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"Dave's Not Here" The Best Stoner Comedies Ever

Stoner comedies are a very specific, very strange, and surprisingly durable little corner of movie history. They have their own rhythms, their own rules, their own kind of logic (or lack of logic) and they have somehow survived generation after generation while changing right along with the culture surrounding marijuana itself.


And with the release of the new Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat comedy The Wrong Girls, I thought this would be a perfect time to celebrate one of the most consistently funny movie subgenres around and put together a list of my 15 favorite stoner comedies of all time.


Now, I'm not ranking these in any particular order. That somehow feels wrong for stoner movies. If you're too high, you're not going to remember whether something was number four or number eleven anyway.


These movies thrive on randomness: random conversations, random detours, random characters appearing out of nowhere, random philosophical observations that seem incredibly profound for about thirty seconds and then disappear forever. So I have decided to honor the genre by listing these randomly. They're 15 favorites, period.


What's fascinating about stoner movies is that their history actually begins with movies that were trying desperately to convince people that marijuana would destroy civilization. Back in the 1930s, anti-drug propaganda produced sensationalistic exploitation films like Marihuana, Assassin of Youth and, most famously, Reefer Madness.


These movies basically claimed that smoking one joint would send perfectly normal people immediately spiraling into madness, violence, sexual depravity and murder. They're so hysterical, so ridiculously exaggerated and so completely detached from reality that decades later they became comedies without anybody having to change a single frame.


That's one of my favorite chapters in movie history. During the midnight-movie boom of the 1970s, audiences rediscovered Reefer Madness and those other old propaganda pictures and began watching them ironically.


People would go into theaters, very often while smoking exactly the substance the movies were warning them about, and laugh hysterically at these incredibly earnest attempts to terrify America. A movie designed as propaganda became part of the very counterculture it was created to attack.


By the 1960s, marijuana had become tied to the hippie movement, anti-establishment politics, music, protests and the growing rejection of traditional American authority. Movies started reflecting that shift.


Easy Rider wasn't a stoner comedy exactly, but it was absolutely crucial in changing the way drugs and counterculture were represented on screen. Marijuana stopped automatically being shorthand for evil and insanity and started becoming associated with freedom, rebellion, youth culture and a rejection of the straight world.


Then Cheech and Chong showed up, and everything changed.


Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are basically the godfathers of the modern stoner comedy. Before the movies, they were doing improvisational comedy onstage, creating characters and routines built around marijuana culture at exactly the moment that culture was exploding.


Their comedy albums became enormously popular, and I grew up listening to those records. I loved them before I even understood half of what they were talking about. When I first heard the legendary "Dave's not here" routine, I didn't understand that the entire joke was that this guy was so unbelievably stoned he couldn't figure out who was standing outside his door. I just thought he was an idiot. And it was still hilarious.


Eventually I got older, understood the references, and realized exactly what Cheech and Chong were doing. They weren't simply making jokes about marijuana, they created an entire comic universe around two lovable idiots drifting through life, avoiding authority figures, getting themselves into ridiculous situations and somehow surviving everything.


When Lou Adler directed Up in Smoke in 1978, Cheech and Chong essentially established the modern template for the stoner movie.


That template is wonderfully simple. Usually you've got two friends. They're smoking marijuana, looking for marijuana, trying to recover marijuana, trying to sell marijuana, or attempting to accomplish some relatively simple task that becomes monumentally difficult because they're high.


Along the way they're usually being chased by cops, parents, bosses, security guards or some other authority figures who take life much more seriously than they do. The protagonists aren't traditionally heroic. They're slackers. They would usually prefer to sit on a couch. But somehow circumstances turn their ordinary day into an epic adventure.


And that's why the stoner comedy blends so naturally with the buddy movie. Cheech and Chong established the formula, but filmmakers have been reinventing it ever since. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle turns the desperate pursuit of hamburgers into an odyssey.


Dude, Where's My Car? turns the simple question contained in its title into an entire movie. Pineapple Express takes two guys getting high and suddenly drops them into an action thriller involving murder, drug dealers and killers. These movies take tiny problems and treat them like Lawrence of Arabia.


But the genre has also produced movies that are much more ambitious than the basic stoner comedy formula would suggest. Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused is one of the great hangout movies ever made, a beautiful, funny, nostalgic portrait of teenagers on the last day of school in 1976.


Ice Cube's Friday is another terrific hangout movie where the entire world seems to exist within a neighborhood and on a front porch. Kevin Smith built an enormous part of his early cinematic universe around Jay and Silent Bob, two drug dealers who somehow became among the most recognizable characters in independent comedy.


And then you've got filmmakers you might not immediately associate with the words "stoner comedy." The Coen Brothers made The Big Lebowski, which is one of the greatest comedies ever made, period. Jeff Bridges' Dude may be the single greatest stoner character in movie history. The Dude is a man whose basic philosophy is to smoke some weed, go bowling, drink White Russians and avoid unnecessary complications, only to find himself trapped inside an increasingly insane kidnapping mystery.


Paul Thomas Anderson made Inherent Vice, basically a stoner film noir in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a permanently baked private detective trying to navigate an impossibly convoluted mystery. That movie brilliantly understands that film noir plots are already confusing enough when everybody is sober, so why not make the detective completely high?


And then the Judd Apatow era arrived and helped push stoner humor completely into the mainstream. Pineapple Express is probably the clearest example, but marijuana became a regular part of the comic universe surrounding Apatow, Seth Rogen and that entire generation of filmmakers and performers.


The stoner stopped being some weird fringe character and became the protagonist of a major Hollywood studio comedy.


There are also stoner movies that wander far outside traditional comedy. You've got crime movies, fantasies, horror films, slashers, animated films and documentaries that embrace marijuana culture.


There are movies like The Harder They Come, Savages, Your Highness, Super High Me, The Tripper, the ridiculous Evil Bong movies, Fritz the Cat, Paul, Ted, Grandma's Boy, PCU, Wet Hot American Summer, the legendary Dave Chappelle classic Half Baked, the various Jay and Silent Bob adventures, and all kinds of films where marijuana may not technically be the entire plot, but it's definitely floating around in the air.


And here's the funny part: I've never actually been much of a stoner myself. I've partaken, certainly, but I was never someone who smoked pot constantly, and I've rarely watched these movies while actually high. I don't need to. The best stoner comedies are funny because they're genuinely funny movies.


Cheech and Chong made me laugh when I was a kid and had no idea what marijuana even did. The Dude is funny whether you're high, sober or halfway through your third White Russian. Jeff Spicoli is one of the great comic characters whether you've ever touched weed in your life.


I think what I really respond to is the counterculture attitude. The best stoner movies are suspicious of authority, dismissive of conventional ambition and completely uninterested in respectable behavior.


Their heroes don't necessarily want the promotion, the big house, the important job or the approval of society. Most of the time they just want everybody to calm down, leave them alone and maybe pass the joint. There's something kind of beautiful about that.


So with The Wrong Girls now carrying that tradition into another generation, I thought it would be fun to look back at the movies that have made me laugh the most over the years.


From Cheech and Chong to the Coen Brothers, from Richard Linklater to Kevin Smith, from Dave Chappelle to Seth Rogen, from front porches to bowling alleys to White Castle, these are 15 of my favorite stoner comedies ever made.


And because this is a stoner list, they're presented in absolutely no particular order.


Now, where did I put that list?



THE 15 BEST STONER COMEDIES OF ALL TIME (in random order):



The movie that basically created the modern stoner comedy, and it still works because Cheech and Chong are genuinely hilarious together. This entry represents all of their movies, which established the template: weed, idiots, authority figures, complete chaos, and a total lack of interest in behaving responsibly.


One of the best examples of the modern stoner comedy because it takes a simple pot-smoking buddy movie and suddenly turns it into a violent action thriller. Seth Rogen and James Franco are terrific together, and the movie is ridiculous, funny, surprisingly exciting, and exactly as stupid as it needs to be.


One of the greatest comedies ever made, stoner or otherwise. Jeff Bridges created an immortal character with The Dude, and the Coen Brothers turned a completely convoluted kidnapping mystery into a wonderfully bizarre movie about bowling, friendship, White Russians, marijuana, and just trying to abide.


A perfect hangout comedy built around Ice Cube and Chris Tucker sitting around a neighborhood, smoking weed, talking nonsense, and getting dragged into increasingly ridiculous situations. This also represents the entire Friday series, but the original remains the classic.


Richard Linklater’s wonderful portrait of teenagers on the last day of school in 1976 is funny, warm, nostalgic, and filled with some of the most memorable stoner characters ever put on film. It barely has a plot, and that is exactly why it works.


Seth MacFarlane took the childhood fantasy of a teddy bear coming to life and logically asked: what happens when that bear grows up to become a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking disaster? Mark Wahlberg and Ted make a terrific comic duo, and both movies are loaded with wonderfully inappropriate jokes.


Jason Sudeikis puts together a fake family to smuggle marijuana across the Mexican border, which naturally leads to one disaster after another. The cast is terrific, Jennifer Aniston is very funny, and the movie has the loose, filthy energy of a good old-fashioned road comedy.


One of the great stoner odyssey movies: two guys get high, decide they desperately need White Castle, and somehow turn that simple goal into an epic adventure. The entire Harold & Kumar series embraced the same absurd spirit, but the original is still the funniest.


Not technically built around marijuana, but absolutely part of the same counterculture comedy tradition. John Landis’ classic is filled with drunkenness, rebellion, stupidity, authority figures being humiliated, and a bunch of guys who have no interest whatsoever in becoming respectable adults.


One of the funniest movie parodies ever made, and its endless drug jokes fit perfectly into this list. John C. Reilly is brilliant, and the movie completely destroys every cliché in the music-biopic genre while somehow also becoming a genuinely great fake music biopic itself.


Kevin Smith’s low-budget breakthrough introduced Jay and Silent Bob and immediately made weed-dealing slackers part of his cinematic universe. This represents the sequels and the larger Clerks world too, but the original remains one of the defining independent comedies of the 1990s.


A bunch of Vermont state troopers behaving like stoned college students while technically serving as law enforcement officers is already a great premise. Broken Lizard turned it into a cult classic filled with pranks, drugs, stupidity, quotable dialogue, and enough material to carry through the sequels.


Mike Judge does what Mike Judge does best: takes ordinary workplace misery and fills it with strange, stupid, deeply flawed people. Jason Bateman is terrific, and the marijuana-fueled scenes involving Ben Affleck’s wonderfully terrible advice help give the movie its laid-back, oddball charm.


Simon Pegg and Nick Frost meet a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking alien and take him on a road trip across America. It is basically a science-fiction stoner buddy comedy, loaded with movie references, geek culture jokes, and a very funny voice performance from Seth Rogen.


An animated movie about talking supermarket food that somehow becomes an R-rated stoner comedy about religion, sex, death, drugs, and existential panic. It is filthy, ridiculous, frequently very funny, and completely committed to pushing its central joke as far as humanly possible.




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