2004 was a banner year for quotable comedies

I’m not sure anyone I knew made a single original joke in 2004.

I wasn’t innocent. As a child, my parents coaxed me into doing Honeymooners bits, filming them gleefully onto VHS tapes that would be screened for every significant other I was unfortunate enough to bring home. My parents also recited Monty Python And The Holy Grail more than the audience of a high school production of Spamalot, so I never had a chance.

When I was a little older, I graduated from the Jim Carrey school of elastic mania, having finished the core curriculum of Ace Ventura and its sequel, The Mask, Dumb And Dumber, and Batman Forever. Apologies to my loved ones for how many times I repeated the three crackling electronic phrases my talking Riddler action figure cycled through. This is all to say that I was a 12-year-old who’d been training for the critical mass of 2004’s quotable comedies all my life. That year saw the release of Napoleon Dynamite, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, Mean Girls, and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle—and conversations quickly required their own works cited.

These movies were more than catchphrase delivery devices, they were good. Original comedy was having a boom year (though Mean Girls was inspired by Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabees, Tina Fey basically wrote her version of Girl World from scratch), and it was aimed directly at people my age. 

With the exception of Anchorman, the subject matter of these movies skewed young just as the comedic box office smashes of 2003—Bruce Almighty, Bringing Down The House, the Cheaper By The Dozen remake—skewed older. Two were set in a high school. All of them were about losers and screw-ups; one even had “Underdog” in the title. They were also mostly rated PG-13 (Napoleon Dynamite’s wholesome quirk was a mere PG), with the few R-rated exceptions easy enough to see if you knew someone who worked at your local movie theater, understood LimeWire, or were brave enough to sit through one with your least embarrassing parent. It was a perfect storm for their target demographic of angsty teens.

Its epicenter was the summer of 2004. Four of those comedies came out in June and July, as did sex comedy EuroTrip’s home video release, setting off a piracy competition in order to find out what Scotty didn’t know. When August rolled around, everyone returning to school was armed with an arsenal of ridiculous phrases sure to amuse in the back of the classroom. Who needed a personality when your impressionable young mind had become a Will Ferrell soundboard?

This year’s coming-of-age comedy Dìdi reflects the 2008 version of this regrettable yet relatable experience by having one of its idiot teens attempting to pass off Dave Chappelle stand-up as his own in order to impress girls. The cringe-inducing behavior resonates, but those of us in 2004 weren’t taking credit for the riffing absurdity of Anchorman’s blowhards, simply because that whole script had already been committed to memory by every possible peer. These weren’t jokes, they were passwords, proving that you could hang. A new juvenile jargon was established over a single season, and we were all fluent. As The A.V. Club’s Matt Schimkowitz wrote about the film’s unforgettable script for our Best of 2004 ranking, “lines of dialogue get memorized, cataloged, and archived for future usage, and no film this century has a filing cabinet bursting with as many memorable quotes as Anchorman.”

Different lines stuck with different demographics. Living in San Diego when Anchorman came out, my partner vividly remembers the impact of the city’s fictitious discovery and etymology (“San Diego” of course being German for “whale’s vagina”). Based on my own middle school experiences, Ron Burgundy’s accidental erection had my whole friend group blaming the pleats of their pants.

And it wasn’t just the writing. After scene-stealing roles in Old School and Zoolander, Ferrell catapulted into movie stardom in 2003 by Elf. But, a year later, Anchorman is what gave his SNL specialties (bloviating dorks on the edge of mania; softly stupid authority figures) the film role they needed. He and Adam McKay defined an era of big-screen comedy with follow-ups Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, building off of Anchorman’s buffoonish sexism with even dumber egotists.

For teen boys, dumb egotism was all we had, propped up in front of our insecurities. Mimicking Ferrell’s broad, cartoonish Anchorman accent and luxuriating in the improvised absurdity from Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and especially Steve Carell made the film that made us laugh so hard feel accessible. And if we subconsciously started associating casual ‘70s sexism with immature losers, well, that was icing.

The other good offering from the Frat Pack that year was Dodgeball. (Starsky & Hutch has its moments, but it’s clearly second-tier.) Pitting Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn against each other in a snobs vs. slobs dodgeball tournament, with Justin Long as the high school surrogate, Dodgeball was blessed with plenty of quips and a supporting cast that rivaled the McKay players. 

Stephen Root, Alan Tudyk, and Rip Torn could fill a character actor Hall of Fame on their own, then Jason Bateman and Gary Cole pop up as the commentators for the tourney. Sure the list of celebrity cameos is a who’s who of disgraced notables, but for the most part, the film’s bold strategy (giving decent jokes to incredible performers) still pays off. Hell, “ESPN8: The Ocho” was such a good gag that ESPN itself quoted it, airing underappreciated sports under the guise of The Ocho multiple times in the years since Dodgeball came out.

Just as adaptable and dense with jokes as Anchorman, Mean Girls is the 2004 film that gives that juggernaut a run for its money, not only because Fey’s script is searingly funny, but because its sticky staying power has resulted in just as many memes, GIFs, and franchise ephemera. Cool moms, asking people why they’re white, wearing pink on Wednesday, not even going here, and, yes, trying to make “fetch” happen—it all took on a life of its own, infiltrating pop culture in a far more familiar form than Anchorman’s surreal newsroom. Where Anchorman had an elaborate and inventive way with vulgarity that spoke to larger truths about Dumb Men, Mean Girls’ jokes were precise in their specific understanding of its social setting.

This insight kept the franchises going until, basically, present-day. Anchorman’s side-movie, sequel, and podcast hung around almost as long as Mean Girl’s musical adaptation and this year’s musical-movie re-adaptation. These oddball afterlives wouldn’t exist if the originals hadn’t been so fully committed to cultural memory; Mean Girls even got sampled for its own themed EP from Chicago rapper Joseph Chilliams. In fact, Chilliams is a perfect example of how these comedies acted as touchstones for a generation. Before his Mean Girls tracks, Chilliams dropped a music video in which he (wearing a version of the Vote for Pedro t-shirt) recreated Napoleon Dynamite’s climactic dance sequence.

Though its power was far more isolated to its era than some of these other films, Napoleon Dynamite was the only comedy from this year that was such a phenomenon that even my parents were quoting it. And doing the voice! I want to hide my face just thinking about it. To this day, I pity anyone they run into named Tina. Exquisitely textured like a thrift store sweater, the strange Sundance hit was itself the kind of win-it-in-the-end loser that so many comedies center on, and its genuine Midwest-like eccentricity spoke to those of us not quite yet poisoned by irony. That and Jon Heder’s performance being, as Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson called it, “the ne plus ultra of cataclysmic pubertal portraits” allowed so many of us to map ourselves onto this worst-case scenario. It burned fast and bright, but its intense trend-setting specificity (and how some of us embraced it) may contribute to why—though its legacy is long-lasting—the memory of loving it is tinged with its own kind of embarrassment.

The year’s R-rated comedies had their successes confined to a smaller audience, but they made their own lasting impact. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle gave John Cho and Kal Penn a career-defining vehicle while redefining Neil Patrick Harris for an audience that had never seen an episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. We wouldn’t have How I Met Your Mother without NPH’s extremely horny cameo here. In a much more personally influential way, though, the film granted me a line perfect for all the Halo 2 I’d be losing later that year: “Bullets, my only weakness. How did you know?”

Wooing us with the promise of even more subversive shock-humor from the South Park creators, Team America: World Police (which kind of featured the second Matt Damon cameo of these 2004 comedies) was attractive for all the wrong reasons. Like Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s series, the critiques were broad and their vehicle was crass. But broad and crass were exactly what I was after—I was 12! I certainly wasn’t thinking critically about the film’s politics, but I do distinctly remember downloading the song “America, Fuck Yeah” and listening to it on repeat as one of the 64 songs that my 256 MB MP3 player could hold. Maybe that’s why there was a point in time when my friends and I could list, in order, all 30 American things that they say “fuck yeah” after.

Debuting during Web 2.0 when sharing quotes online was an inelegant and manual process, the comedies of 2004 were both truly excellent and at the right place at the right time. Rental was still king, and theaters hadn’t yet been monopolized by a single company’s superhero offerings. This meant that you had original options, options that stuck around long enough to make their mark, and it was normal to watch new releases multiple times—especially if you were a teenager throwing something on in the background of your World Of Warcraft LAN party.

Not only have movies shifted even further away from originality over the last 20 years, but streaming services have incentivized up-and-coming comedic voices to pitch series over films. Then, when a modern comedy is a hit, its best lines enter into a vocabulary that has been digitally augmented, outsourced to video clips and reaction images. Part of the reason I Think You Should Leave became so massive for a specific audience was because its perfect sketches debuted on a platform—and coincided with a peak of certain social media sites—perfect for sharing incredible shorthanded silliness. 

But even ITYSL’s success is becoming rare. Reaching critical mass just means something different and more fleeting now, when there’s a new main character of the internet every day. My friends and I, just like in middle school, still converse in a language infused with pop culture references. Our group chats and Discord channels make it into more of a multimedia experience, and our personalities are now confident enough to stand apart from the shows and movies we love. But, dig deep enough, beneath the ever-evolving allusions to hit tweets and viral TikToks and whatever inevitably comes next, and you’ll find the comedies of 2004 still buried in our psyches, foundational and formative.