Comedy, as you may know, is subjective. Just because you find something absolutely hilarious doesn’t mean a professional film critic will end up feeling the same way, and vice versa. While this may sound like the defense of just about any comedian who ever bombed or got treated to a negative review of their work, you can actually back this up with numbers in some instances. That’s why we decided to turn to Rotten Tomatoes to see which noteworthy comedies were trashed by critics but received significantly higher praise from audiences. Here’s what we found.
6. Dirty Work
In 1998’s Dirty Work, Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange star as half-brothers who start a revenge-for-hire business to pay their father’s medical bills. Directed by Bob Saget and featuring appearances from Chevy Chase, Don Rickles, and Chris Farley, the movie made $10 million on a $13 million budget, and got plenty of negative reviews to match. Marc Savlov from The Austin Chronicle went as far as to call it “an SNL sketch gone horribly awry, and one that drags on long after its daily ration of humor has been exhausted.” The Rotten Tomatoes critic score, currently at 21%, would appear to reflect that sentiment, but the audience score is considerably higher at 66%.
5. Tommy Boy
Tommy Boy, released in 1995, was the first of two film collaborations between SNL stars Chris Farley and David Spade. Farley, starring as Tommy Callahan III, teams up with his late father’s former assistant (Spade) to try to keep his newly inherited auto parts company afloat. It opened to mixed reviews, with Time Out saying, “This cinematic folly from the Saturday Night Live stable is enough to make you yearn for the golden days of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd,” and Roger Ebert included it on his “Most Hated” list. Yet again, the people begged to differ, as an audience score of 90% eclipsed the critic score of 40%.
4. Half Baked
Five years after making his film debut in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Dave Chappelle starred in the 1998 stoner comedy Half Baked. Chappelle (as Thurgood Jenkins) plots with his roommates to sell weed to raise bail for their incarcerated friend, Kenny, played by Harland Williams. The eventual cult classic did well at the box office, but was dismissed by critics, with The Washington Post suggesting someone “definitely inhaled too much before making this one.” The difference on Rotten Tomatoes is once again significant, though, with a critic score of 28% versus an audience score of 81%.
3. Super Troopers
The 2001 Broken Lizard vehicle Super Troopers follows the antics of a group of Vermont state troopers. Out of fear of losing their jobs due to budget cuts, they do their best (or, arguably, worst) to try to compete with the local police department. The New York Times called it “bad and tasteless,” and Roger Ebert said he couldn’t “quite recommend it,” yet another case of the audience feeling vastly different. The current Rotten Tomatoes stats show a 37% critic score and a 90% audience score.
2. Harlem Nights
Eddie Murphy has only directed one movie in his nearly-50-year career, and that was 1989’s Harlem Nights, which he starred in alongside two of his comedy heroes: Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. Murphy and Pryor run a speakeasy in Prohibition-era Harlem that eventually gets them mixed up with mobsters and corrupt cops. It was critically panned, which Murphy felt was due to his directing it, something he never did again. Time has been kind to Murphy’s lone directorial effort, at least as far as Rotten Tomatoes is concerned: At press time, it has a 27% critic score and an 80% audience score.
1. Grandma’s Boy
Produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, 2006’s Grandma’s Boy stars Allen Covert as a struggling video game tester who’s forced to live with his grandmother and her strange friends while trying to hide that fact from his co-workers. A stoner comedy for video game lovers is generally not the formula for critical accolades. A New York Daily News review from the time of release said, “There’s no drug potent enough to make Grandma’s Boy worth 87 minutes of your time,” and a lot of others seemed to agree. A look at the current rankings on Rotten Tomatoes shows a massive divide between the critics and the audience. The critic score sits at just 15% whereas the audience score is at a whopping 85%.
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