It wasn’t a classic year for comedy, with “The Hangover Part III” and “Scary Movie 5” clogging up screens with tired shtick, but let’s look back at the year in laughs anyway. What were the five funniest moments at the movies this year?
Channing Tatum’s cameo in “This Is the End”
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen the movie, read no further, but at the end of this Armageddon comedy starring Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and James Franco as obnoxious versions of themselves, Tatum turns up wearing a dog leash and bondage gear. It turns out he’s the sex slave of the movie’s villain, a former friend to the others played by Danny McBride, who turns into the leader of a cannibal army.
The Rock’s toe in “Pain & Gain”
Dwayne Johnson plays a lowlife ’roid case in Florida who hooks up with two other knucklehead weight lifters in a kidnapping scam. He gets his toe shot off, but not to worry: It turns up later, only slightly decomposed. So the dude feeds it to a Chihuahua.
Sandra Bullock’s cat in “The Heat”
Bullock’s straitlaced cop character is so lacking for friends that her pet cat is stolen from a neighbor. When her partner (Melissa McCarthy) finds out, she opens fire with the insults.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s exit from the country club in “The Wolf of Wall Street”
Binging on enough drugs to make a brontosaurus woozy, DiCaprio’s zillionaire investment hotshot tells us about how he nevertheless managed to make a slow, careful getaway from the country club whose phone he was using to call his lawyer, even managing to park his white Ferrari without a scratch. Then, in flashback, we learn what really went down: The Ferrari came out if it looking like it had just tumbled down a mountain.
Danny McBride and James Franco’s argument in “This Is the End”
Playing friends who get cooped up in an LA house together after the apocalypse strikes, Franco and McBride (playing themselves) have an animated discussion about questions of gentlemen’s etiquette involving McBride’s overenthusiastic reaction to pornographic materials. This is Not to be watched with Aunt Mabel anywhere near the TV.