The title character’s big idea is about as stupid as they come: down on his luck filmmaker Robert K. Bowfinger (Steve Martin) decides that his next film must star the world’s biggest action icon, a paranoid, racist basket case named Kit Ramsay (Eddie Murphy). But Ramsay is both ungettable and certifiably insane, so Bowfinger decides to shoot him from a great distance away with telephoto lenses (“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which follow American copyright law”), then cut the footage together with shots of Kit’s nerdy twin brother, Jiff (Murphy again). That’s enough silliness to fuel a movie; director Frank Oz (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) and Martin, who wrote the script, push “Bowfinger” in the realm of the sublime ridiculous. The movie is a bumper crop of bizarro moments: a dog walking through a parking garage in high heels; the hapless Jiff letting himself be talked into crossing a six-lane freeway, and most of all, Kit’s freaked-out rants. “A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination,” he grouses at one point. “A white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That’s what I need, I need to play a retarded slave, then I’ll get the Oscar!”

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s action film spoof isn’t a stupid movie. Quite the contrary: It’s a big-tent sendup that butchers right- and left-wing sacred cows, and it doesn’t just mock big-budget action film conventions, but shows how they reflect and validate American blood lust and narcissism. (Whenever the movie cuts to a new international locale, it makes sure to tell you exactly how many miles it is from the United States.) That said, the bulk of the movie’s humor is extravagantly asinine: silly, loopy and crass in a stoners-in-the-basement sort of way. Even as “Team America” astutely mocks the visual grammar of Hollywood shoot-’em-ups, the action scenes’ biggest laughs come from a less sophisticated place: the sight of wobbly marionettes “fighting” by lamely pawing the air and bumping into each other. (No attempt is made to hide the strings.) As on “South Park,” Parker and Stone never use a scalpel when a mallet will suffice: The bad guy, the Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, talks like a cross between Eric Cartman and Charlie Chan (“Hans Brix? Oh no! Oh, herrow! Great to see you again, Hans!”); the fearsome animals in Kim’s fortress are played by scale-appropriate thresher sharks and house cats; the film’s hero, actor-turned-commando Gary Johnston, is discovered on Broadway while performing a showstopping number from “Lease” titled “Everybody has AIDS!” Then there’s the main theme. And the sex scene. And the numerous, brazenly absurd “heartfelt” monologues, including the one by Gary’s fellow soldier, Chris, tracing his lifelong hatred of actors back to the time he saw a touring production of “Cats” at 19. “After the show I was asked if I wanted to go meet some of the performers backstage. Man, I was thrilled. But when I got back there, they were drunk and out of control. Rumpus Cat and Macavity kept feeling up my leg. I tried to leave, but Rumpleteazer held me down, and … I was raped by Mr. Mistoffelees.”

This cult classic from writer-director Mike Judge (creator of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “King of the Hill” and “Office Space”) is the film America needs and deserves: the first dystopian sci-fi comedy in which the downfall of civilization is blamed on sheer stupidity. Luke Wilson plays Pvt. Joe Bowers, a man of utterly ordinary intelligence who awakens from suspended animation in the far future and discovers that America has become a “Road Warrior”-style junk pile. Democratic government has been supplanted by blandly fascistic corporations; education is a joke; pop culture is corrupt and depraved; dolts are elevated to positions purely on the basis of their shamelessness; and the entire nation is suffering a food shortage because … well, I better not tell you why, because the big reveal is both one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and one of the saddest. “The years passed,” the narrator tells us. “Mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources were focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.” To his credit, Bowers realizes that only in a world where flagrant, self-destructive idiocy is the norm can a mediocrity like him be hailed as humanity’s last, best hope, yet he musters his nerve anyway and rises to meet the challenge. His address to Congress is one of the most chillingly underachieving inspirational speeches in film history: “There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies — movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was, and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again”

I almost didn’t include this movie because if I compile a list of the greatest stoner comedies in the future, this one would have to be on it, and then I’d have to write about it a second time without repeating myself. Then I rewatched the movie and realized I had nothing to worry about. This film is some kind of low-art masterpiece — an inexhaustible trove of foulmouthed, politically incorrect and often proudly dumb-ass humor — and a lot of it isn’t quotable anyway. Director Danny Leiner mostly avoids setup-punch line humor and elaborate sight gags in favor of deadpan reaction shots and semi-naturalistic dialogue (“Harold: “I am so hungry. I’m gonna eat, like, 20 of those burgers, man.” Kumar: “Dude, fuckin’ I will see your 20 burgers and raise you five orders of fries”). Most of the laughs come from the hapless blunderings of the title characters, college students whose late-night quest to satiate their munchies at White Castle becomes an epic journey that would test the patient of Odysseus. That said, there are a number of truly unhinged bits, including the greatest dating montage spoof ever committed to film, and every scene involving Neil Patrick Harris, who plays — well, not himself, really; more like a frighteningly intense frat-dude version of himself. (Kumar: “So where you going to go now, Neil?” Harris: “Wherever God takes me!”)

“The Pink Panther Strikes Again” is a Looney Tune stretched out to feature length. Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers) is the Road Runner. Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is his Wile E. Coyote, an embittered creature whose grandiose schemes to kill Clouseau always end in failure. Sellers’ fourth outing as Clouseau is a shambles as a movie, stumbling from set piece to set piece and barely bothering with connective tissue. Of all the works on this list, this one has the least to offer as a movie. And yet in some way that also makes it the purest title here. “The Pink Panther Strikes Again” is truly, deeply, elementally dumb. It has no ambition to subvert or spoof or dissect or examine anything; it’s just a bunch of set pieces that go from silly to ridiculous to bug-eyed crazy. Director Blake Edwards treats each one as a little movie in itself; he plants a half-dozen setups throughout a scene like firecrackers tied to a single fuse — and then he lights the fuse. The previous entry in the series, “The Return of the Pink Panther,” ended with the long-suffering Dreyfus finally being driven mad by Clouseau’s incompetence. This one finds Dreyfus escaping from a mental hospital, holing up in a scary castle, building a death ray and warning the nations of the world that if they don’t kill Clouseau, he’ll wipe out humankind. (He owns a pipe organ and plays it beautifully.) It’s all just a pretext for epic slapstick: an army of assassins combing the planet for Clouseau, but somehow killing one another instead of their target; a scene in which Dreyfus tries to destroy Clouseau with a bomb while the inspector duels with his manservant, Kato (Burt Kwouk), who has been ordered to attack Clouseau without warning to keep him on his toes; and a magnificent bit wherein Clouseau dons a prosthetic disguise so that he can pose as a dentist, infiltrate Dreyfus’ castle, and arrest him while pretending to fix his teeth. (The men end up stoned on nitrous oxide and weeping with laughter while Clouseau’s wax nose melts.) The film honors its true star, Dreyfus, with one of the wildest and most fitting of all villainous exits. You will never hear “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in quite the same way.

If you’ve never seen a frame of the Cartoon Network series that spawned this truly deranged movie, will it enhance or detract from your enjoyment? It’s hard to say. The adventures of fast food superheroes Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad were never models of coherence on the small screen, either; in contrast to some other TV shows that prompted viewers to ask, “What the hell is going on?” if they missed an episode or two, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” prompted that same question pretty much every second even if — especially if — you were a regular viewer. It was a bunch of disconnected absurdist bits protracted to the point where they stopped being funny, then inexplicably became funnier than ever, and they often involved silly voices, accents, catchphrases and nonsensical sentences of the sort that your best friend might have blurted out in school to get you to spit milk through your nose in the cafeteria. The movie is more of the same stretched out to (barely) feature length, yet for some wonderful reason this only ratchets up the weirdness factor. (The fact that Warner Bros. paid for this insular insanity is amazing in itself.) The plot sets our not-so-intrepid heroes in pursuit of a Macguffin called the Insane-O-Flex, an exercise machine that can destroy the universe (while getting you into amazing shape); along the way they fight various villains, including Dr. Weird and Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past From the Future, and squabble endlessly among themselves in that “We’re making this up as we go” style that the great, rambling surrealist W.C. Fields might have appreciated, if he could figure out what in the holy living crap these characters were saying. Even if the humor isn’t your cup of high-fructose corn syrup, the film is worth seeing for its opening number, a parody of those old-fashioned, in-theater concession stand advertisements that should be played in front of every feature film made between now and the end of time.

No list of movies featuring magnificently stupid humor would be complete without a nod to Jerry Lewis, without whom a number of titles listed here would not exist. I realize the man’s work has become shorthand for “Why the French aren’t as smart as they think they are.” But even if you refuse to accept the proposition that Lewis is a masterful satirist who’s still misunderstood in his home country, you’ve got to give him his due for his ability to stage and shoot elaborately choreographed spectacles of primordial shtick. I’ve chosen “The Patsy” — in which a cabal of agents and managers groom our boy as a successor to a famous comedian who died in a plane crash — to stand in for Lewis’ vast and varied idiot man-child filmography. The movie strips Lewis’ unnerving gifts to their essence. A fair amount of the film’s running time is devoted to simply framed images of Lewis’ character, a dimwitted hotel bellhop named Stanley, flailing around incompetently in his regular job, then trying and failing showbiz fundamentals. This character redefines the word “hapless”: he can’t even sit in a chair without damaging it or sliding onto the floor. The best way to tune in to Lewis’ wavelength is to think of him as a silent comedian who just happened to come along during the sound era. Whatever’s happening at the plot level, the real show is always Lewis’ anxious, spastic, stop-and-start motions through space. This comes through most strongly in a scene where Stanley tells the film’s love interest, Ellen Betz (Ina Balin), about his youthful humiliation at a dance, an incident recounted in long flashback with music but almost no natural sound. If that example makes the film sound more sappy than silly, don’t worry. Most of “The Patsy” takes its cue from the lead-up to that flashback (skip to the 7:40 mark) — a moment where Stanley thinks nobody’s watching and dances like a monkey on a hot plate.

“I was born a poor black child … ” Steve Martin’s breakthrough movie is a comic odyssey that its poster described as “a rags to riches to rags” story; its title character, Navin Johnson, may well be one of the stupidest characters in the history of motion pictures, a naif who makes Candide look like Albert Einstein. When his adoptive father, a sharecropper, explains one of the fundamental distinctions in life (“You see that, son? Now that’s shit. And this? Shinola!”) Navin’s earnest reaction suggests a little kid struggling to process facts that might end up on a test. The entire film is pitched at that level. The script, which Martin co-wrote, is a string of non sequiturs played more or less straight. Navin survives an encounter with a sniper who picked his name out of a phone book, sells pizza-in-a-cup at the county fair, woos and marries a lovely young woman named Marie who’s just as dimwitted and naive as Navin (she’s played by Bernadette Peters, whose wide-eyed performance perfectly complements Martin’s). He builds and loses a fortune creating an accessory that keeps glasses from sliding off one’s nose, cheats death many times, and never learns a thing, except the shit/shinola distinction, the fact that “escargot” is French for snails, and the three most important things in life, as listed by his dear old dad: “Lord loves a workin’ man … Don’t trust whitey … See a doctor and get rid of it.” Once you’ve heard Martin and Peters’ rendition of “The Thermos Song,” you’ll never be able to get it out of your head. Whether you consider that an incentive to rent the film or a warning against it we leave entirely up to you, dear reader. But damned if this silly little bit isn’t just about the most beautiful thing ever.

“The story of a man who turned the other cheek — and got punched in the nose.” That’s the opening title card of Laurel and Hardy’s 16-minute silent featurette “Big Business.” Co-directed by James M. Horne and Leo McCarey (who later worked with the Marx Brothers), the film finds Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy driving around suburban Los Angeles during the Yuletide season, selling Christmas trees door-to-door. (Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, but never mind.) If you’ve never seen a Laurel and Hardy picture before, this one’s a perfect introduction — a marvel of slow-building insanity. Stan’s the skinny one, Ollie’s the fat one; they’re both dumb as bricks, but for some reason Ollie fancies himself the brains of the operation. (“It’s personality that wins!” Ollie preens near the start of “Big Business” his cocky grin foretelling their doom.) The spiral of destruction begins when the boys try to sell a tree to a cranky homeowner (Frank Finlayson). He slams the door in their faces, catching Stan’s coat in the door frame; when they ring the doorbell again to free Stan’s coat, the homeowner assumes they’re refusing to take no for an answer. From then on it’s a war of wills, each side misunderstanding and then humiliating the other, the conflict escalating from low-level animosity to shouting, shoving and wanton destruction of property. By the end, half the block is in ruins. For all their haplessness and stupidity, the duo are forces to be reckoned with, agents of chaos laying waste to civilization. As Gerald Mast wrote in “The Comic Mind,” “Stan and Ollie can convert a group of normal people into a mass of pie-slingers, shin-kickers, and pants-pullers. They bring out the worst in everybody.”

Monty Python is the gold standard for smart dumb humor, mingling high and low comedy in every sketch, sometimes every line and gesture. The Python gang’s debut feature — a meandering riff on the Arthurian legends — boasts fourth-wall-breaking narration, quasi-experimental digressions, and self-aware dialogue that pits one character’s man-of-his-time obliviousness against another character’s modern mind-set. (“Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”) But the biggest laughs come from duels of wit between unarmed opponents and majestically ludicrous sight gags: characters banging coconut halves together in lieu of riding actual horses; the French soldiers with their elaborate insults (“Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!”); the Bridge Keeper with his dreaded three questions; the seemingly harmless but secretly murderous rabbit that can only be vanquished with a Holy Hand Grenade; King Arthur’s protracted, gory duel with the Black Knight (“It’s only a flesh wound!”); the Knights who Say “Ni” (later known as The Knights Who Say “Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-PTANG. Zoom-Boing. Z’nourrwringmm!); and, of course, the exchange about the Castle of Aaaaauuuuugggh, one of the best bits of forehead-slapping tomfoolery since the heyday of Abbott and Costello.

Brother Maynard: (Reading an inscription on a wall) “Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Aramathia. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the holy grail in the Castle of Aaauuuggghhh… “
King Arthur: What?
Brother Maynard: “The Castle of Aaaauuuggghhhh”
Sir Bedevere: What is that?
Brother Maynard: He must have died while carving it.
King Arthur: Oh come on!
Brother Maynard: Well, that’s what it says.
King Arthur: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn’t have bothered to carve ‘Aaaauuuggghhhh’. He’d just say it.
Sir Galahad: Maybe he was dictating it.