The Best Jokes of 2025
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as his love interest Jane. During a fireside dinner, Drebin recounts a past heartbreak. “It’s the same old story,” he says. “Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.” “Goodyear?” Jane asks, breathlessly. “No,” he says, “the worst.”
“Naked Gun” and its two lesser sequels are filled to bursting with this kind of nonsense—connected to reality, by a thread, thanks to the actors’ unwavering deadpan delivery. It’s a kind of comedy that has mostly fallen out of favor—twelve-year-olds are more sophisticated these days, maybe—and it’s especially hard to pull off in our post-irony age. So I was skeptical enough of this year’s “Naked Gun” reboot, starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., and Pamela Anderson as his romantic foil, to mostly forget that it was coming out. But then word got around: it was really funny. And, indeed, upon watching it, I agreed that the movie largely worked—the clunkers clunked hard, but, when the jokes and gags landed, I was hooting.
Midway through, in a seduction scene that pays homage to the original, Anderson’s character looks out a window in Drebin’s apartment, admiring the lights of Los Angeles. “It’s quite a view you have,” she says. “You know, I’ve been drawn to the hills ever since I moved here for college.” “U.C.L.A.?” Drebin asks. “I see it every day,” she responds. “I live here.” Ah, that’s the stuff, dusted off and resurrected from some eighties comedy tomb. There were surely better jokes this year, but nothing made me laugh harder.
So, 2025. Good year? No, the worst. Still, there were some things that helped us smile through it.
Coldplaygate
The year’s most astonishing, unplanned visual gag involved a married (but not to each other) pair of tech executives caught embracing on a Kiss Cam at a Coldplay concert. “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy,” the band’s front man, Chris Martin, narrated in real time. The comedy seemed, at first, to be about just two people. But, upon rewatch (and then dozens more after that), it’s clear that this little vignette actually features a cast of three. First, there’s the woman encircled in the hug, registering a million awful things in the milliseconds before she turns away from the camera, her face in her hands. Then there’s the man doing the hugging, who, slower on the uptake, ducks out of view. O.K., fine, the world is now well acquainted with these poor souls, the subjects of countless late-night jokes, a Gwyneth Paltrow ad campaign, re-creations at stadiums around the world, and even Halloween costumes. But don’t miss the final beat, when the camera pans left and captures a third character, a woman registering the scene she’s just witnessed before becoming a part of it—her hand on the side of her head, grinning madly.
This Is Your Mother Calling
The comedian Emily Catalano told a perfect joke in 2024, but it made the rounds this year: “My mom called me today at 3 P.M., and the first thing she said to me was, ‘Did I wake you?’ Have you ever gotten a metaphorical and literal wake-up call at the exact same time?”
The Wi-Fi Is Down
The winner of this year’s prize for Humorless Tech Billionaire Forced to Endure Technical Difficulties During His Own Tech Presentation goes to Mark Zuckerberg. In September, donning a dopey pair of smart glasses, the head of Meta got onstage for a live demo of the company’s latest wearables and A.I. products. But then: glitches, awkward silence, the repeated ringing of a video call, nervous laughter from the crowd. “This is, uh, you know, it happens,” Zuckerberg said, tightly. He and his fellow-titans are endlessly, grotesquely unaccountable to the public—a distinction on full display this year on the dais at the Presidential Inauguration; in the halls of the newly “optimized” federal government; and along the canals of Venice. But, every so often, the gods concoct a minor tragedy for even the most powerful mortals, and a glimpse of life’s futility—and perhaps even its ever-present mortality—breaks briefly through. For a fleeting moment, Zuckerberg was like the rest of us, just another guy who can’t get his device to work.
Curtis Sliwa’s Sick Burns
Sliwa came in a distant third in another unsuccessful race for New York City mayor, behind Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. But the beret-wearing, cat-rescuing, parade-loving pol won where it really matters, landing the sharpest barbs of the campaign. Responding to calls by the billionaire political dabbler Bill Ackman to drop out of the race, Sliwa mocked Ackman’s suburban home address and eccentric foray into professional tennis, and chided, “Come on, Ackman, stay in your lane.” And during an appearance on Fox News, Sliwa delivered what may be, word for word, the most deliriously cutting political takedown in recent memory, referring to an opponent’s alleged instances of sexual harassment and COVID-era mismanagement in a single phrase. “Andrew Cuomo is a creep,” Sliwa declared, “slappin’ fannies and killin’ grannies.”
“Six seven.”
Just kidding—sort of.
“South Park” Tells Us to Relax
What’s left to say about Donald Trump? The co-creators of “South Park,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone, fresh off a $1.5 billion deal with Paramount, found something new. The show’s impish pairing of the President and Satan, in a love affair that recalled an earlier romance that Parker and Stone had imagined between the devil and Saddam Hussein, got the bulk of the attention. But their key comedic insight was a bit more subtle. As astonished characters demand that Trump explain his latest outrageous decision, the President bleats back, “Relax, guy,” and “Take a rest,” then blithely carries on. “Relax,” I began to see, may be the defining ethos of Trump 2.0, insisted upon by a coterie of emboldened mini-Trumps, all doing their best impression of the boss. Graft, lawlessness, contempt for decency—this is all normal now, they seem to say, and objecting to any of it is the new form of crazy. Relax, take a rest, we’ve got a country to bleed dry.
The Sexy Thieves in Paris
News of the jewelry heist at the Louvre arrived like a dispatch from a different era—when world events could be strange and surprising without going fully apocalyptic. In this case, we got a romantic location, a nonviolent crime, even a dapper bystander in a fedora. A portion of the public was predisposed to root for the alleged thieves—even before fake mug shots began circulating online, imagining them as hunky male models. Jake Schroeder, the grinning TikTok balladeer, captured the mood. “The two dudes that robbed the Louvre are literally sexy as hell,” he sang. “Steal me, feel me, Louvre me, do me.”
J. D. Vance Skis in Jeans
In another fine year for protest signs, one welcoming the Vice-President to Vermont rose above the rest. The day before departing for a family ski vacation, Vance had scolded the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a tense exchange in the Oval Office. (“Have you said thank you once?”) The next day, Vermonters, perhaps the crankiest libs in the nation, responded with one of the Northeast’s coldest insults: “VANCE SKIS IN JEANS.”
Katy Perry Fails to Get Lost in Space
It was a fair bet that penis rockets would always be the funniest thing about Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space business. But this year, Amazon’s founder sent Katy Perry briefly into sub-orbit, where, confined to a small capsule and overcome with the cosmic significance of her roughly eleven-minute voyage, she serenaded her crewmates with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” Back on Earth—and presumably before she read the comments on social media—Perry told reporters, “I feel super connected to love.” She wasn’t the only one. In the fall, the Daily Mail published photos of Perry making out with Justin Trudeau, Canada’s newly available former Prime Minister.
The Joy of a Few Small Beers
Everyone’s got an opinion these days about how men should behave—how we might rescue ourselves from whatever stunted, angry malaise has befallen us. Maybe more people should be asking, What would Sensei Sergio St. Carlos do? He’s the character played by Benicio del Toro in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” a karate teacher with, as he describes it, “a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on.” As Sensei hides besieged immigrant families from a semi-lawless and fully vicious federal immigration force, he remains calm, competent, dedicated to justice, and lightly amused at the fuss all around him. What’s his secret? When cops pull him over as he attempts to save the day, an officer asks if he’s been drinking. “I’ve had a few,” he admits. “A few what?” the officer asks—and Sensei responds, smiling to himself, “A few small beers.” So, cheers: 2025 has been another doozy, and we all deserve a few. ♦
