In a year boasting several superlative newcomers, it was notable how often the year’s funniest screen work had goals other than pure laughter, though two successful remakes, The Naked Gun and The Roses, nailed that brief. Often, the most hilarious things I saw this year overlapped with the saddest, most complex and most affecting.
Here’s my list of the 12 funniest things I saw on screen this year.
Best comedy shows & films in 2025 – quick links
The Studio (Apple TV)
Dazzling in its cinematic ambition (those long takes!) and its A-list celebrity cameos, the 10-episode series The Studio was one of the funniest and most rambunctiously enjoyable Hollywood satires in years.
Seth Rogen’s idealistic but inept and conflict-averse studio head Matt Remick had his share of hilariously cringe-inducing moments, from zealously defending the artistic merits of his upcoming film, Duhpocalypse!, to a table of doctors, to ruining Sarah Polley’s perfect take and getting chewed out by Ron Howard.
The moment of the season, however, belonged to Ike Barinholz’s Sal Saperstein, who stumbled into being the toast of the Golden Globes.
The Ballad of Wallis Island
In the film The Ballad of Wallis Island, has-been folkie Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) arrives on the tiny Wallis Island for a lavishly remunerated private gig, only to find the show’s organiser Charles (Tim Key) plans to be the only audience member and has orchestrated a reunion with Herb’s former romantic and musical partner Nell (Carey Mulligan).
Slowly, the put-upon Herb gets to know Charles in all his eccentricity and lingering melancholy. With career-best work from Key and a perfectly controlled tone, it’s both gently funny and gorgeously moving.
North of North (Netflix)
In the series North of North, when we meet spirited young Inuk woman Siaja (Anna Lambe), she’s at a personal and professional crossroads. Rebuilding her life in Ice Cove, a picturesque and remote fictional Arctic community, Siaja is an inspired comic creation, zipping around on her ski-doo dispensing pithy one-liners but also searching for something more in life.
Reviews namechecked Parks and Recreation and Sex and the City, but co-creators Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril had fashioned something entirely their own.
Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee Season 2 (ABC, ABC iview)
How much fun could a televised spelling competition be? Quite a bit of fun in the hands of laconically hilarious Kiwi comic Guy Montgomery, it turns out. With Aaron Chen adding his brand of low-key absurdity as co-host, season two brought a who’s who of Australian comedy as guests including Hannah Gadsby, returning champion Tom Walker, and an all-conquering Kirsty Webeck. With all kinds of madcap games and spelling pedantry, this was inspired chaos.
How are You? It’s Alan Partridge (HBO Max)
Seeing increased discourse about mental health as a bandwagon he could jump onto to revive his constantly flailing career, How Are You? found Partridge in vintage form. The gaffe-prone broadcaster was alternately sympathetic (cycling around Norwich with long-lost childhood friends) and infuriating (a wince-inducingly petty reunion with Tim Key’s Sidekick Simon) in a mockumentary that developed some long-running storylines (Partridge’s fractious, complex relationship with long-suffering assistant Lynn) and required repeat viewings to catch every subtle reference and callback. Back of the net!
Overcompensating (Prime Video)
One of the most successful examples of the online-sketch-to-television pipeline, Benito Skinner’s college dramedy Overcompensating saw him cosplaying as a jock, confiding to a poster of Megan Fox and making a new bestie, all as he wrangled with his sexuality.
Also boasting a riotous Charli XCX guest appearance, Overcompensating was semi-autobiographical but fully hilarious.
Tilly Oddy Black (TikTok)
Viral sketch creator Tilly Oddy Black was everywhere in 2025 with characters like ‘feral niece’ and ‘that friend that doesn’t know they’re rich’, delivering deftly observed snippets of observational comedy perfect for TikTok’s bite-sized format.
With the acting nous and comic chops sharpened at the seminal Upright Citizens Brigade, the Brisbane-born Oddy Black has mastered the form and is set to bring her characters to a stage show in 2026.
A Real Pain
Technically A Real Pain was released in the final days of 2024, but let’s not let that detail exclude one of the year’s most indelible films, comic or otherwise.
On a trip back to their grandmother’s homeland of Poland, two cousins – the motormouth, free spirit Benji (Kieran Culkin) and the buttoned-up, anxious David (Jesse Eisenberg) – reconnect and reckon with generational trauma and the uncertainty of the present. Low-key but hugely resonant, it was both deeply funny and painfully poignant.
Girt (YouTube)
Getting irate over something frivolous is a classic comic trope and the subjects debated in this series of YouTube shorts may set a new standard for frivolousness.
In Sandwich Lover vs 10 Soup Aficionados, debate show host Ben Russell earnestly defends his contention that a hot dog is a sandwich against 10 interlopers, played by familiar faces like Damien Power and Lena Moon, each with names like ‘Crebb’ and ‘Cramwich’.
Each guest is driven to beetroot-faced rage when the host smugly refuses to concede a rhetorical inch. Girt is both incredibly silly and an all-too-accurate parody of the pointlessly adversarial drivel that passes for today’s political debate.
The Chair Company (HBO Max)
In The Chair Company, when henpecked corporate shlub Ron falls through a chair on stage after his big presentation, he believes the incident is not an ill-timed accident, but the iceberg tip of a vast and malicious conspiracy.
Just as he found wild and fresh sketch comedy terrain to explore with I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson expanded cringe comedy with this singular show which found big laughs in surreal and strange places.
DMV (Binge)
DMV initially appeared as a solid, rather than spectacular, workplace comedy with familiar beats like an incompetent boss, in this case an older employee content to run out the clock and an aspiring motivational speaker à la Michael Scott. But the series soon gained momentum. Harriet Dyer is terrific as Colette, a sweet-natured but awkward individual with a knack for getting herself into improbable scrapes.
Hacks Season 4 (Stan)
Far from spinning its wheels in its penultimate season, Hacks kept its plotline hurtling forward. This season discovered new wrinkles in the ever-fraught relationship between Deborah and Hannah as they manoeuvred and blackmailed their way into killer gigs as a pioneering talk show host and head writer respectively. Comic sparks flew as the duo traded cutting one-liners, but also as they united against a system stacked against them.
