Making good jokes requires more than just getting inspired and tweeting an Updog equivalent while using the restroom. The ideal joke transcends the current trend. There are two possibilities for funny movies: to write a one-line joke and hope viewers get it, or invest an absurd amount of time and effort into creating a running joke. Here are a few good examples.

Jokes in Parody Movie Airplane!

Jokes in Parody Movie Airplane!

Thanks to three filmmakers who unintentionally taped the 1957 catastrophe picture Zero Hour! while researching late-night television for ideas for comic routines, the 1980 parody lampooning all those disaster movies from the 1970s has remained comfortably atop the all-time spoof list for quite some time. The parody of Zero Hour, Airplane! - is filled with jokes and lines that are so memorable that you must be familiar with them all.

What starts as jokes about which zone is for stopping or not soon turns into a hilarious psychodrama between these two announcers who have issues. It’s a great background joke to kick off the absurdity of things to come, and it turns out that David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker — the writers and directors collectively referred to as ZAZ — ended up hiring two actual LAX staffers to play out this little runaway gag of “Sh*! we’re pregnant.”

The Musical Number in Spirited

In a contemporary rendition of A Christmas Carol, the new musical comedy for Apple TV+ starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds is wonderful. It's a good Christmas romp with one particular musical performance towering above the rest, although, at times, feeling a little overloaded, especially in the sentimental department.

In the lead-up to it, Reynolds' media brat Clint Briggs hears Ferrell's character Roberto (as he prefers to be called) explain how saying "good afternoon" to someone used to be considered a "sick burn" and the worst form of insult. Of course, this is not a historically accurate anecdote; in the Dickens novel, Scrooge just shouted it at everyone, but the joke was so successful that it earned its sing-and-dance number.

Jokes about metaphorically slapping someone in the face while saying, "Good afternoon," was at first just a scripted aside. Reynolds, though, had the idea to make a fully-fledged song. We like to assume that it was accomplished so that he could finally fulfill his long-held desire to tap dance with Ferrell while speaking with a cockney accent.

The Fake Gangster in Home Alone

A real classic, especially since Kevin McCallister subsequently uses it to trick the Wet Bandits and scam a pizza delivery boy. The authenticity of the gangster movie, which was shot on the last test day before Home Alone filming got underway, is very evident. Director of photography Julio Macat claimed they had nothing and took the risk.

Macat persuaded director Chris Columbus to use 1940s filmmaking techniques to give the movie a noir aesthetic with a nod to early television productions. Due to financial limitations, the set was constructed on a soundstage in an old high school gymnasium, but it was painstakingly furnished with textures to produce the vintage film effect, and it was decorated with such detail that you can even make out a coffee cup, just out of frame, releasing steam into the atmosphere.