years since to get his recalcitrant uncle work, and is thrilled when the offer comes to reunite The Sunshine Boys for a comedy special. Considering they hate each other so much they refuse to be in the same room, it’s an arduous task. 

With a screenplay written by Neil Simon (based on his own play), The Sunshine Boys is a funny, quietly moving exploration of the beauty and difficulties of long-term creative partnership. While 79-year old George Burns hadn’t appeared in a movie for 35 years, and Walter Matthau was just 55 and playing (brilliantly) two decades older, their comedic chemistry makes them an entertaining, convincing team.

Director: Martin Scorsese

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is determined to do anything it takes to become a stand-up comedian. Even kidnapping beloved late-night host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and making his ransom a demand to appear on his show. 

The King of Comedy dances on the tightrope between comedy and horror. That has a lot to do with De Niro’s vivid realisation of the mesmerisingly erratic Pupkin; the way his impenetrable delusions of grandeur make him both unfailingly polite and frighteningly unpredictable keeps us ever on our toes. While he is a deeply silly man, the movie never lets us forget that he’s a dangerous one too. 

Although it bombed on its original release, The King of Comedy has since been re-evaluated as one of Martin Scorsese’s best movies and an ahead-of-its-time treatise on toxicity in the relationship between performers and their superfans. It would go on to serve as direct inspiration for blockbuster hit Joker (2019).

Director: Richard Pryor

The great Richard Pryor wrote, directed and starred in this thinly-veiled biopic of himself. Though his character’s name is Jo Jo, the very specific elements of Pryor’s own biography – such as having grown up in his grandmother’s brothel, his difficult relationships with his five wives, and almost dying after he set fire to himself while allegedly high on cocaine – are all present and correct.

As you’d expect for a pseudo-biopic of Pryor, there are several extremely funny passages here, most memorably a striptease drag routine sequence that’s followed by the still in drag Jo Jo wielding a gun at some gangsters. Yet primarily the film is striking for its vulnerability, rawness and sincerity; it really feels as if we are watching Pryor work through something big. He would never direct another movie, quite possibly because he said all he had to say with this one. 

Director: Nora Ephron

Julie Kavner – best known for voicing Marge on The Simpsons (1989-) – plays Dottie, a single mother who becomes an overnight smash-hit stand-up comic. Her daughters Erica (Samantha Mathis) and Opal (Gaby Hoffman) are initially happy for her, but they soon start to feel neglected during her long work-related absences. 

Though Nora Ephron wouldn’t enter the stratosphere until the following year’s Sleepless in Seattle, her directorial debut is a warm, fleet-footed look at the travails of single motherhood, filtered through a showbiz lens. While the movie empathises with Erica and Opal’s feelings, it never threatens to suggest the solution is for Dottie to give up her dream and head back to civilian life, instead ending on an uplifting note of compromise. 

This Is My Life also boasts a great supporting cast, highlights being Tim Blake Nelson as a comic who specialises in ‘fish couplets’ and Dan Aykroyd as a napkin-eating agent known as “the Moss” (“He grows on you…”). 

Director: Milos Forman

A little bit of a cheat for this list, considering how regularly Andy Kaufman, played in the biopic by Jim Carrey, would decline the title ‘comedian’. Rather than concentrating on making his audiences laugh, Kaufman would wrongfoot and unsettle: those who’d paid to watch him wouldn’t know whether they’d be up for a dead-on Elvis impersonation or a full-length reading of The Great Gatsby.

Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman, makes no bones about Kaufman’s often off-putting prickliness – some of the film’s great joys are the many reaction shots, as audiences try to work out just what to make of him. Nevertheless, this remains a loving portrait, that takes its lead from agent George Shapiro (Danny DeVito) after an early meeting with his soon-to-be client, “You’re insane, but you might also be brilliant.”

Carrey’s barnstorming performance here is the high watermark of his career to date – his intensive method acting was documented vividly in acclaimed documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (2017). 

Director: Michael Showalter

Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon wrote up the unique origin story of their romance for The Big Sick, and the resultant screenplay ended up winning them a well-deserved Oscar nomination. 

Kumail (playing himself) and Emily (Zoe Kazan) fall in love after she heckles him during his stand-up set. Then a misunderstanding and an argument breaks them up. Despite that break-up, he’s called to her bedside when she comes down with a life-threatening illness that sees her put into a medically-induced coma. As Kumail bonds with Emily’s parents (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) while they wait for news, he realises he made a terrible mistake ever splitting up with her. 

The rare film about a stand-up comedian that isn’t acerbic or depressing, The Big Sick’s warmth and consistently funny script won it many fans among critics and audiences alike. It also made a movie star out of Nanjiani; it’s only recently, with his special Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts (2025), that he’s started to return to his stand-up roots. 

Director: Eva Vives

Nina Geld (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) vomits every time she leaves the stage. Her stand-up is visceral and blackly acerbic, not for the faint of heart. Offstage, her life is a mess, so she decides to move cross-country from New York to LA, to audition for a prestigious TV show. There she meets Rafe (Common), and their budding relationship brings to light a tragic past from which Nina had been trying to run. 

Eventually, we learn that Nina’s mess stems from a horrifying childhood. While the ‘trauma plot‘ has gotten a bad rap in recent years, and not altogether unjustly, Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes her spiky, vulnerable heroine stubbornly multi-dimensional, and never defined purely by the awful thing that happened to her. Besides the comedy as catharsis angle, writer-director Eva Vives infuses her screenplay with thought-provoking meditations on how much control performers like Nina ever have on the art they are putting out into the world. 

Director: Ally Pankiw

Another film about a female comedian dealing with trauma, though one that takes a decidedly different tack. Sam Cowell (Rachel Sennott) hasn’t been able to get on stage since an incident that landed her with PTSD. When she hears that Brooke (Olga Petsa), the teenage girl she used to nanny for, has gone missing, she does everything she can to find her. Through a series of smartly layered flashbacks, we learn both what happened to Sam, and why she cares so much about Brooke. 

I Used to Be Funny deals with some heavy material, with the pivotal scene here being a difficult one to watch, but it’s also often very… well, funny! Writer-director Ally Pankiw navigates her tonal tightrope with impressive ease, especially considering this was her debut feature. She’s aided immensely by star Rachel Sennott; though known for her work in comedy, between Pankiw’s film and Shiva Baby (2020) she’s also displayed formidable dramatic chops.