The 20 most lovable movie idiots

The brainchildren of screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, this unlikely time traveling duo was first brought to adorably dunderheaded life by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in 1989’s “Excellent Adventure." The boys come on as idiots initially but as they journey through history, we discover they’re really zonked-out underachievers who’ve simply been more committed to becoming rock stars (via their heavy metal band Wyld Stallyns) than cracking a history book. When they put in the effort, they become the enlightened saviors of civilization by imploring humankind to “be excellent to each other." They were killed and resurrected in 1991’s “Bogus Journey” and are set to return in 2020 with “Bill and Ted Face the Music." Most excellent indeed!

This slacker-stoner duo played by John Cho and Kal Penn won America’s hearts in 2004 with their munchies-inspired quest to obtain a slew of delicious onion-steamed sliders from the White Castle burger chain. Anyone who’s ever sampled the ganja has definitely experienced this overwhelming, logic-canceling craving at least once in their life, and this relatability kept us coming back for more weed-driven adventures in “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay” and “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” (viva Wafflebot).

All Ridgemont High student Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) wants from life are some “tasty waves and a cool buzz." Spicoli is determined to drift through the school year on a sustained high, which places him in the crosshairs of his no-nonsense history teacher, Mr. Hand (Ray Walston), who’s not a fan of the young slacker’s penchant for having pizza delivered to his classroom. Everyone had a Spicoli in their school: They’re mostly harmless and most likely destined for a job at the local head shop. 

“Godfrey loves me! He put me in the shower!” They say you’ve got to be smart to play stupid. This was certainly true in the case of Carole Lombard, a brilliant woman who delivered some of the most devastatingly funny portrayals of ditziness ever put to film. She was never better than in Gregory La Cava’s “My Man Godfrey," a classic screwball comedy that features Lombard as a dotty heiress who falls for a homeless man she brought home as part of a scavenger hunt. 

The protagonist of Joel and Ethan Coen’s madcap classic, “Raising Arizona," H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) is a recidivist fool prone to quasi-profound declarations like “there’s what’s right and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet.” He’d be a good man if he could keep from knocking over convenience stores and get to raising a child with his policewoman wife, Ed (Holly Hunter). Alas, she’s “barren," which thrusts H.I. into a poorly considered kidnapping plot that concludes with the career criminal doing the right thing. Maybe the twain shall meet after all.

The last man standing in Sam Raimi’s 1981 no-budget horror landmark, “The Evil Dead," Ash (Bruce Campbell) didn’t become an overconfident, self-mutilating jackass until the straight-up comedic sequels. Ash winds up in mortal slapstick combat with his possessed right hand, which he subsequently severs and replaces with a chainsaw. He’s eventually sucked through a temporal vortex that deposits him in the Middle Ages, where he’s briefly worshipped as a hero. But he fouls that up by summoning the army of the dead because he can’t be bothered to remember a simple three-word incantation. It’s like watching Bob Hope dropped into a Three Stooges movie. Hail to the king, baby.

Most classic comedy duos had a funny man and a straight man, but Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were equally adept at playing the fool. Laurel tended to be more well-meaning and clueless, whereas Hardy was blustery and easily agitated. The angrier Hardy got at Laurel for getting them into “another nice mess” (he never said “fine mess”), the more likely he was to make their situation uproariously worse. The timelessness of their work is due in large part to this understanding that we’re all capable of being the idiot.

The squat and cherub-faced Lou Costello was forever doomed to look like a hapless idiot even when he was in the right. These were the duo’s rules, and they were essentially ironclad. One of their best bits involves Bud Abbott repeatedly smacking Costello, who is determined to return fire but can’t; he winds up to hit his partner, but the punch won’t throw. He finally looks at his fist and screams, “what are you waiting for???” The clear, yet unspoken answer: It’s not in the script. Costello never got the upper hand; he was consistently, cruelly thwarted, and we loved him for it.

It’s difficult to single out just one doofus from Adam Sandler’s repertoire of morons, but we’ll go with the hockey hothead turned long-driving golf pro, if only because his hero’s journey is motivated entirely by his desire to rescue his grandmother from a nursing home. Happy also gets humbled by a cement-fisted Bob Barker and romances Julie Bowen during a private free skate to Lionel Ritchie and Diana Ross’s “Endless Love." What’s not to love?

Garson Kanin’s “Pygmalion” riff launched Judy Holliday’s career on both the stage and the screen. She’s dynamite as Billie Dawn, the girlfriend of a corrupt businessman who, to keep from embarrassing him in social settings, is handed over to a journalist (William Holden) for a crash course in culture. In time we discover that Billie’s ignorance was due to no one ever expecting her to be anything more than a pretty face. Holliday won the Best Actress Oscar for “Born Yesterday” and reprised the role when she testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, aimed at uncovering communist activity in Hollywood, to keep from naming names. It worked.

Chris Farley put on a lovable idiot clinic as the son of auto parts magnate “Big Tom” Callahan (Brian Dennehy). He’s never had to work a day in his life, but when Big Tom unexpectedly dies (leaving his company deep in debt), Tommy’s forced to hit the road and save the family business. Perfectly paired with his “Saturday Night Live” castmate David Spade, Farley was never more affably silly than when doing his “Fat Guy in a Little Coat” routine or belting The Carpenters’ “Superstar” through tears.

John Belushi shot to big-screen stardom as the animal of John Landis’ “Animal House," and it’s not hard to see why. Whether he’s stacking his tray (and stuffing his pockets…and mouth) with one of everything from a cafeteria food counter, shattering a bottle over his head in a stupid and futile attempt to cheer up an inconsolable Flounder or crediting the Germans for bombing Pearl Harbor, Bluto is an unabashedly gluttonous buffoon. He’s all id, which explains both his “zero-point-zero” grade point average and, um, his future tenure as a United States senator.

The slack-jawed, out-to-lunch Bushwood Country Club groundskeeper who once caddied for the Dalai Lama is the standout idiot in a film full of them. Carl’s a tremendous slob who imagines he’s “licensed to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations." Fortunately, he’s far too inept to carry out his gopher-murdering duties — though he does succeed at blowing up a sizable chunk of the golf course in his scorched earth pursuit of the cute and furry critter. Bill Murray has generally specialized in lovable losers throughout his career, which makes the tour de force of fully committed idiocy one to savor.

John Candy’s bravura performance in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” allows us to initially perceive Del as a clueless oaf: He leaves his obnoxiously large trunk out where people can trip over it, takes his shoes off on the airplane and explodes a can of beer that’s been sitting on a vibrating bed. When Steve Martin finally blows up and verbally shreds him, we delight in his vitriol. Then we discover that Del’s seeming inconsiderateness is really puppy-dog eagerness; he’s thrilled to have a traveling companion and wants nothing more than to make a new friend. It’s a heartbreaking reveal that hits twice as hard when you remember we lost Candy at the just-getting-warmed-up age of 43.

In the all-id tradition of John Blutarski, here comes Tiffany Haddish as the unstoppable Dina in “Girls Trip." It takes a tremendous amount of charisma and skill to make a character like this “lovable," but like when you watched Eddie Murphy in his prime, you spend the entire movie waiting for Haddish to show up and fire the movie back into the comedic stratosphere. Like several of the characters on this list, Dina’s not an idiot deep down (on the contrary, she’s smart as hell), but she’s definitely out of her mind.

Kurt Russell’s finest hour arrived in John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China," in which he adopted John Wayne’s swagger to play a loudmouth man of action who routinely falls short when the action goes down. It was rare in the 1980s to see a muscle-bound movie star allow himself to be an ineffective hero from start to almost finish (Jack does eventually demonstrate that it is, indeed, “all in the reflexes”), and that’s why an entire generation of movie buffs loves Russell just a little more than Schwarzenegger, Stallone and the rest of the flex-happy crew.

Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong were already comedy superstars when they branched out to the big screen in 1978 with “Up in Smoke." But they never quite reached the inspired heights of their first film with their next five. At the height of their creative powers, this duo created the stoner comedy template that everyone riffs on to this day, and the act caught on because everyone…knows someone who’s gotten insanely baked and behaved this way. And it’s lovable because stoners are harmless. The worst they’ll do is eat all of your food.

We are strongly on the record regarding Rachel McAdams gleefully oblivious portrayal of a woman who believes the real-life crime in which she’s become enmeshed with her equally clueless husband (Jason Bateman) is actually part of their murder-mystery game night: She’s amazing. It’s a performance riddled with daffy highlights: lip-syncing “Semi-Charmed Life” into the barrel of a loaded handgun; attempting to extract a bullet from her husband’s arm via Googled instructions on her iPhone; exclaiming “Oh, he died” after watching a man get sucked into a jet engine. McAdams would’ve slayed in the "screwball era."

Mo Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard transformed unfettered slapstick violence into high art. If you want to turn kids on to classic, black-and-white comedy (like The Marx Brothers, who are way too sophisticated to be on this list), The Three Stooges are the ideal gateway drug; of course, they might also lead them to believe their best friend can survive getting conked over the head with a monkey wrench, so use discretion when sharing their borderline psychotic genius. 

He likes to watch. It was tempting to add Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau to this list, but he was awfully abusive of his Chinese manservant Cato. Let’s go with Sellers’s portrayal of Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby’s classic “Being There”. When Chance’s wealth employer expires, he drifts into Washington D.C. high society, where his shallow observations are interpreted as incisive wisdom. “Being There” once felt like a fantasy, but given the state of U.S. politics today, it now plays like a nightmare.