Are ‘Superbad’ and ‘Anchorman’ the Best Comedies of the 21st Century So Far?

The New York Times culture section is teeing up a whole week’s worth of distraction from the atrocities going on in the real world with its five-part list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far, as voted on by filmmakers, actors, and “influential film fans” (whatever that means; appears to be a way of saying “we asked novelists and comedians but not critics”) worldwide. 2025 might seem like an odd time to unveil one of these encompassing retrospectives – more than a best of the year or decade, not nearly as definitive as an all-time survey – but it’s also overwhelming to realize we’re 25% of the way through the century already. And, not to put too morbid a point on it, hardly anyone contributing to a list like this right now will be around to do the full-century version circa 2100. (Sometimes it feels like none of us will be still making lists in like, 2030.)

Less ghoulishly, a quarter-century survey allows for a greater diversity of choices, meaning that underrepresented genres like comedy can turn up on this list—as evidenced by the set of the first 20 entries, which kicks off with an immediate feting of the 2007 comedy Superbad – boasting the support of Julianne Moore! No such specific celeb endorsement accompanies Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, but it comes in even hotter at 85.

Presumably other comedies will rank in the list’s top 80. (Watch for Wet Hot American Summer, though it doesn’t appear much on the sample celebrity ballots.) On the other hand, if Superbad and Anchorman are among titles like Inside Llewyn Davis and Minority Report down here, it’s hard to picture that many other broad comedies, especially studio-made ones, beating them out. Maybe Bridesmaids, which appears on a lot of sample ballots. Other than that, though, what… like Wedding Crashers?

Maybe it just seems unlikely because, now that you mention it, these two movies feel both a yin-and-yang kinship with each other and a greater relationship to 21st century film comedy so far. I’ll say it: Maybe Superbad should be even higher.

The two movies share some superficial similarities – and creative forces. Judd Apatow didn’t direct either of them, but he produced both. Seth Rogen, then an Apatow mentee, has a bit part in Anchorman, and graduated to co-writing and co-starring for Superbad, a movie he and his pal Evan Goldberg had been working on since they were younger than the teenage characters. Somehow the two films don’t have other major cast overlap, but between the two of them, they cover a wide swath of this era’s comic talent, both in terms of stars and clutch players: Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Emma Stone, Christina Applegate, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Fred Willard, Kathryn Hahn, Martin Starr, Joe Lo Truglio, and Dave Franco.

Both movies also have to do with boys on the prowl. Superbad tells an American Pie-ish story of Seth (Hill) and Evan (Cera), two best friends who are desperate to hook up with their high school crushes as their senior year comes to an end, embarking on a long journey to obtain booze for a house party as a means of facilitating those connections. More sadly, ’70s news anchor Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) is thrown into an absolute tizzy when a female anchor (Applegate) threatens to shift his news team’s club of boy-men. On the whole, the Channel 4 gang is significantly less savvy about women, or the world in general, than the teenage virgins of Superbad.

As Apatow productions, these movies are emblematic of a particular and quickly dominant approach to studio comedy from roughly 2005 through around 2015, involving a certain on-set looseness and openness to improvisation. In fact, while both movies do include ad-libs, they’re pretty far apart in approach. Jonah Hill and Michael Cera can riff with the best of them, but a look at an early Superbad table read available on the DVD (remember those?), recorded before either of those actors were cast, reveals that a lot of the movie’s spontaneous-sounding dialogue was, in fact, verbatim from the Rogen/Goldberg screenplay. There are also copious outtakes showing alternate lines and variations, but the movie is far more tightly scripted than it sounds, a testament to the natural comic charm Hill and Cera’s line readings bring to the characters, and to the sense of ever-so-slightly heightened but essentially believable reality director Greg Mottola uses in the movie’s staging.

Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay, meanwhile, really do riff with impunity, even when they have a solid scripted version backing them up. Anchorman was rewritten in pre-production and on the fly; again, if you go to certain DVD materials, you can find an entire second movie made up of cut and reworked scenes that were ultimately discarded. From my understanding, the most improv-heavy of the five McKay/Ferrell features is Step Brothers, where simple set-ups allowed Ferrell and John C. Reilly to try out all kinds of bizarre alternates until they found one they liked. But Anchorman is clearly a movie with a lot of flexibility about where it might go.

The result is a pair of comedies with vaguely similar boys-will-be-boys themes and some overlapping technique, yet disparate in their effects. Anchorman is a riotous send-up of ’70s-era sexism and local-news pompousness that peels back loutish male behavior to reveal scared and stupid little boys protecting their treehouse. Superbad might seem like exactly the kind of behavior that will warrant decades-later satire of its era; it even sports a ’70s-influenced soundtrack and title. But while Seth’s stated goal is to be a girl’s drunken mistake, the movie is also clear about how the guys’ single-minded mission masks both an insecurity about their abilities to impress their crushes and their deep affection for each other. For all the talk about taking advantage of young women, Seth embarrasses himself by getting blitzed in front of his crush Jules (Emma Stone), who he learns doesn’t drink, while Evan can’t go through with a drunken hookup even as Becca (Martha MacIsaac) advances on him. The fixation on alcohol is really just a distraction. Come to think of it, Ron Burgundy is awfully fond of “scotchy-scotch-scotch.” And Anchorman, too, maintains a deranged version of a moral compass throughout its cartoonier accents, like a brawl between news teams that turns into a deadly battle royale with visual references to Planet of the Apes.

Both movies, in their own ways, refine the post-SNL frat-boy humor of Animal House and its ilk. They’re still silly and raunchy, and they don’t let good intentions get in the way of a strong gag, but neither movie ever defaults to easy snobs-versus-slobs cliches. In fact, they shift that familiar comfort-comedy dynamic to reframe what the slobs are actually fighting against, really – their unease around women. Some later comedies, like the aforementioned Bridesmaids, would place female characters at the foreground, rather than including them as foils to the men experiencing some modicum of growth. But as representatives of those Apatow-driven years, where movies took one last gulp of TV-comedy influence before the lines between the two blurred again (and studios lost interest in making broad comedies for theaters), Superbad and Anchorman deserve their best-of-the-century plaudits. In retrospect, they both feel like preparation for whatever was coming next.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.