You Are Not Prepared For Where The Most Startling Comedy Of 2026 Will Take You

Countless comedies are about the rich, powerful, and privileged getting their just desserts at the hands of down-on-their-luck Average Joes, but these villains are overwhelmingly portrayed as cartoonish, buffoonish, or completely incompetent. The jocks in "Revenge of the Nerds" are all clowns. The cops in "Superbad" are bumbling and incompetent. The titular "Horrible Bosses" are so exaggerated in their horribleness that we can't help but laugh at their antics. Hell, Hedley Lamarr in "Blazing Saddles," which is considered by some to be the funniest movie of all time, is a satire of the mustache-twirling villains of films that came before.

The formula has shifted for Macon Blair's "Idiots," one of the best comedies of 2026. Dave Franco doing his lowlife jagoff best stars as Mark, who takes a job as a human courier to help privately babysit privileged, entitled teens on their way to rehab to prevent the news from going public. He's joined by the devoutly Davis (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), a man who has dedicated his life to trying his best but is still at rock bottom right there with Mark. It's a typical odd-couple buddy comedy pairing, but the wrench in the operation is Sheridan (Mason Thames), a selfish brat who reveals himself to be far more horrifically evil than the average sociopathic, millionaire high schooler.

"Idiots" is a road-trip buddy comedy blended a bit with Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail," but Blair's unflinching willingness to take improbable circumstances ("The Toxic Avenger," "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore") to serve as a vehicle to reveal the festering rot of the contemporary United States twists "Idiots" into a road trip of intentional tonal whiplash. The result is a comedy film that is as funny as it is deeply unsettling — but that's exactly the point.

Like the Jason Segel and Samara Weaving comedy "Over Your Dead Body" that arrived (also from IFC) earlier this year, "Idiots" is a comedy with a hell of a mean streak that will likely serve as the litmus test for whether or not people can get on board with Macon Blair's particular flavor of comedy. There are plenty of terrible rich a-holes in comedy films (Shooter McGavin in "Happy Gilmore," White Goodman in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," Biff Tannen in "Back to the Future Part II," etc.), but even at their most villainous, they don't hold a candle to Mason Thames' Sheridan Kimberley.

At the outset, Sheridan seems like your usual insufferable teenager outsmarting the inept adults tasked with taking care of him, and it's fun to laugh at him terrorizing Mark and Davis even though we know he's a twerp. But "Idiots" takes a hard left about halfway through the film, when the true depths of Sheridan's depravity are put on display. His actions are suddenly very much unfunny, and they re-contextualize everything that came before as even more diabolical. There's even a tinge of guilt that hangs over the room for ever laughing at him at all.

It's easy to call Sheridan a vile, unbelievably troubled young man, but the most worrisome trouble is that he is the way he is because he's had years of getting away with it as a result of being in a wealthy, powerful family. He's not misunderstood. He knows exactly what he's doing. And the film isn't afraid to lay that reality bare. The shifts in tone are deeply uncomfortable, but that's precisely why if you can trust Blair's vision and not bail on the story, it works in 2026.

In 2025, there were reports from productions of "Cabaret" that audiences that would previously gasp and recoil in horror at the big reveal during the number "If You Could See Her" — a song that tricks you into laughing before exposing the stabilization of antisemitism during the Nazis' rise — were now continuing to laugh out loud. It became such an issue that star Adam Lambert would go off-script and tell the audience to "pay attention" or "go read a book," because it was clear the message was being lost.

Laughter leads to normalization, which makes it a dangerous weapon for authoritarian powers. Half of the propaganda films Joseph Goebbels made were comedies. Right-wing podcasts and the rise of the manosphere have exploded because they appeal through memetic language and easily digestible "jokes." Hell, Donald Trump often says horrifically offensive things about any number of marginalized people, and it's waved away as nothing more than "jokes."

"Idiots," while a supremely funny comedy with some all-time great set pieces (including one that is a direct reference to the film's original title, "Sh**heads"), refuses to normalize anything Sheridan does by waving it away as "just a joke." It completely disrupts the tried-and-true formula of road-trip comedies and is a spectacular swing that successfully throws the audience out of comfort and complacency. Sheridan knows he's immune to accountability because he is. He has no moral compass and is worshipped by young people aspiring to live like him because they are like him.

For a movie called "Idiots," the deliberate tonal whiplash is agonizingly smart as hell, as long as people are willing to sit with the discomfort Macon Blair has tricked them into facing.

"Idiots" is playing in theaters now.