"I watch this with my family a lot. All of the Marx Brothers movies have been very popular in the Columbus household for the last 20 years or so. I was a bit of a dictator making my kids watch these movies. They grew up with them because kids are really reluctant to watch black-and-white films. Our family loved the Marx Brothers films, and for some reason the one that we always went back to, and the one that we were obsessed with, was Horse Feathers. It’s 1932, so that’s going back a long way. Yet at the same time I would show that movie to my kids who were seven and five and three, and they were mesmerized. I learned a lot about comedy and breaking the rules in that movie — in terms of comedy — which extended to seeing movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and Annie Hall to a certain extent. The Marx Brothers started it all, and it’s smart comedy. The funny thing about the movie is, there are scenes that, still for me and my family, are falling down funny. So they can watch that movie and take away from it — maybe laugh a little harder than they do at some of the more modern comedies. That movie — and there’s like five or six Marx Brothers movies — is just a wonderful sort of family experience and that’s why it’s on the list."

"I know this is not the best Woody Allen film I’ve ever seen, but it’s still my personal favorite. Only Woody Allen could mix highbrow Bergman homages and Marx Brothers-esque slapstick. I also love how much fun he seems to be having with the great Diane Keaton. If only there were a blooper reel."

"W. C. Fields doesn’t get credit for antiestablishment chaos the way the Marx Brothers do, but his nonsensical visions of getting rich quick deserve no less notice. This movie would still make my list if it only consisted of the sequence in which the con man J. Frothingham Waterbury’s junk bond pitch turns gleefully absurdist when recounted by Fields’s Egbert Sousé."

"One of my favorite films from Jim Jarmusch; I can never get enough of it. Beautifully shot by Robby Müller in Louisiana, a jailbreak with Tom Waits, John Lurie, and the first time many of us were to see the amazing Roberto Benigni. The Defiant Ones meets the Marx Brothers and even better. Jim is one of the last true stylists left in this “sad and beautiful world.”"

"It has to be a tie. Laurel and Hardy simply because they are two of the funniest people who have ever been on film. I’m leaping over the entire Marx brothers collection to say this, which I also love, but I recently went back and saw both of these films, and just the combination of really brilliant physical humor and absolute charm when these guys are just standing there, and they’re so good together. Nothing beats weirdness for the sake of weirdness, like the Marx brothers were prone to lapse into. But just to see the scene where they’re in a bar where they’re way out west, and a cowboy starts singing “Trail of a Lonesome Pine” and Stan and Ollie just join in and do a dance and harmonize and Stan gets hit in the head with a hammer, it’s sublime. Sons of the Desert for the same reason. I don’t think there’s ever been a comedy team as good at what they do as these guys."

"How I loved this film. It was what I had always wanted a musical to be. Little bits of music woven through a romantic story. I thought it was perfect, and I even made a tape of the soundtrack, which I still have, somewhere in the archives. A great opening—which, by the way, I think is the case with most of my film loves—and, of course, the two- and three-line songs that inspired the Marx brothers as well as many others, myself included. But I don’t think anyone did it as well as Clair."

"W. C. Fields, with wife, mother-in-law, child, daughter, and son-in-law, played by the wonderful Grady Sutton. All this is pure enjoyment. When were movies ever more alive than in the thirties, when the great performers from the musical and vaudeville stage entered films? W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, Marie Dressler, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland, among so many others. They were the real authors of their films, needing little help from their directors. American films began with audiences wanting to see performers, not directors, and this, perhaps, continues to separate American films from European films, but we’re lucky to have both, and who’s to say which is really better."