The 12 Funniest Campus Comedies We’ve Ever Seen

When we say “campus comedies,” we are talking about movies set at a college or university. This has been a popular genre for decades, though the peak of the campus comedy probably came in the 1970s or 1980s. Oftentimes, these are also “snobs vs. slobs” comedies, a la Caddyshack, which we will name check as it is not a campus comedy.

It makes sense to set so many movies at colleges, given that such a large portion of the filmgoing public has long been teenagers. Now, these comedies, even the funny ones, aren’t always exactly intellectual.

And, yes, we will acknowledge that we will definitely include movies that have material that does not stand the test of time, and we don’t like the sexist or homophobic elements of many an old school comedy. That being said, one joke, even a dodgy one, does not define a whole movie.

The crew in Real Genius is on the other end of the educational spectrum. While Delta House’s collective GPA was so low they got booted from the school, Real Genius centers on a group of extremely bright students. Young Mitch Taylor, he’s all of 15, gets into the prestigious Pacific Tech. There, he becomes roommates with Chris Knight, played with gusto by Val Kilmer.

Kilmer was, before turning to dramas, a genuinely talented comedic actor. Knight may be a genius, but he’s also a goof-off, a source of anarchy that helps Mitch unwind and cope with college.

Real Genius is funny, and it involves plenty of campus hijinks, but it approaches all that from a different perspective than Animal House. It’s not as vulgar, and the students are generally more likeable and nicer. The villain, such as it is, is Professor Jerry Hathaway. Hathaway is played by William Atherton, and if you know that name, you know that he absolutely nailed this role.

A lot of campus comedies heavily focus on male characters. Well, for many years most comedies outside of romcoms were male driven, but that’s a story for another day. Pitch Perfect takes a decidedly distaff turn, though, with several female characters taking the lead. One imagines the success of Bridesmaids was still reverberating through studios, leading to a raunchy collegiate comedy centered on female leads.

While, for many, Rebel Wilson enjoyed a breakthrough role in Pitch Perfect, Anna Kendrick is our ostensible lead. She gets to play things a bit more straightforward, allowing the rest of the cast to shoulder the load of absurdity and crudeness. Oh, and the whole thing centers on a cappella, so if that isn’t your thing, well, you’ve been forewarned.

Rodney Dangerfield goes to college. We could imagine that being the entire pitch for Back to School and getting greenlit. You take an established comedic persona, and you drop it within an easy-to-understand paradigm. That’s how you turn a budget of $11 million into $91 million at the box office. The poster is just Rodney Dangerfield in a cap and gown! They knew what they were selling.

Dangerfield plays Thornton Mellon, a self-made millionaire whose son goes off to college. Having never gone to college himself, and idly rich, Thornton decides to join him. Then, you know, he does Dangerfield stuff. Also Oingo Boingo and Kurt Vonnegut show up. Billy Zabka plays a smarmy college diving star. Oh, and be on the lookout for a young Robert Downey Jr., as this is one of his first roles.

Here’s a more-recent movie that is a throwback, in a way, to the campus comedies of yore. It’s even set in 1980. With the iconic high school film Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater mined his teen years in Texas to create a lived-in hangout comedy. Well, when Linklater started college at Sam Houston State, he was on a baseball scholarship, and once again he mined his experiences with Everybody Wants Some!!

Set at a fictional Texas college, our point-of-view character is Jake Bradford, an incoming freshman who has a baseball scholarship as a pitcher. The movie takes place over the few days after the students have moved in but before classes start. They party, drink, go to clubs, and even play a bit of baseball. It’s a study in laidback college chaos from a director who does this sort of thing as well as anybody.

So, it turns out that Animal House did not invent the campus comedy. No, they go back a long time. In fact, many early comedies were set at colleges. That includes 1932’s Horse Feathers, which stars none other than the Marx Brothers. While it is not as iconic as Duck Soup, there is plenty of humor to be found in Horse Feathers.

Groucho plays the new president of Huxley College, and his son Frank (played by Zeppo) is one of the students at the school. Frank suggests they recruit professional football players to join Huxley’s team (which is cheating, but oh well) to beat their rivals Darwin. However, due to classic Marx Brothers mayhem, Chico and Harpo are recruited instead by accident. Horse Feathers culminates in maybe the most-anarchic football game captured in a movie.

When we say “campus comedies” or “slobs vs. snobs,” there’s a good chance either way your first thought is, “Oh, like Animal House?” It is probably the quintessential version of both kinds of movies. It was at the vanguard of ‘70s comedy, or at least it was on the big screen. Animal House built upon the edgy humor of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, but brought it to the world of film.

Directed by John Landis, Animal House focuses on the loutish guys at Delta House at the fictional Faber College. They party, they carouse, they torment the stodgy dean. All that stuff has become synonymous with the genre.

John Belushi, one of the original Saturday Night Live cast members, emerged as a movie star. It spawned a TV spinoff, and also a few imitators, though none had the seismic success of Animal House.

This is the one animated entrant on this list. It’s also the only prequel. And, we suppose, the only one focused on monsters. There wasn’t really anywhere to go, in terms of future storytelling, after 2001’s beloved Pixar movie Monsters, Inc., but by this point Disney was mining Pixar for sequels. Thus, we got Monsters University.

Sully and Mike are our main characters again, but this film takes place in their college days at the titular school for scaring. Since movies need stakes, by and large, Sully and Mike find themselves as rivals as they enter school, a distinctly different relationship to their close friendship found in the first movie.

While some Pixar sequels have felt like cash-ins, Monsters University justifies its existence, and does feel like a successful take on the campus comedy from the Pixar world.

Frankly, it’s kind of a surprise Adam Sandler only did one college comedy. The Waterboy is effectively a combination of his first two starring vehicles, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. It’s education meets sports, with Sandler playing one of his classic weirdo characters.

Bobby Boucher is, well, a waterboy for a Louisiana college program. He’s the butt of many jokes and generally mistreated by the team, but then it turns out when Bobby gets angry, he can channel it into being a devastating force on the field.

Thus, Bobby becomes a defensive star for the team. It’s a sports comedy, to me sure, but it mines the college environment, and college experience, as well. Movies can be multiple things! Stick that in your medulla oblongata!

Not since Animal House has a college comedy had a bigger impact on the film landscape. This movie earned many an imitator, but also helped bolster the careers of Will Ferrell (good!) and director Todd Phillips (um…a mixed bag). Oh, also Vince Vaughn, which is also a mixed bag from an output perspective. In the movie, three men in their thirties, unhappy with their lives, decide to start a fraternity, and then frat antics ensue.

Old School became oft quoted and earned many big fans. Some of those fans perhaps specifically tapped into elements of the movie that we don’t love per se. It’s the same thing with another Phillips movie, The Hangover, which got so pear shaped that the third film in that series is more or less a “screw you” to people who loved the first two movies. Quibbles aside, Old School was included on this list for a reason. Will Ferrell is his bag covers a lot of sins.

Once again, we flip the script, because where Old School is one of the more prurient campus comedies, Damsels in Distress is as heady as any movie on this list gets. Are you familiar with the works of Whit Stillman? He became known with his first film Metropolitan, which earned him a best screenplay nomination from the Oscars. Stillman would go on to direct Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco prior to Damsels in Distress, which came over a decade later.

Stillman movies are known for distinct dialogue and wordy characters that are perhaps not as smart and helpful as they believe themselves to be. Also, usually well-off and from money. Well, “Not as smart and helpful as they think they are” is pretty much the perfect description of, like, half of college students. Notably, the star of Damsels in Distress is a young, pre-directorial fame Greta Gerwig.

21 Jump Street, the TV show, was a sincere drama about young-looking cops infiltrating high school. The film adaptation was mostly using that idea for a, well, jumping-off point. 21 Jump Street, the movie, is a high school comedy with a lot of meta humor about the show, but also all the intellectual property mining in Hollywood. It was also a big success, which led to a sequel. This time, we were off to college for a new take on campus comedies.

22 Jump Street admittedly redoes a lot of the jokes and bits of the first film, but now at a college instead of a high school. At least it got to mine spring break for some fresh humor. 22 Jump Street is good, and in terms of sheer funniest, on par with the first movie. It also shows that, yeah, maybe two was enough, and there has not been a third.

For Millennials, the defining film of all campus comedies may just be Legally Blonde. Elle Woods is a chipper, but materialistic, sorority girl who has little direction beyond campus life until her boyfriend dumps her and heads off to Harvard law school to get serious about life. Well, Elle decides to try to get into Harvard law school as well.

In the process, Elle becomes more driven and self-determined, growing as a person. She even gets to show off some proper legal skills. And, of course, the movie is also quite funny. Reese Witherspoon utterly shines as Elle Woods. Legally Blonde manages to be funny, sweet, and surprisingly deep. What, like it’s hard?

You might also like this list of Shameless ’80s Comedies That Don’t Care If You’re Offended or this list of the Funniest Comedy Movies We’ve Ever Seen.