Take a break from your boring day with these funny movies on Netflix
What can be better than a funny movie to take your mind off the stress & boredom of an uneventful day? As it turns out, laughter is said to be therapeutic, for good, scientific reasons. Laughter has been studied to have many positive effects, including enhanced memory, improved judgment and decision making, and more willingness to take risks. Humor can also help us cope with otherwise unspeakable situations.
In their book The Humor Code: A Global Search For What Makes Things Funny, Peter McGraw & Joel Warner explain, “Plato and Aristotle contemplated the meaning of comedy . . . Charles Darwin looked for the seeds of laughter in the joyful cries of tickled chimpanzees. Sigmund Freud sought the underlying motivations behind jokes in the nooks and crannies of our unconscious.”
We’re all equally tickled & intrigued by humor. Having established that, let’s dive into some of the best comedy offerings at Netflix right now.
Always Be My Maybe
Ali Wong & Randall Park bring back the magic of their Fresh Off The Boat chemistry in Always Be My Maybe. They play childhood sweethearts Sasha & Marcus. They bump into each other after 15 years & immediately we’re made to wonder: is this life giving them a second chance? But before that, we need to know: what led to their falling out?
The couple decides to rekindle their romance & to top it all off, we’ve a matchless cameo by Keanu Reeves in a very uncharacteristic role. There are a lot of endearing things about the movie: it’s a cliche-ridden romcom, it plays out the quirks of the Asian-American culture with incisive hilarity, and the protagonists are both refreshingly independent & opinionated.
Wine Country
When Amy Poehler sets her mind to make you laugh, she makes sure she does everything to make it happen, Leslie-Knope-style. Even if that means bringing the likes of Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Paula Pell, Ana Gasteyer, Emily Spivey, and Tina Fey together on your screen. That’s the Netflix magic right there.
This group of six friends decide to celebrate a birthday weekend in Napa. The plan, of course, is to get drunk & let the hijinks take over. Wine Country sure seems like a girls-gone-wild comedy, but its no The Hangover. Or The Hangover Part II. Or The Hangover Part III. The comedy is free-flowing, so much so that it’s impossible to tell apart scripted jokes from improvised punches.
Bad Teacher
Cameron Diaz is best when she’s allowed to let loose. That much we’d established right when she debuted against Jim Carrey in The Mask back in 1994. In Bad Teacher, she fully embraces the nastiness that someone completely unfit for the profession can carry. She arrives hungover to the class, and sleeps in while the kids look at a television for their education.
Also starring Justin Timberlake, Lucy Punch, John Michael Higgins, and Jason Segel, Bad Teacher follows a middle school teacher who acts like a hormonal teenager more than the kids: she smokes up joints in between classes, has raunchy sexual encounters, lies some more to cover other lies, and has a change of heart about the children’s education, albeit for selfish reasons.
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before
Based on Jenny Han’s eponymous Young Adult series, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before is the epitome of a heartwarming YA plot. Even though the next two movies in the series are also available on Netflix now, the first part remains the best & most watchable. No wonder the franchise sent Lana Condor & Noah Centineo’s careers soaring right away. It’s also proof of just how much Netflix loves romcoms.
The story follows the misadventures after Lara Jean’s secret love letters mistakenly get posted & sent to her crushes. In the events that follow, we see her heartwarming relationships with her siblings, her historic & present friendships, her endearing clumsiness, and a make-believe romance that — as it was meant to —turns into an actual romance.
