Laughable Quotes Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Odd Couple

Neil Simon's best play was turned into a very funny film starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. The story of two mismatched roommates--Oscar the slob and Felix the neatnik--"The Odd Couple" is one of the most popular plays in American theatre history, and for good reason.

When Felix's wife throws him out, he has nowhere else to turn but to his old friend, Oscar, whose wife did the same to him a few years earlier. It is not a match made in heaven, however, as the two soon begin to drive each other crazy.

This quote comes early in the film. Felix is a no-show for the weekly poker game and Oscar's buddies are concerned. Oscar is reassuring his poker buddies that Felix is not about to do anything drastic. "He's too nervous to kill himself. Wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie."

Answer: Animal Crackers

"Animal Crackers" is the Marx Brothers at their most joyfully chaotic. During a party thrown in honor the famed African explorer, Captain Spaulding (Groucho), a famous painting goes missing. Wackiness ensues. And that's pretty much all the plot we get because, let's face it, the real point of any Marx Brothers movie is for the boys to create havoc, poke fun at anything and anyone who crosses their paths, and make us laugh.

In this quote, Groucho takes aim at Eugene O'Neill, who, at the time that "Animal Crackers" was made, was widely regarded as America's greatest playwright. In 1928, O'Neill's epic play "Strange Interlude" debuted on Broadway and was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for drama. "Strange Interlude" features a series of stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. The actors would step out of a scene and speak their thoughts to the audience while their fellow actors would stand still in the background. Groucho does the same thing here. While in the middle of a conversation with two women, Groucho says the above quote and steps forward, looks at the camera, and speaks: "Living with your folks... living with your folks... the beginning of the end... drab, dead yesterdays shutting out beautiful tomorrows... hideous, stumbling footsteps creaking along the misty corridors of time... and in those corridors I see figures... straaange figures... weeeird figures: Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138."

Answer: Tootsie

Sandy (Teri Garr), a frustrated actress, speaks this line to Michael (Dustin Hoffman), an equally frustrated actor, near the end of his birthday party early on in the film. Poor Sandy has spent much of the party locked in the bathroom. On top of that, her career is going nowhere, her love life is stalled, and she is seriously considering chucking it all and leaving NYC and her acting career behind. This quote is a wonderful summation of all her frustration.

While things don't get much better for Sandy, they do improve for Michael when he wins a role on a soap opera by masquerading as a woman. His female alter-ego becomes a celebrity but it leads to seriously wacky professional and personal complications. This wonderful gender-bending comedy is one of the very best films of the 1980s.

Answer: Best in Show

Fred Willard's Buck Laughlin is a former sportscaster who has been assigned to be the TV announcer for the Mayflower Dog Show. Laughlin clearly knows nothing about dogs, dog shows or, for that matter, American history, as he demonstrates in this twisted bit of word-craft. He speaks these words to Bob Balaban's Dr. Theodore W. Millbank, III, the dog show's CEO, who appears on TV with Buck for an interview. Millbank is decidedly non-plussed.

"Best in Show" is a wonderful send up of the moneyed, pressured world of high stakes dog shows. A varied cast of characters played by a remarkable cast including Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, and director Christopher Guest make this a must see. One of the funniest films in recent memory.

Answer: Bringing Up Baby

"Bringing Up Baby" is, for my money, the funniest movie of all time. It has masterful performances by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, a suitably fanciful plot involving the search for a dinosaur bone, the wrangling of a leopard, and the pursuit of true love! A classic!

Susan (Hepburn) encounters a psychiatrist and asks him what he makes of a man who "just follows me around and fights with me." He tells her, "The love impulse in man very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict." A few moments later when the man in question, David (Grant) shows up, Susan hits him with this exchange. It's clear to us that Susan is already falling hard for David. This line confirms it.

Naturally, Susan and David end up together and in love. And the dinosaur bone and the leopard? Found and wrangled.

Answer: Love and Death

Woody Allen at his most outrageously comic in this 1975 gem, his last film before the groundbreaking "Annie Hall". "Love and Death" is set in czarist Russia and involves a plot in which a couple of Russian peasants (Allen and his chief muse, Diane Keaton) plot to assassinate Napoleon. But it's all really just an excuse to tell a lot of jokes and poke a lot of fun at the likes of Leo Tolstoy and Sergei Eisenstein. (Killer score, by the way, courtesy of none other than Sergei Prokofiev.)

This quote comes early in the film in a voice-over when Boris Grushenko (Alfred Lutter as a boy, Allen as a man) is, indeed, walking through the woods only to be approached by a hooded figure whom we immediately recognize as Death.
"We'll meet again," intones Death.
"Don't bother," answers Boris, nervously.
"It's no bother," Death replies.
And, of course, they do meet again.

Answer: Office Space

Mike Judge's 1999 cult classic "Office Space" tells the story of a Peter (Ron Livingston), a guy who, like most of us, hates his job and is looking for a way to get back at the world for his perceived misfortune. He and two recently fired co-workers concoct a scheme to rip off the offending company pennies at a time.

When the plan backfires--or when the plan works way better and faster than they imagined, making their crime more detectable--they start looking for ways to hide the loot from authorities.

In this scene, the three amateur criminals are debating ways to handle the situation. Money laundering seems like the best idea but they are such nerds and such amateurs that they don't even begin to understand how the process works. Solution...look it up in the dictionary!

Answer: Adam's Rib

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn team up in this charming comedy about a pair of married attorneys who find themselves on the opposite side of an attempted murder case. This film was also the first major role for future Oscar-winner Judy Holliday, who plays the wanna-be murderess. In this quote, she is being questioned by her attorney (Hepburn) when she blurts out this hysterically honest answer.

This film was written by the married team of Garson Kanin and actress Ruth Gordon. Gordon would win an Oscar years later for her role in "Rosemary's Baby". Playwright Kanin, at the time, was hot off his Broadway success "Born Yesterday", which made a star out of, you guessed it, Judy Holliday!

Answer: The Goodbye Girl

Neil Simon again. Simon has gotten a lot of comic mileage about mismatched people living uncomfortably together in close quarters--"The Odd Couple", "Barefoot in the Park", "Brighton Beach Memoirs". All of these plays and many others exploit and have great comic fun with this basic premise. In 1977's film "The Goodbye Girl", starring Simon's then wife Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss (who took home an Oscar for his role), he does it again.

Mason plays Paula, a divorced mother and recent dumpee who finds herself forced to share her Greenwich Village apartment with Dreyfuss' Elliott Garfield, an abrasive off-Broadway actor. This quote demonstrates the perils of such close living when Paula bursts in on a buffo Elliott.

The two mismatched roomies ultimately fall in love, of course, but not until after an insanely funny rendition of "Richard III" in which Elliott is forced into a particularly humiliating rendition of Shakespeare's misshapen anti-hero.

Answer: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

Myrna Loy has one of her very best moments in a glorious career in this exchange from 1946's "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House." Loy and her husband, played by the incomparably funny Cary Grant, decide to move from the city into the suburbs only to discover that building a dream home is a lot more trouble than they could have ever imagined.

Take this quote for example. Loy is giving directions to a pair of house painters--very detailed directions, such as...

"I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin's egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds."

Or...

"Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer."

Or...

"Now, the dining room. I'd like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshine-y."

After she leaves the room, the painters confer.

"You got that Charlie?"
"Red, green, blue, yellow, white."