Slap Shot

Slap Shot is the funniest sports film ever made — a profane, violent, hilarious comedy about minor league hockey that captures the desperation and absurdity of small-time professional sports with a fidelity that no other film has matched. Paul Newman plays Reggie Dunlop, the player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs, a terrible hockey team in a dying steel town whose attendance surges when they start playing dirty.

The Hanson Brothers — three bespectacled, foil-wrapping goons played by real hockey players Steve Carlson, Jeff Carlson, and David Hanson — are the most iconic characters in sports comedy. Their combination of childlike innocence off the ice and psychotic violence on it is endlessly funny. The scenes of them listening to toy race cars, buying toy trucks, and then immediately breaking someone's nose are comedy perfection.

Newman is magnificent. He plays Dunlop with the charm of a con man and the sadness of a man who knows his best days are gone. The film's depiction of a dying industrial town — the mill closing, the fans drinking away their despair, the team as the last source of civic pride — gives the comedy a weight that makes it more than just a string of gags. Slap Shot is raunchy, violent, and deeply vulgar. It is also the most authentic depiction of minor league professional sports ever committed to film.