(Continued)

5. "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984)
Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) said it best: "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." Rob Reiner walks that fine line in his rockumentary mockumentary. In collaboration with a skeleton crew and a cast that thrives on improvising under pressure, Reiner shoots the film like a real documentary, capturing the inspired satire -- girlfriend troubles, absurd touring mishaps, screeching songs with sniggeringly sexist lyrics and dead-on portraits of eternally adolescent rock stars -- with a genuine sense of spontaneity. The results inspired co-writer and co-star Guest to turn the mockumentary into his own cinematic playground and his most recent, the folk-umentary "A Mighty Wind," even reunites Spinal Tap's power trio frontmen as aging folkies. On the comedy scale, this is an 11.

Favorite line: "We've got armadillos in our trousers. It's really quite frightening."

4. "Blazing Saddles" (1974)
Mel Brooks spins genre parody, cartoon slapstick, ethnic gags and bathroom humor into the looniest Western spoof ever made. Cleavon Little is Black Bart, the thoroughly modern African-American sheriff of a small-minded frontier town under siege from a corrupt governor's aide. The film features a twisted sense of humor and a nonstop barrage of sight gags and crude dialogue. Madeline Kahn earned an Oscar nomination as a lisping Dietrich-like Mata Hari, and Gene Wilder provides amiable support and crack timing as the on-the-skids gunfighter who signs on for sidekick duty. Frankie Lane sings the brilliant theme song without a trace of camp (it also received an Oscar nomination). Oh, and campfire meals have never been the same since.

Favorite line: "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

3. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)
After a career of inspired skit comedy, the unbalanced minds of Monty Python pounded the Knights of the Round Table into their own skewed square hole. King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad and the rest of the dotty knights forsake the decadence of the Camelot -- "It's only a model." Instead, they ride the misty English countryside, banging coconut shells (thus providing hoof sounds for their invisible horses) and taking on abusive Frenchmen with outrrraaageous accents ("Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!"), hot-to-trot nuns, a killer rabbit with pointy teeth, the mysterious Knights Who Say "Nih!" and other typical medieval threats. Probably the cheapest Arthurian adventure ever made (they couldn't even afford horses!), and easily the funniest.

Favorite line: "And as the Black Beast lurched forward, escape for Arthur and his knights seemed hopeless, when suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack!"

2. "Airplane!" (1980)
My vote for the funniest movie ever made. The directorial debut of the writing/directing team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams (who apprenticed on "The Kentucky Fried Movie" screenplay) re-energized the flagging subgenre of American comedy with an anything-goes spirit of nonsensical humor and carpet bomb-delivery and the juvenile glee of "Mad" magazine on speed. Ostensibly a goof on the almost-forgotten aviation thriller "Zero Hour" by way of the "Airport" disaster franchise, it's all about madcap sight gags and demented dialogue delivered with a heightened deadpan intensity by the likes of Peter Graves ("Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?"), Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and "Leave It to Beaver" mom Barbara Billingsley, who luckily speaks jive. Golly.

Favorite line: "Listen, and you listen close: Flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle, just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes."

1. "Young Frankenstein" (1974)
Mel Brooks' lovingly hilarious spoof of the Universal "Frankenstein" films is more than simply an inspired lampoon of an iconic piece of cinema history. Brooks and co-writer/star Gene Wilder create something that has never been repeated in the legion of movie spoofs that followed: a real movie with dynamic characters, a story that stands on its own and a touching undercurrent of pathos amidst the parody. Wilder is all passion and torment as the white sheep "Fronken-steen" who embraces the family legacy with a passion after creating his own monster (Peter Boyle), a childlike innocent with a nasty temper and decidedly adult instincts. Woof. Handsomely filmed in black and white on a brilliant recreation of the original laboratory set and set to a beautiful and haunting score by John Morris, it's like a remake on laughing gas, simultaneously respectful and ridiculous.

Favorite lines: "Pardon me, boy. Is this the Transylvania station?" "Ja, ja. Track 29. Can I give you a shine?

Special Mention:

"George Lucas in Love" (1999)
Dozens of years ago, in a nearby galaxy... USC film school student George Lucas overcomes writer's block with the obscure advice of a troll-like professor who talks backward, the taunts of an asthmatic rival with a wheezing inhaler and the love of a beautiful woman in giant hair buns. The hilarious, perfectly sculpted short spoof stirs "Star Wars" and "Shakespeare in Love" into a college romance, highlighted by a nebbish performance by Martin Hynes as Lucas, a perfect evocation of the lush "Shakespeare" score and more "Star Wars" sight gags than you can count on a single viewing.

Favorite lines: "Search not. Inspiration will you not find. It will find you." "Could you talk forward?"

What is your favorite movie spoof? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for the Internet Movie Database. His writing has also appeared on Greencine.com and in Amazing Stories, Asian Cult Cinema and "The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide."

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