The Best Comedies Based on True Stories

Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna star as baseball players in a female league founded during World War II to fill the void left by men at war. The runaway hit was famous for Hanks’ line to a crying player, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

The film is based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created in 1943. Three hundred women tried out for teams in the league in the spring of that year from all over the United States and Canada.

An Australian Kelpie, or red dog, searches for his lost master in the outback and in doing so brings a disparate community together.

The movie was the first exposure that many people had to the Australian Kelpie breed. The plot was based on the true story of a Kelpie who hitched rides and traveled throughout Western Australia’s Pilbara region. The beloved canine was a member of social clubs, a transport workers union, and was even given a bank account with the Bank of New South Wales. A statue of him stands in Dampier, Western Australia.

Taron Egerton plays the indomitable Eddie Edwards, a ski jumper who represented Great Britain in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, despite opposition from various British athletic organizations in part because he was far-sighted and weighed more than most competitors.

Edwards became the first British ski jumper since 1928 to compete in the Olympics. The bespectacled Edwards charmed the public with his spirit and Olympic ambition. He finished last in both the 70-meter and 90-meter events at the 1988 Winter Olympics – but this biopic was a winner, becoming the highest grossing British film of 2016..

Emma Thompson stars as P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins books. Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) had promised his daughters that he would turn the books into a movie. It took him 20 years of courting Travers before she flew to California to meet him, and it took another two weeks for Disney and his team to convince Travers to allow them to make a Mary Poppins film.

In the process, Travers revisited her childhood. She’d based the character of Mr. Banks – patriarch of the London family that Mary Poppins helps – in part on her father. The film became one of the best-loved Disney movies of the era.

Jillian Bell plays New York party girl Brittany O’Neill, who’s trapped in a world of booze, late nights, lousy food, and a nowhere job. After her doctor tells her how unhealthy she is, her roommate, playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo, helps convince her to take up running. She builds up to running in the 1984 New York City Marathon, and Colaizzo tells her real-life story – on which the film is based.