Rob Reiner, 1989 Advertisement I was a naive 15-year-old when it came out at the cinema and had no interest in a film about relationships. We only went – me, my sister and parents – because Turner & Hooch (a dog that has witnessed a murder, yes please!) had sold out. But I loved it. I don’t think I’d trust anyone who didn’t love this classic romcom. Most romcoms don’t have enough “com” but Nora Ephron was a wonderful comedy writer. My sister and I used to go to a film class where we studied films and dissected them. When the lecturer announced next week’s film was When Harry Met Sally… my sister and I stopped going. Leave it alone.

Jason Moore, 2012 I’m going to begin with a curveball. I don’t think this will be on that many other lists: those who have not seen it will assume it’s a musical (which it is), and a teenage girl’s film (which it is – I went to see it, not expecting that much, with my teenage daughter). But none of these things stop it from being brilliantly funny. Zinger for zinger, it’s up there with the best, Rebel Wilson is hilarious and the singing is accamazing. Just don’t bother with the sequel.

Jay Roach, 2000 I love a film built on a very real-life anxiety like meeting your partner’s parents. Here, the father is a former CIA agent and the young man’s got to impress him. They squeeze every drop of funny out of it; you never feel shortchanged. When we were making The Office, around the same time this film came out, we also played a lot on discomfort and awkwardness, and I think they did that really well in this film. Being given a polygraph test by your prospective father-in-law is just such a great idea for comedy.

Hal Walker, 1945 I grew up watching Bob Hope films with my dad. The rapport that he had with Bing Crosby in this film is just delicious. He’s lambasted now, seen as a sort of dinosaur of comedy, but when he first came along there was something effortless, cool and contemporary about him. He wasn’t just slapstick, he was joking about sex and modern life. He was subversive. There’s lots of looking at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience; all the things that we associate with postmodern comedy that came later, like Monty Python. You can see he influenced Woody Allen and I’m sure Chevy Chase and Tom Hanks, too.

John Landis, 1988 This film is Eddie Murphy at his very best, playing a range of characters, and not in a rubbish way like in The Nutty Professor. Arsenio Hall is excellent as his right-hand man and James Earl Jones nails comedy with gravitas. The film is littered with catchphrases – “The royal penis is clean, your Highness”, “Freeze, you diseased rhinoceros pizzle” – and there is a call-back to Trading Places that blew my mind. It has some issues with stereotyping, of course, but if you can forgive that, it really is testament to Murphy’s comic talents and almost made me forgive him for making Norbit.