15 Sports Comedies That Are Legitimately Funny

There are many iconic characters and moments in Major League, making it hard to claim a favorite. Whether it is the on-base antics of Willie Mays Hayes, the concerningly inaccurate 100-mile-per-hour arm on Wild Thing, or maybe the outfielder who uses voodoo magic to try and hit curveballs. The insane bunch of characters brought together by the Cleveland Indians bring many different things to the table. With a bit of camaraderie and teamwork, they string together a few wins, but they start playing like superstars when they hear of their owner's plot for an intentionally losing season. 

She filled the team with outcasts to purposefully have an awful season so she could move the team to Miami and will then proceed to clean house. Once they know their fate is sealed, the team defiantly plays their hearts out and goes on to win their division, despite the owner’s acts of sabotage along the way. The movie does an excellent job of displaying how clubhouses can be a mixed bag and how a team is a collective of individuals dependent on blending their own personal ideologies and habits with everyone else.

It is easy to forget that Happy Gilmore is only the second film that Adam Sandler had written and produced. It is not only non-stop funny, but it might also be his most iconic role. For a man who puts more movies out than almost anyone, that is a pretty impressive feat. The '90s classic is about an angry hockey fanatic who finds that he has the uncanny ability to hit golf balls great distances. 

After meeting an old golf pro who says he will coach him up, Gilmore wins a spot on the pro tour. Here he becomes a fan favorite thanks to his unpredictable habits never seen on golf courses, like beating up a heckling game show host, riling up the crowd, and screaming at his ball when his putt falls short. 

The force working towards Happy’s downfall is Shooter McGavin, a rival tour member who finds Gilmore’s lack of golf etiquette deplorable. Shooter became an instant classic villain thanks to a cartoonishly evil persona he makes no attempt to hide. Happy, on the other hand, is an easy character to root for, despite his frequent anger-fueled rampages that terrorize essentially all around him. 

The film is centered around his golf career, so there are plenty of inside golf jokes related to the links, but the film is so funny that you could have no interest in the sport, and it wouldn’t matter a bit. It is a laugh riot from start to finish and some of Sandler’s best work.

Dodgeball is what so many great sports movies are: an underdog story. It's right there in the title. The film is about a group of weirdos from Average Joe's gym who compete in a dodgeball tournament in an attempt to use the prize money to save the place that brought them together. Trying to stop them is White Goodman, owner of Globo Gym, a corporate powerhouse that wishes to absorb the crew’s beloved Average Joe's. Goodman, played masterfully by Ben Stiller, puts together a superteam to take the Average Joe’s down, and the craziness of the Las Vegas-based dodgeball tournament in which they compete is what makes this movie a masterpiece. 

The absurdity of everything that goes on, from getting their uniforms mixed up with boxes of BDSM gear to David Hasselhoff screaming in the German team's faces that they are a disgrace, is almost too much to take in. Vince Vaughn and Stiller lead this film, but Jason Bateman’s role as the tournament's color commentator, Pepper Brooks, might just be the funniest part of the whole movie. He steals each scene with his unorthodox commentary.

Dodgeball is completely over the top, with insane characters played by top-tier character actors. It’s the perfect dose of silly while never letting the film tip overboard into parody. Instead, the film's unhinged nature makes it entirely unpredictable, with too many unexpected cameos to count. For instance, who would have thought Lance Armstrong would give the pep talk that saves the day? Or that Chuck Norris would be the guest judge that allows the championship game to continue despite the team's initial forfeiture? While these funny and random cameos are just cheap jokes, they add to the fever-dream-like quality it can sometimes have.

A League of Their Own is arguably a top 10 all-time sports movie, and it also has some of the hardest laughs you will find in the genre. Jon Lovitz’s character alone supplies a plethora of chuckles and wheezes, and he's only in the movie for 15 minutes. An ensemble cast of women leads the film into hilarious moments as they navigate life as professional baseball players after an all-women’s league starts up due to all the US men being shipped overseas to fight in WWII. 

The film follows the first season of play for the Rockford Peaches, and the star-studded cast includes Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna, Anne Ramsey, and Tom Hanks, who plays the drunken ex-ballplayer turned manager concerningly well. He is truly one of the most entertaining alcoholics in movie history. One iconic line sums it all up: “There’s no crying in baseball!”

The film is full of laughs from start to finish while also being a terrific baseball movie, and most films aren’t able to make such a solid commitment to both these aspects of sport and comedy so equally. From when Lovitz first scouts Geena Davis’s Dottie and yells at a cow to shut up to when one of the player’s demonic children covers the bus driver’s eyes with his grubby chocolate-covered hands and almost forces a deadly impact, the film is a funny the whole way through.

Cool Runnings is based on the Olympic phenomenon that popularized bobsledding to the degree that the Jamaican bobsled team became a widely recognized household name, despite their lack of prestige in the sport. This 1993 Disney comedy was easy for audiences to connect with, and it didn’t hurt that it was full of chuckles along the way. 

The movie is about sprinters who fail to qualify for the Summer Olympics, so they instead learn how to bobsled and start a Jamaican national team with hopes of competing in the Winter Games. Taught by their disgraced ex-Olympian coach Irv, the team defy the odds and make it to the games, and while they don’t miraculously finish with medals, they receive a meaningful ovation during the end of their final run. 

Any movie starring John Candy is already getting a leg up in the laughs department, and Cool Runnings uses his comical prowess to the best of its ability. The film finds most of its comedy derived from fish-out-of-water moments, making it an easy watch and a funny one too.

The Sandlot is perhaps the most beloved baseball movie of all time, at least among a certain generation. This is primarily due to the friendships between the nine backyard baseball players and their views of the world being timeless for kids that age. The way they are embarrassed to talk about girls, constantly tease each other until it goes too far, or act as if they are experts on subjects their friends know little about. It feels like it could be you with your friends back home on a summer day, trying to make the most of your time away from school by coming up with wild adventures where you get to play the heroes. The thing is, your friends probably weren’t nearly as funny as The Sandlot crew.

Sure, the jokes are childish, but sometimes that is what makes them funny in the first place. The trash talk is one of the many pieces of this film that has made it a classic, especially the famous scene in which a flurry of insults ends with the unspeakable diss of “You play ball like a girl!” That might not fly with today's audiences, but let’s not examine a movie like this with a modern lens right now. The film captures the oddities of being a young boy of this age, and it perfectly transforms both the character's turmoils and successes in their adventures of growing up into comedy gold that resonates with all ages.