After seeing Knocked Up on the weekend, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was, of course, that this was an awesomely hilarious movie, rife with great jokes and references and yet another bravura performance from Paul Rudd, who is now on my mancrush list.

The second thought I had was far less positive. It had to do particularly with Katherine Heigl, an actress who’s received (mostly) positive reviews from her work in the film. Despite those notices, however — and, sure, she’s mostly inoffensive — I think it’s fair to conclude that she is, by and large, not a very funny person. She isn’t witty, outlandish or otherwise hilarious. She does not make quips, nor use sarcasm well, nor know the first thing about a good pratfall. Any laughter that surrounds her is likely to always be due to someone else.

Despite all that, though, Katherine Heigl is likely to go on to star in a slew of comedies. Most of these will be bad. Some, I guess, could be good, but again, it will be due to other people’s efforts, and never her directly. In following this path, she’s set to join up with an ever-growing cadre of actors and actresses who have defined themselves as ‘comedic’ performers despite never really being funny. Some of them have even gone on to fantastic success, despite never really being funny.

Starting with Heigl — the newest addition to the list — I’ve put together a list of the Top 10 comedic actors who are not at all funny. These people are not — most of them — bad people. Some of them are even good actors! They’re just very bad comedic actors. If they’d just stop considering themselves funny, I could even see myself liking some of them.

Top 10 Comedic Actors Who Aren’t At All Funny

10. Katherine Heigl

I covered her inclusion in the introduction, but I will admit that she could prove me wrong on this one. It’s possible that Knocked Up won’t be the first in a long line of comedic leading roles for her. But considering her also limited dramatic abilities, the fact that recent interviews have made her seem to be an utterly loathsome person and my own longstanding grudge against anyone involved in the original production of My Father, The Hero (And, yeah, that includes you, Depardieu), I’m not exactly filled with hope.

9. Owen Wilson

I feel bad about including him, as he’s a legitimately talented writer and, often, a more than decent actor. He can play a quirky supporting character in a drama/comedy like none other, and the movies he wrote with Wes Anderson are amongst my favourites of all time. The guy’s a fucking Oscar winner, for Christ’s sake.

Still, though, he sucks at comedies. Especially broad, audience-pleasing type comedies. He added nothing except a distraction from Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers, and his work in shit like Starsky and Hutch and Shangai Knights is really just dreadful. His acting style is nearly identical to Matthew McConaughey’s, except that McConaughey looks better with his shirt off and has the good sense not to try and be like Will Ferrell all the damn time.

8. Jamie Foxx

Jamie Foxx is a pretty good actor. We all saw him in Ray. And then, again, in the many many months following Ray, in which he continued to pretend to be Ray Charles at every press event, awards gala, talk show and — presumably — family function he got within fifty yards of. All throughout that, the weird part was that the media kept dropping references to Jamie Foxx being a former comedic actor. There was clearly a discrepancy there, as Jamie Foxx has never said anything funny ever.

I really believe that. I believe it so much I’ll put it in bold. Jamie Foxx has never said anything funny ever. All you have to do to dispute the claim that he was once a comedic actor is to look at his résumé. The Truth About Cats & Dogs? Not funny! Booty Call? Not funny! Bait? Not even remotely funny. Collateral? Okay, a little funny, but only because Tom Cruise makes for a hilarious hitman.

Hell, he has a more legitimate claim to being a rapper than he does a damn comedic actor.

7. Ben Stiller

Some might dispute this, but let me explain. Stiller is, like Owen Wilson, a talented guy. He was, once, a very promising director, with films like Reality Bites and (seriously, it’s good) The Cable Guy to his credit. However, pretty much all of his recent comedic efforts have proved he’s way more interesting and funny behind the camera than he is in front of it.

As an actor, Stiller has exactly two characters. Either he’s an extremely neurotic “straight man” character, or he’s a completely over-the-top doofus with weird hair. There really is no middle ground. And it’s just utterly tiresome at this point, because his movies are all formula and nothing else. It’s all “Here’s wacky Ben Stiller playing dodgeball!” or “Here’s straight man Ben Stiller macking on Jenifer Aniston!” or “Here’s straight man Ben Stiller running from a dinosaur or some shit.”

It’s played out. And, looking back on the movies Stiller was in that are legitimately funny (There’s Something About Mary, Zoolander and, marginally, Keeping the Faith), they’re generally funny for reasons that have nothing to do with Stiller’s comedic performance.

6. Christina Applegate

The effect I described in my introduction in relation to Katherine Heigl could rightly be called the Applegate effect. Christina’s been appearing in various low-rent comedies for years, all stemming from the fact that she was, once, a cast member on Married… With Children and thus is convinced that she was part of what was funny with that show.

She wasn’t.

She gets such a high spot on this list nearly entirely on the strength of The Sweetest Thing, a comedy she made with Cameron Diaz that was, I guess, supposed to be a “gross-out comedy for chicks.” It was awful. Like, beyond awful. It had everything bad about movies. I can’t even begin to describe some of the offenses this movie committed. Suffice it to say there’s a lengthy sequence in which all of the main cast sings a song about big penises and then, all together, gestures at their own vaginas.

I almost put Cameron Diaz on this list, too, as she’s clearly another person who’s been appearing in comedies that is not at all funny. However, Diaz, unlike Applegate, has seemed to have realized over the last few years that comedy is not her strength, and settled into a nice “I’m a stupid airhead!” niche for herself. Applegate, on the other hand, continues to try really really hard, appearing in otherwise funny films like Anchorman and adding absolutely nothing to the mix.

This fall, she has a new sitcom. It will be neither funny nor successful. You can bank on that.

5. Martin Lawrence

I don’t even know what you could say about Martin Lawrence. His continued success in films is so baffling that he’s like the Stonehenge of actors. How did he get so famous? How does he not fall over? Did aliens build him? These are all legitimate questions to ask when considering the storied career of not-at-all-funny comedic actor Martin Lawrence.

Just scan his filmography and try to find a movie that was even remotely funny or enjoyable. Black Knight? Not even close! Big Momma’s House? Not a chance. Bad Boys II? Sure, if you find Cuban-American relations hilarious. Big Momma’s House II? What are you, stupid or something?

4. Wanda Sykes

Though not as big a mystery as Martin Lawrence’s continued success, Wanda Sykes’ enduring presence is still pretty fucking intriguing. She appeared as if from nowhere in 2001, and suddenly everyone was clamoring on about how funny and fresh she was. But she never said anything funny. Her whole schtick was just reacting angrily to things that, normally, wouldn’t make people so angry. That was it. And she was supposed to usher in a new era of comedy.

Even now, with numerous failed sitcoms, low-grossing films and not-so-many accolades, Wanda Sykes finds ways to stay on TV. It just doesn’t feel like an awards show now without Wayda Sykes saying something painfully unfunny at some point during the evening. And she’s still getting bit parts in movies (like the upcoming Evan Almighty), which they always feature in the trailer as if she’s some great draw, despite proving again and again that she is nothing of the sort.

Is it a government conspiracy? A pact with Satan? How do we reverse this curse and get her the hell away from things that are supposed to be funny and enjoyable?

3. The Wayans Brothers

I’m cheating some with this pick, but it’s hard to pick just one of the Wayans Brothers when you’re dealing with painfully unfunny people. The Wayans have a storied history of making absolutely unwatchable films that somehow go on to become huge box office and DVD successes. Their filmography is another that speaks largely for itself: Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, White Chicks, Little Man. They really do love two word titles that kind of sum everything up, don’t they?

The Wayans’ success isn’t as mysterious as Lawrence’s, nor is their cultural endurance as maddening as Wanda Sykes’ is. Individually, all of the main Wayans — Damon, Keenan Ivory, Marlon and Shawn — have the potential to be funny (In Living Color had its moments), and all they’ve really done is tap into America’s love of comedies that do little more than reference other, more popular movies, so that the audience can be all “Ha ha, I remember that scene!”

Still, though, together, they’ve never done anything I could ever call funny, and I really doubt their ability to ever do so in the future.

2. Molly Shannon

Oh, Molly Shannon, the sequence of events that led to you being sometimes thought of as “funny” is so damn coincidental it’s like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel. See, Saturday Night Live did, for a long time in the 90s, suck hardcore. And not like it sucks hardcore now — this was a whole different kind of suck. It was, essentially, just Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade and others making gay jokes and talking about cocks. So, at the end of one particularly bad season, Lorne Michaels fired all those guys.

And so began a new era, which was — and a lot of this was media-driven — to be known as some sort of groundbreaking, women-on-top era, spearheaded by people like Cheri Oteri, Ana Gasteyer and, yes, Molly Shannon. And while, yeah, Oteri and Gasteyer could be pretty good, Shannon was almost never good. It was only her stupid rendition of the recurring Mary Catherine Gallagher character that, somehow, caught on with the audience. And, unfortunately, it was that character that made her a star.

Molly Shannon makes everything worse. That might seem harsh, but it’s true. There’s not a single thing Molly Shannon has been in that would not be better had she not been in it. She’s marred episodes of Scrubs and 30 Rock, along with a whole bevy of films, from Wet Hot American Summer to Serendipity to Happiness.

1. Robin Williams

This can’t be a surprise. Of all the actors on this list who’ve been posing as comedic actors despite not being funny, Williams is the one who’s been doing it the longest. And, sure, maybe there was a point in his early days, when he was still drug-addled, that he actually could make a decent joke, but those days are long behind him. Now, Williams is known for just rambling on and on forever, making Dennis Miller-style pop culture references that, unlike Miller’s, don’t make sense regardless of how many issues of The Economist you’ve read.

His status amongst movie goers is well-established at this point. He’s kind of the Norman Rockwell of comedies at this point — this safe, established, mostly non-threatening guy that people can talk about as “funny” without worrying about potentially offending anyone else in the room. And that’s the biggest problem with Williams’ comedy. It’s so inoffensive and appealing to everybody that it can’t possibly even be comedy. When the whole audience — which contains six year olds and sixty year olds — is laughing, it probably isn’t comedy. More than likely, it’s just Robin Williams speaking in a crazy voice. Or accidentally spraying himself with a bunch of fecal matter from his RV.

Williams is another guy who is, actually, a decent enough actor. His dramatic roles are good. His creepy bad guy roles are even better, generally. But no matter how hard he tries to get away, he always ends up back in the so-called ‘comedic’ realm, annoying the hell out of anybody who isn’t tired of his “check out all these various accents” brand of humour.

Conclusions

That’s a long list, and it got a little bit mean at points. If you happen to be one of the people I named above, I apologize. I am sure you are a wonderful person in your home life. Maybe even a funny person! I know that I am often at my funniest when I am not being recorded. However, even if that’s the case, you should probably stop trying to be funny on film. Otherwise I’ll probably have to be mean to you again.

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

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