There were a lot of funny movies in 2024, but most of them weren’t what we’d call ‘comedies.’ There were funny action movies (The Fall Guy, Bad Boys: Ride or Die), funny dramas (Anora, Dìdi), funny horror movies (The Substance, Lisa Frankenstein), funny thrillers (Drive-Away Dolls, Emilia Pérez), and so on, but not many straight-up comedies. One film, however, embraced the very roots of comedy, combining silent slapstick with very early animated comedy to great effect, and it’s now free to watch basically everywhere. That would be the absurdist, utterly wacky delight, Hundreds of Beavers.
Hundreds of Beavers is co-written by its lead star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who gives one of the best physical performances in years. It’s a good thing he was a co-writer, because most actors wouldn’t do what he’s subjected to in director Mike Cheslik’s film. The movie is a microbudget passion project made for $150,000 over the course of many years; actual filming took place in the subzero winters of Wisconsin and Michigan during 2019 and 2020. Finding time and money for the editing and post-production took two years, and then finding some kind of distribution after its successful festival run took another two years before Hundreds of Beavers was released to great acclaim in 2024, garnering a 97% critics’ score and an 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Give this movie a chance, just 10–15 minutes. Yes, it’s a silent, black-and-white movie with really only four actors (alongside many extras in human-size animal suits), but it’s frequently hilarious and incredibly imaginative. This is comedy, stripped of all Hollywood artifice, pure and distilled. The synopsis for Hundreds of Beavers reads as follows (and you can watch the trailer below):
In this silent supernatural epic, a drunken applejack salesman is thrust into the frigid wilderness. Can he go from Zero to Hero, become North America’s greatest fur trapper, and defeat hundreds of beavers?
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Other Great Comedy Movies of 2024
While Hundreds of Beavers is my pick for the best straight-up comedy of the year (and not a film from a different genre that happens to have some humor), there were several other great comedies in 2024. Jesse Eisenberg’s movie A Real Pain is a great character-based comedy about two cousins (Eisenberg and a monumental, sure-to-get-an-Oscar-nomination Kieran Culkin) traveling to Poland to learn about their grandmother and their Jewish ancestry.
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Brothers may be very wacky (and downright dumb at points), but it has some of the most laugh-out-loud moments of 2024. The Prime Video crime comedy has a brilliant cast — Josh Brolin, Peter Dinklage, Glenn Close, Brendan Fraser, Taylour Paige, M. Emmet Walsh, Jennifer Landon — all letting loose and delighting in the ability to be silly. Babes has a great performance from writer Ilana Glazer, and is a much more grounded but still funny look at female friendship.
Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie is a loving ode to cinema and youth, and is very similar to Adam Carter Rehmeier’s excellent Snack Shack. Both coming-of-age movies are profanely funny but also sweetly nostalgic autobiographies from two great comedy directors. However, Hundreds of Beavers likely takes the cake. You can watch it for free on YouTube here. It’s also streaming for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and on Prime Video through the link below:
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