The comedies that film critics have deemed the greatest in history often wrap their humor in an inventive or thought-provoking package.
From Charlie Chaplin's silent-film antics to quote-worthy parodies like "Airplane!," to contemporary classics like Jordan Peele's "Get Out," comedy films have taken many forms over the decades.
To find out which movies in the genre have gained the most critical acclaim over time, we turned to the reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes for its list of the top-rated films labeled "comedy" on its site.
With Rotten Tomatoes' wide-ranging conception of "genre," some may argue that certain of these entries are dramas rather than comedies (or horror in the case of "Get Out"). But we went with their categorization on the site.
We arranged the films in chronological order by decade, stretching from the 1920s to the present.
Here are the 100 best comedy movies of all time, according to critics: