The Best Comedy Actors Working Today, Ranked by Craft

Comedy is the hardest thing to do well on a camera and the least rewarded once awards season arrives. The Academy has handed out a bare handful of acting Oscars for comic performances across nine decades, which tells you more about the Academy than about the work. The names below are ranked on the things the trophies ignore: timing, physical control, the willingness to look ridiculous, and the rarest gift of all — carrying an entire film on charm without letting it float off into weightlessness.

One tell runs through almost every entry: the great comic actors are usually the ones who could have played the drama instead, and several here have done exactly that. We start at the top, with the performer who does more with a single held pause than most actors manage in a whole monologue, and work down from there. Disagree freely — that is the entire point of a list like this — and know that the loudest arguments start further down, where the ranking stops being obvious.

1. Steve Carell

Steve Carell built the most quoted comic character in television history and then walked straight into the dark to prove the same instruments work there too. The pause before the wrong thing gets said — nobody alive controls it better, and it drives everything from Michael Scott to his hollowed-out killer in Foxcatcher. Watch him decide, in real time, to say the line that will detonate the meeting; the decision is the joke, and he lets it land on his own face first. What astonishes is how little separates that comic timing from his dramatic work: the same withheld beat, aimed at a different target.

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2. Michelle Yeoh

Michelle Yeoh won an Oscar for a performance that is, underneath all the multiverse machinery, a straight comedy: hot-dog fingers, a talking raccoon, a universe in which the meaning of life is an everything bagel. Everything Everywhere All at Once asks her to be exasperated, deadpan and slapstick-agile at once, often inside a single shot, and four decades of action choreography turn out to be the ideal apprenticeship for physical comedy — comic timing is only fight timing with a softer landing. She is funniest when she is most annoyed, which is the surest mark of a real comedian.

3. Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling pulled off the most surprising comic reinvention of the century. After a decade of being taken very seriously indeed, he threw the whole edifice into a peroxide-blond act of total absurdity, and his Ken — needy, sincere, catastrophically confident — is a complete comic creation that never once winks at the camera. The Nice Guys got there first and remains the proof of concept: the best sustained screaming of his career, a grown man losing an argument with a bathroom stall. He commits to looking foolish the way other actors commit to looking wounded.

4. Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton deploys her own strangeness as a comic instrument, which almost no actor of her seriousness is willing to do. In The Grand Budapest Hotel she buries herself under age make-up for a handful of minutes and walks off with them; her small, exact turns for Wes Anderson and the Coens are unimprovable miniatures. The joke is always the gap between her otherworldly bearing and some entirely mundane human need, and she plays it without ever appearing to try. Few performers grasp so completely that comedy is mostly a matter of conviction.

5. Bill Hader

Bill Hader went from the sharpest impressionist of his SNL generation to writing, directing and starring in a series about a hitman that turns deliberately less funny as it goes. Barry is the argument for him: the control across its later stretches, the way a scene pivots from farce to genuine dread inside one line reading, is the work of someone who understands comedy as a matter of precise, almost frightening timing. He is among the very few comic actors who became a major filmmaker without mislaying the thing that made him funny in the first place.

6. Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen is the last great practitioner of comedy as ambush, and the only one still taking real legal and physical risks to get the shot. Borat remains the high-water mark of a form he essentially owns — the fictional character loosed into an unsuspecting real world — and the discipline it demands is total: stay in character while the situation turns genuinely dangerous. His straight work in The Trial of the Chicago 7 shows the technician beneath the provocateur, a performer who was always in complete command of the chaos.

7. Kate McKinnon

Kate McKinnon is the most inventive live sketch performer of the past twenty years, an actor who wins scenes with her eyes while everyone else is still reaching for the punchline. Her long run on Saturday Night Live was a masterclass in stealing focus without appearing to want it; even in a crowded ensemble the camera keeps finding her, because she is always doing something specific and slightly deranged at the edge of the frame. Handed a film like Barbie, she folds that same off-kilter energy into a supporting turn and makes it look like nothing at all.

8. Nathan Fielder

Nathan Fielder invented a form: comedy assembled out of real people, real contracts and a persona so flat and affectless it curdles into something genuinely unsettling. Nathan For You built the template and The Rehearsal pushed it somewhere nobody else would dare, staging human behaviour with the budget of a blockbuster and the ethics of a raised eyebrow. What looks like anti-comedy is in fact ferociously controlled; every excruciating silence is engineered to the second. Nobody else on television is making anything remotely like it.

9. Adam Sandler

Adam Sandler earns his place for the whole strange picture at once: the Happy Madison comedies that print money on pure likeability, and the handful of performances where the same barely-suppressed rage is pointed straight and turns frightening. Punch-Drunk Love located the terror inside the man-child; Uncut Gems weaponised his motormouth charm into two hours of undiluted anxiety. The comedy and the drama are not opposites in his case — they run on the same nervous system, dialled up or down.

10. Jean Dujardin

Jean Dujardin makes the best parody work of the century in any language, and he does it with a matinee-idol face most actors would guard rather than deflate. The OSS 117 films are a sustained demolition of the suave-spy archetype, played with such straight-faced commitment that they somehow double as the real thing; the Oscar he carried home for The Artist came out of exactly the same silent-comedy toolkit — the raised eyebrow, the perfectly timed swagger, the joke told entirely with the body. Europe has produced no finer comic leading man.

11. Awkwafina

Awkwafina broke through on pure comic timing — a rapper’s sense of rhythm applied to a scene-stealing supporting reel — and then quietly proved the range was the whole point. The Farewell asked her to carry an entire drama, much of it in Mandarin, about a family lying to a dying grandmother, and she held it with a stillness nobody would have predicted from her earlier work. The best comedians are almost always hiding a dramatic actor, and she dropped the disguise faster than most.

12. Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey is the most physically extreme comic actor Hollywood has ever produced, and the one who proved most conclusively that the elastic face was a technique, not a tic. Dumb and Dumber is the pure uncut version, a body that appears to have no skeleton at all; The Truman Show is the counter-proof, the same instrument turned toward melancholy without shedding an ounce of precision. When people argue about whether broad physical comedy counts as real acting, Carrey is the name that ends the argument.

13. Maya Rudolph

Maya Rudolph is the finest reactor in American comedy: hand her a flat straight line and she finds three separate rhythms inside it before she even answers. Bridesmaids works precisely because she is the one playing everything for real while the mayhem detonates around her, the still centre that makes the chaos land. Her sketch work runs on the same engine, an almost musical ear for when to hold and when to break, and a run of leading roles has only sharpened it.

14. Roberto Benigni

Roberto Benigni won Best Actor for a comic performance set inside a Holocaust film — something no committee should logically have permitted and no other actor could have carried off. Life Is Beautiful works or collapses entirely on his ability to keep a clown’s lightness alive inside unbearable circumstances, and he holds it upright through sheer physical conviction, the whole Italian tradition of the sacred fool concentrated into one desperate, tender act. It is the most audacious tightrope on this list, and he never once looks down.

15. Ayo Edebiri

Ayo Edebiri is the youngest name here and the one most obviously still climbing. Bottoms is the funniest thing she has done, a lead performance carrying the confident deadpan of someone twice her experience, and The Bear shows the other half of the instrument — the ability to play the quiet, wounded side of a scene against anyone the show puts in front of her. She has the two qualities that separate a comic actor from a comedian: she can carry the plot, and she can break your heart. The future of this list runs through her.

The bench is deep enough to fill a second list. Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy have both carried more hits than most of the names above; Paul Rudd has quietly been the most reliable comic presence in Hollywood for two decades; Aubrey Plaza, Tiffany Haddish, Jenny Slate and Bowen Yang are each a single right role away from the top fifteen. Leaving them out was the hardest part of building this.

What unites everyone here is that the funniness is not a limitation but a discipline — a level of control most dramatic actors never have to develop, because a missed beat in a drama is forgivable and a missed beat in a comedy is death. The performers who can do both, and nearly all of these can, are simply the most complete actors working. Argue with the order; that is what the comments are for. Just don’t tell us comedy is easy.

Tags: actors, Comedy, Tilda Swinton, Adam Sandler, Michelle Yeoh, Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron Cohen, Steve Carell

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