Satire inflates real life like a parade balloon until it pops under the pressure of its own contradictions, using irony and exaggeration to highlight the world’s absurdities. And cinema has a long tradition of employing it to ridiculous effect. To help get you right to the best of the best of the bunch, here are our picks for the 10 greatest satire films of all time.

Most great satire takes high aim at those lofty institutions bearing down on us from atop towers of bullshit - bureaucracy, politics, and all your favorite ‘isms - but we’ll get to all that later. To start things off, we always like to grab readers’ attention by beginning with a whimper, so we’ll begin by closely looking at those satires that poke and prod at the foundations of our very relationships.

City of Women, Wild Grass, Love at the Top, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Divorce: Italian Style all take their own aim at the ways we love - or at least pretend to - one another, but for our favorite satire of this sort, we’re kicking things off with The Lobster. Aging spinsters and spinstettes are given one last chance to find love or face transformation into the animal of their choice to live out their days, and director Yorgos Lanthimos makes it clear what he thinks of the pressure surrounding the institution of marriage.

With as dark and wry a satirical posture as can possibly be taken, his breakout feature sets its deadpan targets on the societal pressures of monogamy with hardly a single wink to betray his sense of the absurd. Delivered in his trademark blunt style of on-the-nose dialogue, his characters speak every drip of subtext while facing the usually-metaphorical threat of failing-to-conform rendered physical and… bizarre.

By creating a visceral analogy to running out of time, Lanthimos makes it crystal clear exactly how he feels about the entire concept of “til death do us part.”

Read our full review of The Lobster.

Next up, we pivot to something totally unrelated, even though we phrase it like it’s deeply connected because we couldn’t think of a better way to segue between Relationships and The Media.

Media satires have sent up the concept of fandoms in Galaxy Quest and celebrity in general in films like Meet John Doe, The King of Comedy, and Natural Born Killers, but our favorite media takedowns look at the fourth estate, and our number nine pick, Network, fits right into that category.

On just about the complete opposite end of the emotional spectrum of The Lobster’s detached frigidity, Network is a screaming tea-kettle in a boiler room of a nuclear reactor going supercritical as it plumbs the hollow soul of the media machine.

Sidney Lumet conjures Paddy Chayefsky’s escalating succession of passionate monologues into hulking cinematic form. Transmuting them into the weight of an entire journalism industry coalescing into a fist with which it might pummel reality into submission such that it behaves in a way worth reporting on. And the result is a “reportage” that rings truer with each passing day.

Even more than mocking its little sibling TV, Hollywood loves making fun of itself. It’s just the right amount of self-deprecation to justify an hour and a half of pure vanity. Singin’ in the Rain teases in the gentlest, most loving way, while Sunset Boulevard dresses it up in noir clothing, but it is Robert Altman’s satire The Player that clinches this particular slot.

A heart-baring love letter from Altman to the film industry that made him famous, chewed him up, spit him out, and then invited him back for more, The Player begins with an iconic eight-minute long take that sets up the entirety of the plot along with its self-referential frame.

This is the story of an ambitious studio exec, played by a slick-haired Tim Robbins, who seeks out a writer he suspects of sending him harassing postcards… before he accidentally murders him. It’s a star-studded parade of cameos that further blurs the line between real and make-believe in the land of make-believe, and it only gets blurrier from there.

There is perhaps no auteur more qualified to render an indictment against his entire industry - and more capable of executing it to its wryest potential - than Altman proves he’s capable of in the masterpiece that is The Player.

Ever so slightly less sacred to Hollywood than itself are the films that set out to send-up religion, to absolutely no controversy at all. Right? What has ever gone wrong here?

Critiquing Christianity in The Milky Way, Bruce Almighty, Dogma, Islam in Four Lions, Spirituality in Schizopolis and - hot take here - Fight Club are high marks, but our favorite of the religious satires pokes fun at Christianity and Judaism as a way of mocking religion in general. We’re talking about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

It’s hard to see how this is - in fact - a satire, and harder still to imagine the Monty Python gang engaging in wonton silliness, but beneath its straight-laced, docu-historical facade, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is, in truth, a heavily coded farce.

Life of Brian presented at-the-time cutting-edge archaeological findings that established that Jesus of Nazareth was born on the same day as - and next door to - another Israelite named Brian, who was frequently mistaken for the son of God himself. This, of course, shook scholars from the bible belt to the Vatican, calling years of established church doctrine into question, and raised all kinds of important questions: Were the miracles all correctly attributed to Jesus? Does humanity really need to be following anybody at all? Who really was Biggus Dickus?

Alas, scholars secular and religious alike will be pondering these three questions for decades to come, as Life of Brian is surely just as enjoyable - and more importantly, informative - now as it ever was.

Perhaps even less controversial than religion is racism, and we almost didn’t include a category on racial satires because what’s there to make fun of? But then after exhaustive research conducted by tireless scholars on long sleepless nights via peer-reviewed quick Google searches, it turns out there actually are a few things. Shocking.

Like District 9’s apartheid allegory, Blazing Saddles’ takedown of bigotry in the wild west, or Django Unchained’s smarmy upending of it. Black Dynamite parodying as it satirizes, Get Out horrifying, and Dear White People making the case that it is in fact Gremlins that is the racial satire we all deserve.

But ultimately it’s Spike Lee who takes this slot, whose career is laced with racial satire from Do the Right Thing to BlacKkKlansman. But never has he done so with a sharper bite than in 2000’s Bamboozled.

Bamboozled sees Spike Lee barring approximately zero holds total as he expands the satire of Sidney Lumet’s Network into the realm of race. Trapped in a contract with a network uninterested in portraying African Americans in a positive light, a TV writer attempts to get himself fired by pitching a modern-day minstrel show, complete with every stereotype in the book, including Black actors in blackface. It goes predictably not-awry and the show gets very much made and is very much a smashing success.

With a bleak and caustic sense of humor and an ever-present sense of tragedy - only one of which is absurd - the film was way ahead of its time in its on-screen portrayal of racism as a system made up of individuals who serve simultaneously as both perpetrator and victim, without letting any one of us - audience included - off the hook.

As long as we’re building categories around things you ought to be talking about on first dates and Thanksgivings, let’s not disappoint the internet and leave out politics! And, oh God, where do we even start? Maybe by looking back into the past to escape the problems of today.

Bob Roberts takes on fake folksy relatability, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington brilliantly tackles the manipulation of the political machine, and Team America: World Police mines American exceptionalism to ridiculous lengths, but it is the political incompetence of In the Loop that snags our next slot.

The spiritual forefather - and older, meaner uncle - of HBO’s Veep, In the Loop sees the same creative team cut their teeth on the insane inanity of the run-up to the invasion of the Middle East in a way that will have you wondering what’s worse, the selfishness or the stupidity, before gleefully interrupting you to ask why the f*** not both?

If there were a Mozart of profanity, he would look a whole lot like the film’s Malcolm Tucker, composing grand opuses of obscenity with the craft of an artisan as if political machinery ran on fuel enriched from run-on sentences composed entirely of four-letter words. But swearing aside, the satire’s brilliance is mostly in how the plot’s machinations come together - how all the banality and buffoonery and petty self-interest adds all of the little wrong decisions that are easily justified along the way into an enormously catastrophic one that had no good excuse.

There are many good non-US political satires made in the US, like Duck Soup, Jojo Rabbit and The Great Dictator - and in the UK, like The Death of Stalin - but for an international pick, we turn instead to the Greek since it’s their turn for a satire with no small towns faking anything at all from the film Z.

Shot by Greek director-in-exile Costa-Gravas, Z is about as adoring of his home country as one could expect from an expatriate revolutionary artist banned from returning. A pacifist politician on the Left is assassinated after defying the Greek government, and - while officially ruled an accident - evidence begins to emerge as to the truth of the matter. Investigation follows evidence, and suppression follows investigation. And - oh yeah - it was all pretty much true.

And while In the Loop finds endless humor amidst the wrongdoings behind the closed doors of politics, Z’s satire is of the much darker, modest-proposal sort, taking on the tone of a taut based-on-a-true-story political thriller, parceling out nail-biting cinematic suspense even as it takes a strong authorial position against political corruption.

With very little embellishment, Costa-Gravas proves that sometimes all that’s needed to make great satire is to reveal the goddamn truth and let it mock itself.

Pivoting from the boardroom to the battlefield, we next take a breather from the heaviness of politics with a category known as war.

Starship Troopers was an indictment of colonial warmongering so searing you might have missed it, and we’re very sad not to pick it, but we think Paul Verhoeven is ever so slightly edged-out by the lesser known Stanley Kubrick who has mocked war not once but twice in Full Metal Jacket and, our number three pick, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

With an all-star cast consisting of Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and an unbelievably young James Earl Jones, Stanley Kubrick’s farcical tale of nuclear brinkmanship gone over the brink puts on grand display the biggest problem with all our nuclear security systems: That they are run by people.

And here, Kubrick’s people are hilariously grotesque in their fallibility, stupidity, absurdity, egotism, and infantilism, in such a way that has been proven sadly prophetic by recent history. But even as they are truly terrible leaders, they’re all so terribly likable that it’s almost fun watching them stumble their way into the apocalypse.

In the filmography of an auteur who made a career of bitingly dry satires, Dr. Strangelove is perhaps Kubrick’s most openly playful, managing to find sickening delight even - and especially - as the mushroom clouds bloomed.

Our next category explores those satires questioning the sickening realities of advertising and capitalism in general, but first, a word from our sponsors…

Thank You for Smoking is a brilliant jibe at PR BS while Modern Times sees Charlie Chaplin make a slapstick critique of capital’s relationship with labour. But this is the category we get to hand to Verhoeven for his other brilliant satire: Robocop.

A megacorporation partners with local police to help bring under heel an out of control future-Detroit… and gets very rich while doing it. Although often enjoyed as an ultra-violent action-romp, Robocop is - in true Verhoevean fashion - very much positioned as a critique of the violent media culture and the capitalist system that creates it, particularly inspired by the Reagan Era during which it was made.

Of course, contemporary viewers will be shocked - shocked I tell you - to see that much of its criticism is still relevant: gentrifiers attempting to displace residents of the inner-city; a police force that is weaponized to the point of robotification; private companies taking over public services and then not acting in the public interest. Like I said… shocked.

Verhoeven’s Robocop lays bare and unsubtle that which supports the unequal system benefitting the few rather than the many: lots and lots of violence.

Finally, we get to channel the inner Karl Marx you’ve always secretly suspected lay within us and carve out a category for class commentary, something which has been done brilliantly across the decades from My Man Godfrey to Clueless to Idiocracy. We’ve also been treated to Barry Lyndon’s satire of upper-class behavior in the Victorian Era, but we’re worried if we don’t pick a foreign film in our top slot, you won’t know how sophisticated we are!

The Rules of the Game is utterly brilliant and just misses this slot, but the award for the film that is more impressive - and foreign-sounding - is La Dolce Vita.

Marcello - a tabloid journalist - floats his way through a loosely connected series of episodes amidst post-war Rome’s upper crust, dabbling in love and fame and high society. One of Fellini’s many masterpieces, the film’s satire is more lyrical than biting, although its name - translated as The Sweet Life - betrays its inner irony: By all appearances, life is everything Marcello or anyone could have ever dreamed. But over and over he comes up unsatisfied. The sweet life reveals itself as hollow and unsatisfying.

How could so much mean so little? And that’s the irony. That’s the joke. A three-hour series of beautiful poetic moments that fail to amount to what was promised. That is why we think it’s one of the 10 best satires of all time.

So what do you think? Disagree with any of our picks? Did we leave out any of your favorite satires? Let us know in the comments!