Lists of favourite films, as I am in a particularly good position to know, having recently caused a certain amount of consternation with my 100 favourite films in the Guardian, are essentially provoking and argumentative.

But they are usually compulsive to read. And the American Film Institute's list of 100 best comedies - only American, of course - has its share eccentricities and just plain bloopers.

One of them you can spot straightaway - Sydney Pollack's Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an actor who dresses up as a woman to win a part on daytime TV, at No 2.

This is way above the several Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Chaplin classics included, and has the impertinence to be nine places above Mel Brooks's The Producers, too.

Never mind. The list, chosen by members of the AFI who were given 500 comedies from which to pick the best, at least has a worthy No 1 - Billy Wilder's unforgettable Some Like It Hot.

And as George E.Brown tells the late lamented Jack Lemmon in the last line of that film, when the cross-dressing Lemmon tells him she's a man: "Nobody's perfect".

Things could have been much worse. In a parallel list culled from the public (but not used, thank heaven) Porky's supplanted Wilder's film as the funniest. Lucky it was not Pearl Harbor.

There are other strange things on the list, like the Zucker Brothers' Airplane above the Marx Brothers' Night At The Opera and Harold Ramis's Caddyshack, about which one critic wrote: "If you're still at the age when farting and nose-picking seem funny, then the film should knock you dead", above Monkey Business.

And what is Singin' in the Rain doing fairly near the top of the list? Top of the musicals, perhaps. But a comedy?

The most British of the American films on the list is Charles Crichton's A Fish Called Wanda. A little high, perhaps, at No 21 but we must be grateful for small mercies when Four Weddings And A Funeral and not a single Carry On can be displayed, presumably because of British source money.

On the whole, it is not a bad list, even though the numbering is eccentric. At least there are the Marx Brothers, Keaton and Chaplin films, and even my favourite Laurel and Hardy, Sons of the Desert. There are also masters like Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Wilder, Preston Sturges and Woody Allen.

View the full lists
The 100 funniest - according to the American Film Institute
The 10 funniest - according to the punters