When people think of political films, their thoughts usually turn to stories of dense intrigue and skullduggery like “The Manchurian Candidate,” or morally uplifting fare like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

And yet, Hollywood has long known that politics was a sphere ripe for satirical appropriation. Running alongside the hoary tradition of the political drama is the rich vein of political comedies, treating Washington, or its local equivalents, as ripe for mockery and abuse.

Viewing presidents, senators, generals, and political operatives with a barbed sense of good humor, these films treat politics with the appropriate amount of respect–which is to say, not very much at all.

Here, then, are 10 of the greatest political comedy films ever made. In our era of deflated political discourse, their good humor and cynicism makes the ideal tonic. When the political sphere is dominated by the likes of Sarah Palin, what else is there to do but laugh?

“Duck Soup” (Leo McCarey, 1933)

“Duck Soup” is an ordinarily extraordinary Marx Brothers effort until approximately halfway through, when the Marxes’ brand of illogic shakes hands with the avant-garde, turning a hectic farce into a savage indictment of warfare. “Duck Soup”’s scabrous denunciation of war’s eternal pointlessness—change the costumes, but everything else stays the same—is unstinting, and prescient.

“The Great McGinty” (Preston Sturges, 1940)

“The Great McGinty” is like a fictional adaptation of the memoirs of Tammany’s George Washington Plunkitt, full of graft, chicanery, and corruption. McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is a bum who enters the voting booth on Election Day in exchange for the two dollars promised by the incumbent mayor’s cronies, and soon enough comes to take over the local political machine. The machine, though, ultimately has the last word, and the joke, such as there is one, is on McGinty.

“A King in New York” (Charlie Chaplin, 1957)

After being exiled from the United States for his political beliefs, Charlie Chaplin was out for blood, and “A King in New York” is his riposte to the bullies who had banished him from his adopted home. King’s America is a plastic world of salesmen, hacks, and courtiers, but the tone is amused, not hectoring, and Chaplin’s comedy is as inviting as ever.

“One, Two, Three” (Billy Wilder, 1961)

What could be funnier than the collision of Coca-Cola capitalism and Stalinist Communism in the divided city of Berlin, with machine-gun dialogue spitting fire on the no man’s land between East and West? During postproduction on the film, the Berlin Wall went up, and what had seemed like an amusing farce became a ghoulishly inappropriate, tasteless joke. Or so it seemed to many critics at the time. Some two decades after the fall of that same wall, “One, Two, Three” has regained all its verve, its smashing of Cold War pieties nearly the equal of Dr. Strangelove for sheer audacity.

“Dr. Strangelove” (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

In Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War comedy, the threat of nuclear apocalypse keeps giving way to some other mood, some other genre. All of which is appropriate, in a way; Kubrick had initially intended to make a drama about the nuclear threat. Somewhere along the way, though, the inherent absurdity of nuclear doomsday began to poke through, and Kubrick and co-writer Terry Southern turned their project into a madcap, midnight-black farce.

“Nashville” (Robert Altman, 1975)

Released the year before the U.S. bicentennial, Altman’s sprawling film about the intersection of musicians, political operatives, and assorted loners and oddballs over three days in the country-music capital of the world was intended as a filmmaker’s state of the union. Politics is entertainment, and entertainment is politics; even the third-party presidential candidate Hal Philip Walker, with a platform consisting of banning lawyers from politics and adopting a more tuneful national anthem, is as much stand-up comedian as statesman.

“Being There” (Hal Ashby, 1979)

Ashby’s film is a rip-roaring political screed disguised as a gentle comedy. Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner is merely a beneficiary of unpredictable circumstance, the projection of others’ hopes and desires with none of his own beyond the immediate: a hot meal, a warm television. Being There is simply too much—a comedy far too exaggerated to possibly swallow—until one remembers that the very next year, a Gardiner-esque blank slate would be elected the 40th president of the United States. If there is a reason that no feature-film biopic of Ronald Reagan has yet been made, it is perhaps because Peter Sellers has already embodied him here.

“The Distinguished Gentleman” (Jonathan Lynn, 1992)

“The Distinguished Gentleman” was a loose remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in which the newcomer was not another idealistic Jimmy Stewart, but an apprentice Claude Rains. The Distinguished Gentleman is a surprisingly tart satire of Republican governance, with Murphy the ambitious black politico who gets ahead by playing the good ol’ boy. “The Distinguished Gentleman” succeeds in large part because of Murphy’s ability to turn corruption into comedy.

“Wag the Dog” (Barry Levinson, 1997)

This remarkably prescient satire anticipated the soon-to-develop Monica Lewinsky saga: a president, caught with his pants down, engineers a fantasy conflict (with Albania) to distract attention from his peccadilloes on the eve of an election. Dustin Hoffman is superb as Stanley Motss, the twinkly-eyed Hollywood mogul—think Lew Wasserman with incurable diarrhea of the mouth—brought in to produce the war.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” (Mike Nichols, 2007)

Director Mike Nichols had also directed the tart Clinton roman a clef “Primary Colors” (1996), but “Charlie Wilson’s War,” with Tom Hanks as the boozy Texas congressman who founds the Afghan resistance in their war with the Soviet Union, is a raucous, amoral political satire with a surprising kick. Hanks and a superb supporting cast recreate the free-wheeling atmosphere of Washington in the go-go Reagan 1980s. “Charlie Wilson’s War” is a madcap Washington adventure whose mujahedeen hilarity rings distinctly, and deliberately, hollow.