The best comedy movies and TV shows of 2023 so far

This timely A.I.-centred horror-comedy plays like The Terminator on helium or a genius bar Bride of Chucky. Allison Williams is a toy-making robotics pioneer who creates a self-aware doll to keep her newly orphaned niece company. Which is all well and good, until the neighbour’s dog barks its last and further violent mayhem is unleashed. M3GAN invaded your social feed in January with creepy dolls dances and swiftly became a gay icon, too. This doll slays – in every sense.

For whatever reason, the origin stories of famous products are all the rage in Hollywood this year, from Air Jordans to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. BlackBerry, about the creation and eventual obsolescence of the titular smartphone, is perhaps the sharpest of the bunch – like a screwball, caustically funny version of The Social Network. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton turns in a megawatt performance as Jim Balsillie, the toxic co-CEO of the company that essentially invented 21st century communication, only to see it become a relic. He’s the darkly comic heart of this (mostly) true tale.

To say that Ari Aster’s three-hour surrealist odyssey is polarising is like describing the American political landscape as ‘a bit testy’. Some saw it as a masterpiece of gonzo ambition; others called it an act of career suicide. Suffice to say, guffawing levels may vary. But if you’re attuned to Aster’s bizarro wavelength, then this story of a paranoid shut-in (Joaquin Phoenix, inarguably excellent) travelling for his mother’s funeral – confronting murderous hobos, psychotic war vets and giant penis monsters along the way – will scratch a major itch. 

Like Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado before it, the title of Cocaine Bear made it a meme before anyone even saw the movie, which usually doesn’t bode well for the actual film’s shelf life. Only, in this case, the flick got an extra bit of juice from its loose ‘true story’ bonafides: in 1985, a bear in Georgia really did consume a duffle bag of cocaine dropped from a smuggler’s plane. It didn’t go on a rampage – it just died. But director Elizabeth Banks embellishes the details in all the right places, creating an appropriately manic B-movie that manages to hold its madcap energy for its full 95 minutes. All you can ask for, really.

Undemanding fun, this basketball comedy laughs with, and very much not at, a team of Down Syndrome adults. They shoot hoops and teach Woody Harrelson’s salty ex-pro coach a few life lessons, and needless to say, one of them has a hot sister – though she’s not there to take coach’s self-centred BS either. The upshoot is a likeable, affectionate comedy that knows what plays to make and mostly makes them pretty nicely. If the idea of a slightly homelier version of Hoosiers sounds like a good time, this one hits a three. 

Guardians has always been the most organically funny Marvel franchise, and the third (and presumably final) film in the series serves as a much-needed shot in the arm for an MCU finally showing signs of box-office fatigue. It’s the most expressly emotional entry in the trilogy, but still generates plenty of legit laughs via Chris Pratt’s heroic doofus and his crew of alien weirdos, as well as Marvel’s first foray into comedy of the more f-bomb-dropping kind.

Julia-Louis Dreyfus and The Crown’s Tobias Menzies play well-heeled professionals whose cosy marriage is upended when she catches him slagging off her new novel to a friend. Nicole Holofcener keeps filling the Woody Allen gap with urbane comedies like Enough Said and Please Give, and here she alchemises relationships, ego and insecurities into big laughs. Real-life marrieds David Cross and Amber Tamblyn all but steal the show as a bickering couple in therapy.

Filmmaker Quentin Dupieux specialises in absurd concepts delivered with a distinctly French flippancy, and his latest is a quick-hit horror-comedy whose anthology structure allows Dupieux to throw a bunch of weird ideas at the wall. Flush with both gore and giggles, it’s like a midnight movie on a sugar high, framed around a group of tobacco-powered superheroes on a teambuilding excursion that serves as a springboard for an impossible-to-summarise series of vignettes, digressions and one-off jokes. It’s an acquired taste, obviously, but the giddy WTF-ness is infectious.