Ditch the drama, funnymen! For every Bill-Murray-in-Lost In Translation (good), there are 10 Bill-Murrays-in-Broken Flowers (God-awful).

<strong>Robin Williams, <i>Jakob the Liar</i></strong>- Zany Robin Williams + Nazi-occupied Poland = Holocaust Hilarity! Oh, wait. This was a depiction—nay, a celebration&3151;of the human spirit and its ability to transcend sublime cruelty. Or something. We didn’t pay all that much attention, either.

<strong>Jim Carrey, <i>The Majestic</i></strong>- A philosophical question: If you’re much better at one thing than another, and the thing you’re good at pays you 20 times as much as the thing you’re not so good at, why on God’s green earth would you persist in doing the thing you’re not good at? As much as we dug Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we glaze over when Carrey starts giving his acting chops a workout. We want to see him screaming and twitching and contorting his rubbery frame, basking in the lowbrow glory that is a fart joke. We’re kinda old-fashioned that way.

<strong>Rodney Dangerfield, <i>Natural Born Killers</i></strong>- Rodney Dangerfield, the guy who made his living with one-liners like “My wife and I were happy for 20 years… then we met,” as a sexually abusive white-trash dad? Sure, nobody will have a hard time swallowing that. One thing that sucks, though: Rodney was denied membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when he applied after NBK. Apparently Caddyshack, Back to School, and the “Rappin’ Rodney” video weren’t enough. Snobs.

<strong>Ben Stiller, <i>Permanent Midnight</i></strong>- What we totally, completely love about Ben Stiller is his ability to crank up the wacky. Along Came Polly, Meet the Fockers, Night at the Museum… wacky, wackier, wackiest! But in Permanent Midnight, he isn’t particularly wacky, perhaps because there’s nothing wacky about heroin addiction and the reckless overemoting that accompanies on-screen depictions of it. As goes the wacky, so goes Stiller.

<strong>Dan Aykroyd, <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i></strong>- We’d say that Aykroyd went the De Niro route and gained 35 pounds specifically for his role as some dude with a feisty ol’ mom. But if he did, he obviously liked them so much that he decided to pack on another 20 for good measure. Either way, Aykroyd’s southern accent sounds about as authentic as a drum machine.

<strong>Billy Crystal, <i>Memories of Me</i></strong>- Fresh off Throw Momma From a Train and The Princess Bride, Crystal likely thought he had credibility capital in the bank. And spend it he did, on this generic dad-wasn’t-all-that-nice-to-me-so-now-I’m-an-emotionally-stunted-adult-myself dramedy that combined all the giggles of a papsmear with the dramatic oomph of a Hallmark card.

<strong>Michael Richards, <i>Unstrung Heroes</i></strong>- Think back, if you can, to the days before “Michael Richards, scary racist,” when “Michael Richards, goofball” appeared poised to build on his small-screen success. Rather than doing a broad comedy flick that showcased his balletic pratfalls, he chose Unstrung Heroes and its quirky-uncle blather. As far as career-crippling decisions go, of course, this doesn’t rank anywhere near as high as it did prior to the moment he took the stage at The Laugh Factory.

<strong>Jack Black, <i>King Kong</i></strong>- Even in a mouthy-impresario role right up his alley, Black wasn’t the comic relief in this bloated flick. No, that’d have been the transparent CGI effects during the dinosaurs/monkeys/humans chase sequence. We no more believed that Black and his khaki-clad cronies were in danger than we did that these so-called “dinosaurs” actually existed years ago. Science is a lie.

<strong>Adam Sandler, <i>Spanglish</i></strong>- Adam Sandler spends exactly 0.000 percent of Spanglish speaking in his ha-ha-funny, whispery, little-boy soprano, which frees two-plus hours of screen time for his blank-faced dramatis personae. You hardly even know he’s there.

<strong>Dane Cook, <i>Mr. Brooks</i></strong>- One might quibble with Cook’s inclusion here, as his handlers have yet to provide irrefutable proof that he is, will be, or has ever been funny. In Mr. Brooks, then, he becomes the first-ever non-comic to play against a non-established comedic persona. Pretty meta, no?