Warm up your electrified fooling machine: April 1st is here! Once you’re done putting ice buckets atop doors, gluing your co-workers’ stuff to their desks, and faking your death in a car explosion and then disappearing for years afterwards, come check out this week’s gallery of the 24 biggest, greatest fools from movie history!
Harry Dunne & Lloyd Christmas (Jeff Daniels, Jim Carrey) from Dumb and Dumber
Harry and Lloyd can identify Aspen on a map, are aware of The Monkees’ keen influence on The Beatles, and keep up with current affairs, such as the recent moon landing. Wait, why are they on this list?
Brennan Huff & Dale Doback (Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly) in Step Brothers
Will Ferrell and John C. Riley have made a mint with their man-children comedies and in Step Brothers they take the joke to its literal extreme: Dale and Brennan are 40-year-olds worried about getting grounded, schoolyard bullies, and having enough room for activities.
Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) from Burn After Reading
The Coen Brothers have a knack for getting high-wire acts of buffoonery out of beautiful people, perhaps best exemplified with Pitt as a scrappy gym rat who thinks he’s come across a disc of hot CIA secrets, setting off a murderous chain of events.
Shelley Darlingson (Anna Faris) in The House Bunny
Starting with Scary Movie, Anna Faris had an amazing run of playing dopey leads during the aughts, her talent best exhibited as Playboy model aspirant in The House Bunny.
Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) from Army of Darkness
Horror’s greatest knucklehead didn’t start out that way (the first Evil Dead is straight horror), but once Ash had to start doing complex things like memorizing words (three of them!), we were all doomed.
Alan (Zach Galifianakis) from The Hangover Masterminds, Dinner for Schmucks, Due Date: Plenty of fools to choose from within Galifianakis filmography, but we’re going with the uncontrollable Alan Garner from The Hangover series, which made him a household name.
Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge
Incandescently oblivious yet sensitive to his own self-centered needs, there was no traffic report, top 40 hit, or hostage situation Alan couldn’t make more embarrassing and awkward than they already were.
Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) from All About Steve
Both a comedy and a cautionary tale of unchecked mental illness, Steve stars Bullock as an aggressive weirdo who pursues a news cameraman across country.
Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) from Anchorman
A movie starring Ron Burgundy sets the bar high for foolishness, but naive, gullible, and not-quite-all-there Brick scurries over that bar with ease.
Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Fortune’s sweetest fools, the only two who can travel through time and play games with Death while keeping their brains dimmed and souls light.
Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) from Finding Nemo
Forgetful? Annoying? A general burden on everyone around you? Then get yourself into a Pixar movie…you might even get your own starring sequel!
Frito (Dax Shepard) from Idiocracy
Only in a Mike Judge comedy could a lawyer qualify for the Biggest Dumbass on Earth award and still only place somewhere in the middle.
The Marx Brothers
Groucho usually had his wits about him; it was Chico and Harpo who ran around chasing hare-brained schemes. Zeppo, the smart one, stayed off camera after a while and let the morons do all the talking.
Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) from Bean
The angelic rascal in a tweed jacket, whose destructive curiosity left baffled Brits, turned-over Reliant Robins, and, once the character got his own movie-sized budgets, explosions in his wake.
Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) from The Naked Gun
Emerging from the dusty case files of Police Squad! is Detective Frank Drebin, oblivious to the absurdity of his work and the anarchy he creates upon every one around him.
Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) from O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Beneath Clooney’s twitchy, bug-eyed irritability is a moronic epic hero capable of lines like, “It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”
Chauncey Gardner (Peter Sellers) from Being There
Chauncey Gardner bumbles his way into high society using platitudes learned from a lifetime of watching television.
Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) from The Pink Panther
It’s a rarefied talent to consistently read the wrong thing from the right clues and still nabbed the bad guy in the end.
Mira Sorvino, Lisa Kudrow in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
Ditzy bimbos Romy and Michele are leading inane lives when they come up with a round of lies (like claiming to be the inventor of Post-It Notes) to impress former classmates at their upcoming high school reunion.
Navin Johnson (Steve Martin) in The Jerk
Fresh off a wild stand-up routine of loud, streamlined stupidity, Martin took the concept into his first major feature role.
Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) from This is Spinal Tap
You don’t need brains to become a rock star: It takes verve, rhythm, attitude, and knowing what comes after 10.
Virgil Starkwell (Woody Allen) from Take the Money and Run
Virgil is a near-sighted serial crook whose passion for doing crimes is matched only by his incompetence, like writing illegible robbery letters or carving a gun from soap while it’s raining out.
The Three Stooges
For when you need to go even more low-brown than the Marx Brothers.
Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) from Zoolander
Stiller stars as a male model and special needs advocate in this skewering of runway society.
