Controversial 2008 Movie Named Best 2000s Comedy

Tropic Thunder has been ranked as the best comedy movie of the 2000s, according to a list compiled by Total Film.

There's tons of discourse about why Hollywood doesn't make comedies anymore, creating a sense of nostalgia for the genre's heyday in the 2000s. In the decade that gave us iconic hits like Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, and Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder managed to stand out in more ways than one.

Tropic Thunder was a rare case of Hollywood satirizing itself. In it, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. play actors playing soldiers in a Vietnam War movie. At the behest of a difficult studio exec played by Tom Cruise, the director drops them into the Vietnamese jungle and captures their raw "performances" with hidden cameras, Blair Witch Project-style.

The movie — directed by Stiller — was a massive commercial success, earning nearly $200 million at the box office and earning several award nominations, including an Oscar nomination for Downey for best supporting actor. However, Downey's role would almost certainly not fly today.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Blackface Role Got Him an Oscar Nom

Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, an actor who is playing a Black character in the fictional film within a film. Lazarus goes full method, getting surgery to look like a Black man. As a result, Downey's role is entirely in blackface.

While such a role would almost certainly cause massive backlash in today's zeitgeist, Tropic Thunder didn't receive much backlash in 2008. As mentioned, Downey even got an Oscar nomination. Why was the reaction so muted?

Downey thinks it's because the film wasn't using blackface to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, but rather to highlight the absurdity of white actors playing Black roles, as well as actors who use extreme method acting techniques. "I think that it’s never an excuse to do something that’s out of place and out of its time, but to me it blasted the cap on [the issue]," Downey said on a 2020 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.