WILL FERRELL AS RICKY BOBBY IN TALLADEGA NIGHTS: THE BALLAD OF RICKY BOBBY (2006)

Will Ferrell's Anchorman may be more absurd, but Talladega Nights is still the SNL alum's greatest big-screen achievement to date, a NASCAR-set bit of lunacy that mocks American culture while simultaneously exhibiting fondness for it. Via the character of Ricky Bobby, a nitwit car-racing star, Ferrell manages to send up our national gluttony and materialism, as well as Southern political and social conservatism, with a no-holds-barred goofiness that's nonetheless underscored by affection for his redneck milieu and its inhabitants. To keep things evenhanded, Sacha Baron Cohen's aggressively homosexual French F-1 champ Jean Girard provides a hilarious caricature of liberalism. It's Ferrell's titular clown, however, that truly embodies the film's fair-minded attitude, his Ricky Bobby an egotistical good ol' boy whose jingoism is as inane as his predilection for saying grace to the baby Jesus