Even The Hurt Locker ends with the hero going back to war, giving up on himself and surrendering to his addiction to war and adrenaline. I admit that I haven't seen every single movie on that list, and there might be a couple outliers that the commenters will point out, but I've seen most of these, and every single one is about people nobly suffering to keep things exactly how they are. That's the story we're supposed to think is honest, important, and serious. I'm not saying that these types of movies are bad in any way (I'm a huge fan of every movie listed so far) but isn't it weird that this is the only moral we like to give awards to?

Think about what that message means for poor kids growing up in a ghetto, or women who get harassed over literally whatever they happen to be doing that day, or the impressionable teenager being sent to fight for a morally ambiguous war, or gay kids getting beaten to death in the street. "Your suffering is noble," the movies say. "Suffering means you're respectable," the insulated, multi-billion-dollar international industry says. "Being in pain means you're important. You're making this country great. Thanks for that. I'm going to enjoy an old fashioned and watch Pacific Rim on Blu-ray," says the single most far-reaching and powerful propaganda tool that has ever existed in human history.

Oh, and about the lack of comedies on that list ..."

This is part of why it's so profoundly stupid for someone to say, "How come X gets to tell that joke, but I don't?" Because comedy, jackass. The place the joke is coming from is part of the joke. That's not fair, but hey: would you rather your jokes be fair or funny? Sorry, that's a rhetorical question, because no one cares about your answer. They just wanna know if you can make them laugh.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the fart scene from Blazing Saddles:

Watch it. Watch the whole goddamn thing. Take it all in. It's a part of you now, forever. Most people wouldn't defend this as an exemplary piece of groundbreaking social comedy, but most people aren't writer-director Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks is, though, and this is what he said:

Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. ... Shakespeare said, "Hold a mirror up to life." I held mine a little behind and below.

Comparing farts to repressed minorities seems a bit offensive, so do you think Brooks -- a Jew who fought in World War II -- is fucking with us? He definitely is, but he's not "just" fucking with us, because his weird fucking point is also really fucking true. Farts, like poverty and systemic repression, are something everyone deals with but nobody wants to talk about, and farts are the classic source of comedy. Even Louis C.K. agrees. Fart jokes are about paying attention to something you've been trained by polite society to ignore, and goddamn if that isn't a great definition of "social justice."

Go back further, to Medieval and Tudor times, and you'll see the court jester -- a man whose job it was to debase himself while mocking everybody. No matter how poor and shitty you were or how rich and powerful, the "fool" was still allowed to mock you because he was below everyone else. That's the power of humor: not everybody can make jokes, but anyone can be joked. So the most notable voices are the ones that otherwise aren't being heard.

The best example of this is the Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy, also known as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End. They're three of my favorite movies, inarguably the best directed comedies released in the past decade at least, and also some of the most secretly depressing stories ever committed to celluloid. And I mean crushingly depressing.

Take Shaun of the Dead: when we meet Shaun, we immediately learn that he's a lazy loser who doesn't want to go anywhere with his life. But after zombies invade London, he pulls himself together in an attempt to survive and ... oh, he ends the movie still a lazy loser with no aspirations. Also, he gets most of his friends killed by insisting that they go to a bar and protect themselves, which is the dumbest way to try to survive a zombie apocalypse.

Hot Fuzz is the same, but a bit more subtle: Nicholas Angel is a strict, by-the-book cop, and by the end of the movie he's still that, only now he believes in wanton violence. He frees the town of Sandford from the oppressive and Illuminati-esque Neighborhood Watch Alliance, but he replaces it with his own hybrid of fascism and action-movie machismo.

The World's End is by far the most depressing: Gary King is an alcoholic, and after the world ends he gives up the drink, yes, but none of the things that made him an alcoholic: he becomes a drifter, leading an army of robot-clones of his childhood friends and fighting people. He isn't able to come to terms with himself and be happy unless the entire world crumbles around him.

All of those movies have the same message: if you don't address your own flaws, illnesses, and insecurities, you will hurt the people closest to you on an increasingly large scale. That's a tough moral, generally a bitter pill to swallow. But we get to leave the theater chuckling to ourselves, because Simon Pegg tripped over a fence again.