Best Ever
Comedy Movie?

John Winger loses his job, his car, his apartment, and his girlfriend in a single day. His response—dragging his best friend Russell Ziskey to an Army recruiting office on a whim—makes no logical sense. “We’re not homosexual, but we are willing to learn,” he tells the recruiter, already undermining the institution he’s about to join. This is the Bill Murray method in its purest form: chaos as coping mechanism, verbal dexterity as survival strategy, the refusal to take anything seriously as the only sane response to an insane world.

Stripes arrived in 1981, the same summer as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while Spielberg’s film dominated the box office, Reitman’s comedy performed the quieter work of establishing a template. The slacker-joins-institution premise would fuel decades of comedies from Police Academy through Major Payne, but none captured what makes the formula work: the institution has to deserve the mockery, and the slacker has to be genuinely talented beneath the irony.

Murray’s Winger is both. The Army of Stripes—peacetime, bureaucratic, running on inertia—can’t process someone who treats every interaction as improvisational theater. Drill Sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates, bringing his usual weary authority to a role that could have been pure caricature) recognizes Winger’s intelligence immediately, which is precisely why he finds him intolerable. “Lighten up, Francis” became a catchphrase, but the scene works because Oates plays it as genuine frustration with wasted potential, not comic overreaction.

Harold Ramis, co-writing and co-starring as Russell, provides the essential counterweight. Where Murray improvises, Ramis grounds. Where Murray provokes, Ramis mediates. Their friendship feels lived-in—two guys who’ve been enabling each other’s worst decisions for years, now discovering that the same dynamic might accidentally produce competence. The climactic graduation ceremony, where Winger leads his platoon through an absurdist drill routine to “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” only works because we’ve watched these two slowly, accidentally, create a functional unit out of misfits.

The supporting cast reads like a comedy murderer’s row before anyone knew to call it that. John Candy’s Ox, too gentle for the Army’s purposes but physically imposing enough to matter. Judge Reinhold’s nervous Elmo. John Larroquette’s smarmy Captain Stillman. Each gets moments without disrupting the Murray-Ramis axis. The women—Sean Young and P.J. Soles as MPs who become love interests—are underwritten by contemporary standards, but both actors bring more personality than the script strictly requires.

Reitman’s direction serves the comedy without calling attention to itself. He’d already demonstrated this facility with Meatballs, and would perfect it with Ghostbusters, but Stripes represents the approach in its most confident form. Scenes run long when Murray’s riffing productively, cut short when the energy flags. The basic-training sequences find visual comedy in the gap between military precision and human chaos without resorting to slapstick. Even the third act—widely considered the film’s weakest section, as the platoon accidentally invades Czechoslovakia—maintains momentum through sheer performer commitment.

The film’s politics have aged interestingly. Stripes treats the Army as absurd but not malevolent—a jobs program for people who can’t figure out civilian life, a machine that runs on routine rather than ideology. This was possible in 1981, after Vietnam but before the Reagan military buildup fully took hold. The recruitment scenes play as satire; today they might play as documentary. Winger’s pitch for why he and Russell should enlist—“We’re Americans… we’ve been kicking ass for 200 years”—is delivered as obvious bullshit, Murray’s voice dripping with irony. Whether audiences in 1981 heard the irony is an open question.

What isn’t open is Murray’s centrality to the film’s success. Remove him and you have a competent service comedy; with him, you have a showcase for a performer who’d figured out how to weaponize detachment. Winger’s final speech—“Our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world”—rewrites American exceptionalism as the triumph of people too difficult to assimilate anywhere else. It’s funny because Murray makes it funny. It’s also true, which is why it still works.

The summer of 1981 gave us Indiana Jones and Superman II and An American Werewolf in London. It also gave us Bill Murray explaining that “Chicks dig me because I rarely wear underwear, and when I do, it’s usually something unusual.” Both versions of American cinema matter. Stripes is the version that doesn’t need a whip or a cape—just a fast mouth and a willingness to see what happens.

Decide for Yourself:

• The extended cut adds nearly twenty minutes of footage, including more of Murray’s improvisations and an entire subplot involving the recruits’ misadventures in basic training.
• The theatrical cut remains tighter and arguably funnier—Reitman knew what to leave on the floor.
• For the full early-Murray experience, pair with Meatballs—Reitman’s first collaboration with the comedian.