Funniest Film Lines Ever? Trivia Quiz

Answer: "It's a 50-year-old father with three 47-year-old sons."

"You know why they get along good?...they're all the same age!" Levinson's Baltimore trilogy ("Diner", "Tin Men", "Avalon") is distinguished by realistic and often-side-splitting dialogue.
True Levinson freaks know that the line about the Ponderosa looking fake was also from a Levinson film, though this was "Diner" and not "Tin Men".

Answer: "Joey, have you ever... ever heard of amyl nitrate?"

Just the CASTING on this film was funny! Lloyd Bridges (who "picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue"); Robert Stack ("Loneliness--that's the bottom line. I was an unhappy child...") Barbara Billingsley (for once, not worried about the Beaver, but instead present to translate "jive")... surely they must have hunted down every early 60's TV icon they could find!

They did-- and DON'T CALL ME SHIRLEY! (Resurrected Leslie Nielsen's career too!)

Answer: Chinatown

A true noir classic. The incredible, crackling screenplay made Robert Towne the hottest screenwriter on the planet-- deservedly. Polanski fought with everyone under the sun and made a masterpiece. Many 70's films have aged poorly; this one hasn't.
It's fact-based to a great extent, too: the film's "Hollis Mulwray" is based on legendary LA water czar William Mulholland, and LA's water (as in the film) was in fact rerouted to it from the distant Owens Valley after a good deal of chicanery.

Answer: "I have to go now, Duane... I'm due back on the planet earth."

Woody Allen in "Annie Hall". Walken is Annie's spaceball brother... the tiny role seems to have launched him on a career of playing frightening white guys. The "leaving..." quote is Boon (Peter Riegert) in "Animal House"; the other two are vintage Nicholson, the "loony bin" from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; "Heeeere's Johnny" of course from "The Shining."

Answer: "quality footwear"

Hard to pick from amongst so much great stuff in this film, but I think this line just barely beats out Stonehenge ("...it tended to understate the hugeness of the object"), the "choking to death on vomit... someone else's" bit, the lyrics to the songs, and (ever so slightly) Fred Willard saying "We are such fans of your music... I'm not speaking of yours personally, but the whole genre..."

Answer: "The popcorn you're eating has been pissed in... film at 11"

Directed by a then little-known John Landis, this utterly hilarious film featured a side-splitting takeoff on the Bruce Lee film "Enter the Dragon", a takeoff on cruddy 50's educational films ("Zinc Oxide and You"), and some of the more hilarious movie previews ever to be seen on the big screen, including the blaxploitation film "Cleopatra Schwartz" ("She was six feet of black dynamite... he was a short, Hasidic Jew"; "while she burned the ghetto to the ground, he kindled the Sabbath candles"). This was indeed a movie of "extraordinary magnitude".

Answer: "She's dead? Did she put you up to this? That minx! What a lively sense of humor."

The untimely death of Fawn ("sophomore dies in kiln explosion") of course leads to dates for the road trippers and the no less infamous roadhouse incident, which will not be discussed in detail here. All of the incorrect answers were bandied about in one form or another during the road trip, by the way.

Answer: Nuance

"You know what word I'm not comfortable with? Nuance. It's not a real word. Like-- gesture's a good word. At least you know where you stand with gesture, but nuance? I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong." Levinson wrote and directed; a great cast, too: Reiser went on to TV fame, Kevin Bacon to a number of good big-screen roles, Steve Gutenberg went on the be the second-funniest guy from the Massapequas, and Mickey Rourke went on to fame in, well... France.

Answer: "Hitler was a much better yodeler than Churchill"

Now picking off awards on Broadway, but the '68 Mel Brooks film with Zero Mostel as Bialystok and Gene Wilder as Bloom ("I'm wet! I'm wet! I'm hysterical and I'm wet!") is a masterpiece in itself.

Answer: "Those... aren't .. PILLOWS!"

Maybe the funniest of all the John Hughes films, though bittersweet in light of Candy's untimely demise. Martin's rant about the missing rental car to rental clerk Edie McClurg, and their subsequent interaction, not much of which can be printed here, is only slightly less uproarious.