The actor:	Will Ferrell
The character:	Ron Burgundy
The film:	Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
The line:	“You stay classy, San Diego.”

Everyone eighteen months or so I go on a minor MST3K kick. I’ll watch maybe four or five of them in a compressed space of time and feel like I got my fix, only to go on to watch as much “good” stuff as I can find. It’s sort of like when you’re a kid set loose for a weekend who eats junk food the whole time and starts craving salad on Monday. On this most recent jaunt, I finally got to Space Mutiny, undoubtedly the finest of the twenty or so I’ve seen, but even this incredibly funny episode lost me at points because I am not, and was not, neck-deep in the pop culture of the ’90s. There are things like “We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese!” that are going to be funny to subset of doofus for hundreds of years to come, but pithy references to a one-hit wonder are going to continue to lose people. There’s no such thing as a timeless comedy, even one as basically unobjectionable and consistently great as MST3K.

It’s a lot easier to decide if a comedy is effective fifty or seventy-five years later than it is to decide if it’s funny ten years later. When I was in high school, American Pie was a movie I understood had been important to people my older brother’s age, but even as a eighteen-year-old I wasn’t taken with it. The Hangover was new, and it was so instantly popular that it made it into the class salutatorian’s speech at graduation. By 2019, The Hangover was out of my system. As I sit here and write this, I’ll grant that it’s a lot funnier than Zombieland, notably funnier than The Pink Panther 2 or It’s Complicated, but is it that much better than Land of the Lost? A comedy that crosses the ten-year barrier has a chance. A comedy that’s still funny after twenty years is a wonder, worthy of the first line in someone’s obituary. If it’s funny as long as Dr. Strangelove or Some Like It Hot or The Awful Truth or The Gold Rush now, that’s enough to make a person believe in God.

Detectives will be able to figure out that I was thirteen when Anchorman came out, which is the perfect age to be when one sees Anchorman for the first time. You also don’t need to be a detective to guess that thirteen-year-old me was a pretentious little know-it-all, and I believed that I was above Will Ferrell’s brand of comedy. I hadn’t been watching Saturday Night Live, had no sense of Ferrell’s style or performances, and Anchorman just felt deeply stupid to me. Now, as a wiser man with a way better sense of humor, I recognize that there are ten to fifteen lines in Anchorman which are about as funny as you can hope for. I’ve left some of them out of this list because they were a little too memed for me to appropriately judge them. Is “I love lamp” or “Boy, that escalated quickly!” as funny as their use as reaction shots say they are? I’ll laugh at “Sixty percent of the time, it works every time” or “And I’m Tits…I’m Ron Burgundy” until I’m an old man.

The line from Anchorman that just feels the most right to include here is “You stay classy, San Diego,” because it distills the premise of the film exactly. Let’s ask Google about when the word “classy” hit its most reached point.

I dunno which corpus Google relies on, but this is probably good enough for our purposes. Around 1919, the word “classy” hit its highest ever, only for the word to go out of style during the ’20s; in the 1940s, when I think many of us would assume that “classy” was popular, it was not in favor. But there’s an upswing in the early 1970s, starting to climb around 1974. That’s the same year that Anchorman takes place in, and it’s so right for Ron Burgundy, who conceives himself as this man’s man at the top of a boys’ club, an old-fashioned playboy bringing a ’70s twist to his shtick. Maybe it’s not as funny in isolation as so many of the film’s other quotes, but it’s the one that guarantees it a place as one of our classic comedies for at least another few years.