Comedy is so subjective, and in terms of movies, particularly favorites of some cause others to wonder whether their friends’ tastes are parallel to theirs or on an entirely different planet.  Among guys in my age group, there do tend to be some movies that are loved across the board – Caddyshack, Stripes, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Animal House, Ferris Buehler, and The Blues Brothers are a few examples where you rarely hear a guy in his 30’s say “That one stunk. I hated it.”

There have been movies done in the last 15 years that are classics too, although the chance of variance of people liking it is greater than those classics from the 70s and 80s.  You might like Clerks but hate Tommy Boy.  For every Big Lebowski lover, there’s someone who thinks The Royal Tennenbaums is much better.  There is a movie that’s only a few years old that contains, in my opinion, the funniest set of sequences in the past decade.  I think part of it stems from the fact that the scenes contain a 1980s icon; therefore it hits a little closer to home for me.

I’m referring to all the scenes involving Neil Patrick Harris (AKA Doogie Howser) in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle.  He plays himself in the movie and every scene is so divergent from what you envision Doogie Howser to be is what makes the movie a classic.  The scene that puts this comedy over the top of anything done in the past 10 years is where, after he stole Harold’s car while, in his words “tripping balls” on Ecstasy.  They run into him again and he is standing in the sunroof with several hookers and snorting lines of coke off one of the stripper’s asses.  I challenge anyone to name a more shockingly funny scene filmed in the past 10 years.  I’ve watched this movie several times now on DVD and have yet to get bored with it.  This constitutes a classic to me.

The only thing I can compare his scenes to is how we now know Bob Saget to be.  America knew Saget as the clean-cut guy who read cheesy jokes on America’s Funniest Home Videos and was a star in Full House.  Then about 5 years ago I saw a comedy special on TV that was in Aspen and Bob Saget appeared on it and was bluer than Sam Kinison and Richard Pryor combined.  I was dumfounded, yet pleasantly surprised.  It turns out Bob’s been a dirty comic all along, but his TV roles were the opposite of what his stage persona was.  This was confirmed in The Aristocrats where Bob, along with Sarah Silverman, had one of the raunchiest versions of the joke.