Over the 20-year history of LIAF we have screened hundreds of films that fall into the comedy category, mostly in our ‘From Absurd to Zany’ programmes. Half of what most of us dream could easily qualify as absurd or zany. A good percentage of the best stuff that comes out of kids mouths is the same. In common, those two wellsprings of the absurd and the zany are firing off imaginations that are less blanketed by the smog of simple realities that gradually grow to demand priority of our private thoughts and public expressions.

Art is about interrogating what lies beneath all that and bringing it out into the open so anybody who wants to, can use it, as a tool to help ease the gradual suffocation of their simplest and most honest thoughts. Animation is a near perfect tool to do that, and in many animated instances that imperative bubbles out in the kind of absurdist and zany films that find their way into this programme.

Here are 10 of the funniest and weirdest films we have screened at LIAF over the years. Several of these films tend to extract the humour from the everyday foibles of normal people and amplify it into an inevitable, hilarious train-crash of an ending. Others give every impression of seeing nothing funny in everyday foibles whatsoever, instead finding ingenious ways to turn the mirror on ourselves until we have little choice but to laugh at our conceits and shortcomings. Sit back, relax, and treat yourself to a laugh.