Spoof comedies can sometimes feel like a scarce resource. They tend to appear in brief, market-saturating feasts, as in the early ‘90s or the mid-2000s, before disappearing for lengthy periods of famine, as in the past decade-plus of film comedy recession. But the history of the form, defined here as broad comedies structured to poke fun at familiar genres while prioritizing a great volume and variety of jokes, goes back nearly as far as cinema itself. (The boundaries are always debatable. For example, this piece considers Monty Python a whole other thing, even though their joke-packed features have elements of both parody and satire.)
The 5 best spoof movies to watch after Naked Gun
