ScreenCrush has compiled several lists of the greatest movie posters in the past. We’ve done pieces on great action posters, great horror posters, great sci-fi posters, and great disaster posters. But we’ve never done comedy. Until now.

The fact that all those other genres came first can be pinned to a single reason: I’ve always believed that comedies don’t have very good posters. As opposed to more serious, more experimental, more artful genres and styles, comedy posters tend to run towards the generic, the garish, and the repetitious: A couple closeups of the stars faces, some flashes of color, a comical tagline, that’s about it. But in researching this topic, I found there were more exceptions to that rule than I previously thought; so many, in fact, that I expanded the list from 25 to 50 great comedy posters.

The films on this list date back decades (one is almost a century old), and viewed in concert they show how the art of comedy poster art has evolved, from beautiful illustrations to careful photography, to a hybrid style that blurs the line between the two and incorporates text and witty wordplay. In ascending order, here’s ScreenCrush’s picks for the best comedy posters in movie history.

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