2025 could well go down as the year of the murder mystery comedy, at least if Netflix manages to get its way. The streaming platform is serving up a doubly humorous helping of ᴅᴇᴀᴅly detective work later this year, with its screen adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club debuting alongside the third instalment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise, Wake Up ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Man. However, it looks like we’ll have to wait until the end of the year to solve these cases, as both of the movies appear to be penciled in for a holiday season release at the back end of the year.
In the meantime, there’s a chance to dive deeper into this endlessly enjoyable subgenre of onscreen mysteries, and discover some comedy classics along the way. This brief list highlights just five of the most hilarious murder mysteries from yesteryear. But it serves to show that Johnson and The Thursday Murder Club author Richard Osman are far from the first storytellers to turn the most heinous of all crimes into a barrel of laughs, offering fun for all the family.
Clue
1985
Based on the classic board game, Jonathan Lynn’s meta murder mystery struggles to take itself even a tiny bit seriously, and is all the better for it. Tim Curry has an absolute blast in one of his best movie roles, hysterical house butler Wadsworth, Madeleine Kahn’s bizarre non-sequiturs somehow strike all the right notes, and the rest of the cast play their parts with the kind of straight-faced dedication that Saturday Night Live performers would be proud of.
In fact, the whole film has the feel of a skit elongated to feature length. There are moments where it’s unclear whether the cast is fully in on the joke. Either way, Clue has to be applauded for the audacity with which it unsuspends disbelief, even if it’s accidental. There’s talk that TriStar Pictures and Sony are about to remake the movie, but nothing could ever do justice to the sheer lunacy of this original.
Murder By Death
1976
Murder by Death is a movie that is very much intended to be a parody of the murder mystery genre, and it’s certainly got the right cast for the job. Peter Sellers and David Niven reunite following their James Bond parody Casino Royale, while Columbo himself Peter Falk does his best impression of Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man, Poirot, and Miss Marple also get their send-up in this utterly preposterous whodunnit with Truman Capote, Maggie Smith and Alec Guinness in supporting roles.
Sellers certainly wouldn’t have gotten away with his performance today, and rightly so.
The one blot on the film’s legacy might be Sellers’ offensively dated portrayal of Sidney Wang, a Chinese-Haiwaian police detective based on the character Charlie Chan. Although Sellers’ performance is actually meant to lampoon the crude stereotyping of the Charlie Chan films, it ends up doing little more than enacting the same offensive stereotype. Sellers certainly wouldn’t have gotten away with his performance today, and rightly so. This unfortunate aspect of the movie aside, it’s a gloriously silly celebration of the best detectives TV and cinema have to offer.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
1988
One of the few examples in cinema history of live action and 2-D animation working together to make a film better, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is truly a unique venture in the history of moviemaking. Disney somehow managed to get Warner Bros. and Universal on board to bring together Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and their two yellow-beaked friends Donald and Daffy Duck. Then there’s the eponymous hero Roger Rabbit and his show-stealing wife Jessica, two characters who more than hold their own alongside the litany of toon legends they’re sharing the screen with.
Holding it all together, though, is Bob Hoskins in the role he’s now best remembered for, private detective Eddie Valiant. Throwing an actor famed for his portrayal of gangsters into a throng of famous cartoon cameos sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet it turns out to be an inspired bit of casting. Hoskins elevates what otherwise could have been a case of toon overkill into a thoroughly three-dimensional comedy classic.
Sleuth
1972
Now most famous as the movie that led Laurence Olivier to turn down the role of Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Sleuth is a brilliantly dark study of ᴅᴇᴀᴅly crimes in its own right. Only, the movie’s darkness is laced with black humor, particularly in its final scene, which reduces the murderous ends of its protagonists to “just a bloody game”.
The exterior scenes of Sleuth were sH๏τ at the real stately home, Athelhampton House, in Dorset, United Kingdom.
Part-comedy, part-psychological horror, Sleuth is designed to mess with its audience in all the ways a good murder mystery. Michael Caine is at his best as the sneering love rival of Olivier’s character, and the lavishly gothic stately home in which the film is set captures the claustrophobia of a crime investigation better than many of the genre’s more serious films.
The Thin Man
1934
When it comes to feature-length comedic murder mysteries, The Thin Man is the original and arguably the best. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1933 novel of the same name, the movie serves up wit, suspense, and one of the all-time great reveal scenes of the murder mystery genre. It provided the blueprint for everything that came after it, balancing respect for and dedication to the crime at hand with lighter moments and elements of farce.
All of the great murder mystery comedies of modern times can trace their roots back to The Thin Man in some way, and it should be the starting point for anyone looking to become better acquainted with the genre. Those who’ve seen the 1934 classic will recognize its influence in the final act of The Thursday Murder Club later this year, while Rian Johnson has clearly used aspects of Nick Charles as inspiration for his Knives Out detective Benoit Blanc. Johnson, Osman and others might have revived the genre, but they’re standing on the shoulders of this movie.
