Sometimes watching a foreign film is difficult, as you have to be familiar with the culture to grasp the film’s message. One universal theme you’ll find, though, is comedy: Everyone may not laugh at the same things, but everyone loves to laugh. Take a tour of the world from your couch with 15 of the funniest foreign films of all time:
15. The Dinner Game (France)
Pierre and his friends play a cruel game every week. Everyone brings a guest to dinner, and then they mock whoever appears to be the biggest fool. Pierre believes he has found a guaranteed winner in François Pignon, a tax office employee who builds models from matchsticks.
Then Pierre injures his back. The dinner never unfolds as planned, and he ends up stuck at home with a man who is eager to help. That assistance ends up costing him a great deal.
Jacques Villeret makes Pignon so desperate to please that you foresee every disaster while Pierre remains oblivious. Francis Veber builds entire scenes around misjudged phone calls. The pleasure lies in watching a smug man lose his grip on his own joke.
14. The Intouchables (France)
Driss shows up for a job interview because he needs evidence that he applied. He doesn’t anticipate that Philippe, a wealthy man paralyzed after a paragliding accident, will hire him as his caregiver. Philippe does.
Omar Sy gives Driss a cheekiness that cuts through the fuss surrounding his new boss. François Cluzet matches him, and their arguments over taste and manners make up a large part of the fun. A formal birthday party receives a much-needed change of music. The two also hold very different opinions on the price of modern art. It’s easy to see why Philippe would enjoy spending time with someone happy to tease him.
13. Shaolin Soccer (Hong Kong)
Football’s rules struggle to keep pace with Stephen Chow. His character, Sing, aims to integrate Shaolin kung fu into everyday life. A former football player notices his talent, and together they assemble a team from Sing’s old Shaolin brothers. Before long, a pass can send a player soaring, and a shot on goal seems like it should need a weapons permit.
It’s wide-ranging, goofy slapstick, with effects that transform the pitch into a cartoon brawl. You don’t have to be a football fan to understand the joke. The team begins broke and worn down, so it’s genuinely satisfying to watch these men discover a use for the skills everyone else has overlooked.
12. Toni Erdmann (Germany)
False teeth can cause considerable damage in a business meeting. In Maren Ade’s German comedy, Winfried travels to Bucharest to see his daughter, Ines, who works as a corporate consultant. His antics irritate her. Then he dons a cheap wig and begins posing as a life coach named Toni Erdmann.
Peter Simonischek plays the father with a deadpan expression, which only makes his attempts to blend into Ines’ work life more painful. You keep hoping he’ll stop right before things become genuinely awkward. He seldom does.
Sandra Hüller also gives Ines space to push back. At more than two hours, this is a slow burn, yet its long, tense pauses are partly what makes the big laughs land.
11. Good Bye Lenin! (Germany)
Alex faces a rather large problem he must hide from his mother: East Germany no longer exists. She fell into a coma before the Berlin Wall came down. When she wakes up, a doctor cautions that a shock could kill her, so Alex works to keep the old country alive within her room.
Daniel Brühl excels at making a foolish plan seem like a son’s best choice. Alex searches for old food jars and enlists a friend to produce fake news broadcasts. Every new sign of change creates more work for him. If you’ve ever told a small lie to keep the peace, you’ll flinch as the chores mount up. The film also shows why his mother might miss parts of her former life, which lends all that farce some substance.
10. A Man Called Ove (Sweden)
Ove has rules for the entire street, and he expects everyone to follow them. Rolf Lassgård portrays the Swedish widower as a man capable of finding fault with nearly any act of kindness. A new family moves in next door and immediately makes a mess of parking their trailer. Ove has plenty to say about that.
His connection with Parvaneh, played by Bahar Pars, provides the film with its finest comic arguments. She has no intention of leaving him alone simply because he scowls. Adapted from Fredrik Backman’s novel, this is also a film about grief, featuring scenes of suicide attempts, so expect some pain alongside the laughs. Flashbacks to his marriage help explain how he became so cross, while the scenes with his neighbors show how difficult it can be to remain that way.
9. Riders of Justice (Denmark)
Mads Mikkelsen appears to be the last person you would ever want to anger. In this film, he portrays Markus, a soldier who returns home after his wife is killed in a train crash. Another passenger shows up claiming it was murder, and brings friends along who believe they can help prove it.
Their belief in data collides head-on with Markus’ belief in force. Anders Thomas Jensen draws plenty of dark laughs from the contrast between these men, particularly when a debate about the plan begins to resemble a domestic quarrel.
The violence is brutal, yet some of the most amusing scenes simply let these wounded people sit together in a room and attempt to talk. You might begin by anticipating revenge, only to find yourself much more absorbed in their peculiar little group.
8. Amélie (France)
Amélie discovers a box of childhood mementos in her apartment and sets out to give it back to the person it belongs to. That one small gesture launches her on a series of secret good deeds, mixed with a few carefully aimed pranks. Audrey Tautou lends this shy Parisian waitress a sly edge that stops the sweetness from becoming too much. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet revels in tiny details: a garden gnome travels far from home, and scraps from a photo booth turn into clues in a romance.
There’s plenty to look at, but what makes it funny are the awkward efforts to connect. Amélie can devise an entire plan to fix someone else’s life, yet simply talking to the man she likes requires far more courage. If big, loud jokes wear you out, you’ll appreciate how much this film achieves with a single glance.
7. Wild Tales (Argentina)
On certain days, a single minor offense is all it takes to wreck your mood. Wild Tales centers on individuals who carry that sentiment far, far beyond the everyday. Damián Szifron’s Argentine movie presents six distinct stories, ranging from a road rage quarrel to a wedding that turns savage once the bride discovers too much.
There is no lone protagonist to root for, which opens the door to some truly terrible decisions. The parking quarrel in one story escalates into a battle against an entire system. In a different one, neither driver is prepared to let an insult slide. You will likely recognize a grievance of your own, then spend the following few minutes relieved that you never acted on it.
The comedy is vicious and frequently gory, yet the small-minded motives are so transparent that the leap from a rough day to full-blown mayhem comes across as grimly hilarious.
6. One Cut of the Dead (Japan)
The opening section of One Cut of the Dead comes across as a low-budget zombie movie falling apart. A film crew is working in an old warehouse. Zombies turn up, the director keeps shouting, and the camera appears to capture far more than it should.
Be patient. Shin’ichirō Ueda has crafted a comedy in which the awkward-looking moments later prove their worth. Pauses that seem overly long and decisions that appear strange begin to draw laughs for reasons you couldn’t have spotted at first.
If the deadpan style of Troll Hunter appeals to you, this makes a solid follow-up. You’ll appreciate it more if you let the film reveal itself, so the fewer plot details you bring in, the better.
5. 3 Idiots (India)
Rancho has a bad habit, at least as far as his college is concerned. He never stops asking questions. Aamir Khan portrays the engineering student whose unwillingness to learn by rote puts him at odds with the dean. His friends Farhan and Raju are drawn into the trouble as well.
A speech one student has painstakingly memorized goes badly wrong, while Rancho keeps finding ways to deflate the dean’s pride. R. Madhavan and Sharman Joshi bring plenty of warmth to the friends, and Boman Irani makes the man they call Virus an excellent target for their pranks.
Rajkumar Hirani also addresses the pressure of exams and the fear of disappointing your family. Those sections become weighty. Still, the film leaves ample room for songs and silly schemes, so you get a full college comedy along with its plea to let students think for themselves.
4. Troll Hunter (Norway)
The 2010 Norwegian film Troll Hunter is serious about a not-at-all probable subject. The film takes a mockumentary approach, following a group of college students who are out to make a film about a man they suspect to be illegally hunting bears. Instead of bears, they discover the man is one of the nation’s few troll hunters, who manages to battle incredibly tall legendary creatures right under everyone’s noses.
The film even stars Norwegian comedians, although you won’t find many obvious jokes, and you can’t compare it with pure comedy movies. The humor comes from the seriousness with which the characters approach the situation, as if the hunter is all that stands between civilization and the trolls determined to eat people.
3. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain)
The 1988 Spanish black comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown begins with a woman about to kill herself because her fellow voice-over actor’s ex-boyfriend just left her. A frantic call from one of her best friends (also suicidal) interrupts her plans, and her ex-boyfriend’s son, a child he had unbeknownst to her, shows up at her apartment with a fiancée interested in renting the place.
The fiancée asks for a drink and accidentally drinks the wine laced with medicine that the woman intended for her suicide. Layer after layer of coincidence and depressing situations cause one woman after another to consider killing herself, only to be saved – or interrupted – by the next darkly comedic situation to come her way.
Although in Spanish, the film stars a young Antonio Banderas. If you like your comedy dark but with a hopeful message running throughout, you can’t go wrong with this biting social commentary that examines the different types of pressures women feel in modern society.
2. Big Man Japan (Japan)
A 2007 film that’s both surreal and a tongue-in-cheek homage to classic Japanese monster films like “Godzilla,” “Big Man Japan” is part mockumentary and part bizarre comedy. The film starts somewhat low-key, as a documentary following the daily life of a seemingly normal middle-aged businessman. The film eventually reveals that the subject of the “documentary” can, like his father, grow 98 feet tall to battle giant monsters that sometimes attack Tokyo.
The bizarre spectacle of a giant man battling rubbery monsters against fake backdrops of buildings is enough to keep you laughing. Eventually, the movie turns dark as the “documentary” unravels the truth behind life as a giant man.
1. La Cage aux Folles (France)
If you ever saw 1996’s “The Birdcage” starring Nathan Lane and Robin Williams, you may find the story of “La Cage Aux Folles” familiar: A gay couple who owns a drag club attempts to conceal their occupation and lifestyle when they meet their son’s conservative future parents-in-law for the first time. Based on a play, the French version of the film was released in 1979.
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 92 percent positive rating. Decades after its release, the film still strikes a chord. While most of the film will have you chuckling at the crazy situations the characters find themselves in, the message of acceptance makes it a film to remember.
Once you’ve sampled some of what the comedy world has to offer, don’t stop there. If you found the absurdity of “Big Man Japan” a riot, check out what else Japanese filmmakers have released. If the mockumentary Troll Hunter impressed you with its wry humor, watch other Norwegian films. When looking for an introduction to foreign films, comedy is a great category to start with. Humor is a universal language that quickly invests its audience in the film.
From situational comedy to black humor to mockumentary, all of the above-mentioned funniest foreign films have something different to offer and are sure to tickle your funny bone. Have you seen any of these films? What were your thoughts after watching them? Let us know in the comments section below!