Brooks. ZAZ. Python. The Wayans. These are the lords of the spoof movie, the jokiest jesters of cinema, parked over in the corner and facing the wall for torching the teacher with a harsh-but-true comical observation. And they might be the smartest people in the room.

Key words being might be. One thing’s for sure: They make funny movies. Specifically, movies that make fun of movies, and sometimes even themselves. Mel Brooks didn’t invent the film parody — most likely Edwin S. Porter did, with 1905’s The Little Train Robbery, with which he showed the ability to laugh at himself by mocking his own film from two years prior, The Great Train Robbery — but he’s the progenitor of the modern formula, using a well-worn genre as a springboard for a blend of nonsense gags and self-aware comedy. The best of them deliver non-stop jokes or searing social commentary, or sometimes both. 

Which brings us to the new 2026 Scary Movie reboot, which apes the 2022 Scream reboot, just as the original 2000 Scary Movie aped the original 1995 Scream (which, to split a hair, was more of a deconstruction of horror tropes than a parody). Got all that? I know — when the snake of a joke loops around to bite itself in the ass, things get a little wonky-Tuesday. But the entire point of the genre is to let rip and take no prisoners, kind of like a celebrity roast of Hollywood itself. 

The spoof was in a sorry state for a couple of decades. Multiple watered-down Scary Movie sequels, Superhero Movie, and Meet the Spartans were among a glut of desperate junk making a variety of scattershot references instead of, you know, writing actual jokes. Then The Naked Gun reboot dropped in 2025, followed by the new Scary Movie (which ain’t great, but it grossed a staggering $231 million at theaters worldwide) with a hotly anticipated Spaceballs sequel due next year. With that in mind, let’s look back at the spoofs of the modern era that hit Ludicrous Speed — you know, the ones that make you go, Damn, they’ve gone plaid!

1. This 1974 all-timer was the first of two parodies by Mel Brooks released in the same year — Young Frankenstein followed closely thereafter — establishing the formula for the modern spoof. Brooks directed no less than eight such films, skewering a variety of genres, from the Hitchcock psychological thriller (High Anxiety) to Biblical epics (History of the World Part I), and Star Wars (more on that in a minute, since it deserves its own spot on this list). Blazing Saddles tears the Western down to the studs, targeting gross racial stereotypes as it tells the story of a Black sheriff (Cleavon Little) enforcing the law in an all-white frontier town — and Brooks’ stick in the eye of prejudice was never sharper. That, and the jokes are still really f—ing funny. The campfire fartfest? The “biker” with handlebars mounted on his horse’s saddle? The brawl at the end that absolutely decimates the fourth wall? Brooks may be 100 years old now, but his comedy is timeless. Fifty-two years later, we’re still laughing our asses off, especially at people who judge others by the color of their skin. You know: morons.

   Where to stream Blazing Saddles

2. Recently proclaimed to be the funniest movie ever by Variety, this ZAZ joint — that’s Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, as in writing/directing/producing team David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams — is an unapologetically stoopid joke machine that ratatats the funny at us until the laughs all run together into silly soup and we’re upside down and sideways and skewed all at the same time. Mission accomplished: entropy! Leslie Nielsen anchors this deconstruction of police procedurals and noir-dick stories, his far-beyond-clueless cop sowing chaos with every deadpan line reading and slapstick gag. (And the 2025 remake/reboot anchored by Liam Neeson does it justice with the chili dog bit alone.) But the funniest ever? Yeah, probably — at least in the home of the land, and the laaaaaaaand of the free.  

   Where to stream The Naked Gun (1988)

3. This absurdist romp, located equidistant on the release calendar between Camelot and Excalibur, finds the Python squad turning Arthurian legend inside-out and running higgledy-piggledy through the countryside, parading its intestines in the air with lunatic glee. It’s insane! It’s endlessly quotable! It’s a moronic array of non sequiturs and a musical! And hidden inside its Trojan rabbit is… nothing. Nothing at all. This is comedy for its own sake, senselessly silly. Ni, I say. Ni.

   Where to stream Monty Python and the Holy Grail

4. The disaster movie trend of the ’70s yielded this 1980 ZAZ gem, their first collab with Leslie Nielsen, who brought what he learned from starring in The Poseidon Adventure to this movie so everyone could set it on fire. Nielsen supports primary castmates Robert Hays, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julie Hagerty, and Lloyd Bridges, and who can forget June Cleaver herself, Barbara Billingsley, as the Jive Lady? Are we supposed to be laughing at that bit still? I dunno. I’ll let someone else wrestle with that one. But the inflatable autopilot? Hilarious. Surely the GOAT spoof movie? Maybe. Just don’t call me a goat.

   Where to stream Airplane!

5. I see your schwartz is as big as mine. Brooks dropped this gleeful blaspheming of Star Wars in 1987, four years after The Return of the Jedi. The sci-fi franchise had grown stale, and Brooks was a bit behind the curve. But that didn’t mean we didn’t laugh our tuckeses off at Dark Helmet, Princess Vespa and John Candy as Barf the Mog — half-man, half-dog. Awoo! And we’re still laughing now as Spaceballs maintains its relevancy during a time when Star Wars returned triumphantly, then fell flat on its face — inspiring the pending release of Spaceballs: The New One in 2027, which officially brought the beloved Rick Moranis out of decades of retirement. If that isn’t evidence of Spaceballs’ cultural cache, nothing is.

   Where to stream Spaceballs

6. Plot, schmot. The ZAZzers strung together 26 bits and called it a movie, which is anarchy, my friends. Anarchy! Not that we’d want it any other way. It’s notable for featuring a stupidly early Val Kilmer performance, an insane Bruce Lee parody and a bevy of deeply politically incorrect comedy involving the names of Asian people and, shall we say, the upper portion of the female anatomy. The movie established ZAZ as the princes of spoofs (Brooks was the king, of course), enjoying a terrific run with Airplane!, Top Secret, and three Naked Guns (not to mention how members of the eventually splintered creative trio were involved with several Scary Movie movies and the Hot Shots films). It also differed from Brooks’ work by being a smattering of parodies, a variation on the spoof formula that would be adopted by other films later on this list.

   Where to stream The Kentucky Fried Movie

7. Speaking of. Sure, this is primarily a Top Gun take-the-pisser, but it also takes shots at Rocky, 9½ Weeks, First Blood, and Gone With the Wind. Charlie Sheen plays the Cruise analog who works through an array of quasi-skits that reward you for your awareness of various ubiquitous movies, and are pretty funny — until you realize that, in retrospect, this was basically the beginning of the end of the genre indulging any serious satire beyond big fat Hollywood targets. It would come back around eventually (perhaps because by the 2020s, so many things needed serious satirizing). But don’t blame director Abrahams; he and Sheen landed the plane on the jokecraft carrier more often than not.

   Where to stream Hot shots!

8. The Wayans Brothers spearheaded this shit-taker of horror movies that know they’re horror movies, drafting off the success of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. And it was a monster hit, raking in $278 million. It works, and it hits easy marks like The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix, even though nowadays, parodies of The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix are worth their weight in free-in-the-mail AOL CD-ROMs and Beanie Babies. Six sequels would follow, three of them coming after control was wrested from the Wayans, who would eventually reclaim their throne for the new 2026 reboot/requel/rewhatever. The Scary success also spawned utter slopola like Date Movie, Superhero Movie, and a bevy of sub-par referential junk that were about as funny as the jokes in a Bazooka Joe gum wrapper. Mixed bag here, is what I’m saying. 

   Where to stream Scary Movie (2000)

9. Scary Movie meets Blazing Saddles in this clever-as-all-hell spoof from director Tim Story and writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins, who begin with a brilliantly simple premise: If the token Black people in horror movies always die first, what happens when everyone in a horror movie is Black? Jordan Peele’s pioneering Get Out is another reference point as the characters work through a quasi-Cabin in the Woods scenario, funneled through a horribly racist board game they find in their remote weekend rental. This is easily the smartest stoopid movie on this list. 

   Where to stream The Blackening

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.