Perusing a list of the top-grossing films of 2013, it’s easy to get depressed about the state of film comedy. But things were much livelier on the fringes, particularly in the geek-friendly worlds of genre-mashing science-fiction and horror-comedies, and in a string of dark social satires about man and womankind at their hilarious worst. The year was full of strong personal visions and wonderful sleepers, but they were seldom found at the top of the box-office charts, and they were rarely limited to pure comedy.

The top-grossing comedies of the year were, for the most part, a tired, dispiriting lot, an all-too-familiar combination of can’t-lose sequels (Grown Ups 2, The Hangover Part III) and slick exercises in formula, like the surprise smashes We’re The Millers and Identity Thief. In these four hits, all among the top 25 grossing films of the year, comedy is largely a matter of plugging recognizable comedic actors into humorous, familiar scenarios. There’s something particularly soulless about We’re The Millers, a slick variation on an old staple: the group of misfits who come together to form a makeshift family. We’re The Millers is about largely awful people going through the motions for the sake of a big payday: Jennifer Aniston’s default look of bored determination suits her character, a jaded stripper with ample reason to view humanity with disdain, but it fits Aniston’s performance even more. She looks like an actor glumly resigning herself to being a cog in the machine.

The big-budget machinery of studio comedies has a way of grinding down even the most idiosyncratic talent. Consider the case of Melissa McCarthy, who appeared in two of the 20 top-grossing films of the year: the buddy-cop movie The Heat and the road comedy Identity Thief. It’s rare for a major female box-office attraction to look like McCarthy, or trade so brazenly in vulgar physical comedy, or be so comfortable playing abrasive, unlikeable characters. Yet Hollywood did what it tends to do with bracingly original voices: It buffed off her rough edges, reduced her complicated persona to simple, bankable shtick, and plugged her into familiar formulas that made all that originality a little easier to process. McCarthy slid directly to the Richard Pryor-in-Superman III phase of her career in vehicles that reduced the abrasive genius she displayed in Bridesmaids and gave her a shtick: behave obnoxiously for two acts, then reveal a heart of gold. (That can also be said of Bridesmaids, but there, it felt organic and earned, rather than the product of focus-group testing.) The Heat is the better of the two films by a large margin, but McCarthy and director Paul Feig ultimately seem less interested in transcending the clichés of mismatched buddy-cop movies than in delivering a faithful but moderately improved version of a subgenre that was ubiquitous in the 1980s.

Thankfully, 2013 was full of comedies so overflowing with ambition and ideas that they sometimes don’t even appear to be comedies at all. Comedies tend to be dismissed because the word now invokes images of Adam Sandler mugging, rather than, say, Leonardo DiCaprio’s rapacious smirk in The Wolf Of Wall Street. Because comedy is often unfairly held in lesser esteem than drama, it still feels vaguely insulting to consider films like The Wolf Of Wall Street a comedy. Martin Scorsese’s movie is many things, but it is above all a ballsy, wildly funny dark comedy that delights in its subjects’ decadence and greed. Wall Street is the funniest movie of the year because it aspires to more than laughter: It’s a film of breathtaking ambition and achievement that also has the benefit of being funny from start to finish.

Scorsese wasn’t the only filmmaker getting laughs from the manic misbehavior of cretins and degenerates. David O. Russell’s American Hustle is half sprawling Scorsese homage, half David O. Russell comedy of neuroses. And it’s never better, or funnier, than during Bradley Cooper and Louis C.K.’s scenes together. As an FBI agent who’s leapt off the deep end and his long-suffering boss, respectively, Cooper and C.K. made for one of the year’s most unexpected comedy teams.

Elsewhere, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring divided audiences and critics with their purposefully artificial exploration of criminality among the young, horny, and fascinatingly inarticulate. Both films are sneering, insouciant provocations that practically beg to be hated. And both subscribe to the notion that the best way to satirize the empty-headed, celebrity-obsessed idiocy of youth culture is to embody it in grotesquely exaggerated form. They are each dazzlingly, intentionally, and often transcendently superficial. Notably, Scorsese, Korine, Russell, and Coppola never make more than a token effort to win sympathy for their characters: Their movies are gleefully amoral exposés that pin their subjects to a wall and then delight in watching them squirm under the scrutiny.

This Is The End, the directorial debut of longtime writing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, isn’t about criminals, hustlers, killers, or degenerates. It’s about something much worse: celebrities. Rogen roped in many of his buddies to play themselves in a phantasmagoric dark comedy that imagines what it would be like to endure the apocalypse in the company of best friends you secretly suspect are your worst enemies. In fact, the apocalypse and the strain it places on group dynamics proved to be a surprisingly frequent theme in 2013, making its way into This Is The End, Todd Berger’s It’s A Disaster, and Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, each of which uses the end of the world to comment on the contemporary world we live in.

Beyond being an uproarious comedy, The World’s End is a quietly powerful exploration of addiction and the way relationships decay with time. In the kind of performance that tends to get overlooked because it’s fundamentally comic, Simon Pegg delivers a boldly unsentimental, even unlikeable turn as an emotionally stunted man-child willing to put friends and family in harm’s way for the sake of pursuing a pathetic adolescent fantasy. Pegg behaves abhorrently throughout The World’s End, but he never loses sympathy or the sense his lager-soaked soul is worth fighting for. But The World’s End’s ambitions go beyond that, to addressing the homogenization of a commercial world that’s left the human spirit as the only entity left uncolonized by multinational corporations. This Is The End is sillier and more self-indulgent, but it’s similarly fascinated with the corrosive effects time, age, and circumstances can have on friendships, as is the winningly low-key and naturalistic It’s A Disaster, which works so well as a portrait of group dynamics, it probably doesn’t even need its apocalypse.

Beyond depictions of the apocalypse, many of the year’s overachieving comedies had a distinctly geeky flavor, particularly Zero Charisma, a micro-budgeted independent film about the rivalry between an obnoxious alpha-geek running a role-playing game and his hipster-asshole rival. Like Zero Charisma, Andrew Bujalski’s unique analog stoner comedy Computer Chess represents an unusually authentic representation of geek culture. A wonderfully lo-fi take on a computer-chess tournament in the early 1980s, the film suggests what Real Genius might have looked and felt like had it focussed on the geekier preoccupations of Jon Gries’ über-nerd. Computer Chess has a modest scope wedded to big ideas and ambition, a description that also applies to Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At The End, a sort of post-punk, genre-smashing Ghostbusters that fuses pitch-black comedy with a narrative so overflowing with surreal conceits that it induces a low-level altered state of pleasurable befuddlement. Coscarelli’s wild science-fiction comedy isn’t shy about throwing more at audiences than they can possibly process or handle the first time around, secure in the knowledge that the geeks and cultists will always return for more. Comic-book culture might have taken over the mainstream, but these three instant cult classics are content to buzz happily at the margins.

They’re joined there by a pair of inspired horror-comedies prominently featuring alumni of The State. Bad Milo! is a clever, surprising throwback to the funny-scary Gremlins-fueled creature-features of the mid-1980s, built around Ken Marino’s powerhouse performance as a repressed man whose impotent rage manifests itself as a terrifying demon that lives inside his ass. Marino’s fellow State alums Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are old hands at filmmaking—having scripted the Night At The Museum films, among others—but their 2013 directorial effort, Hell Baby, represents one of the only times they’ve made a feature-length comedy that has the benefit of actually being funny.

Like This Is The End, The World’s End, and It’s A Disaster, Spike Jonze’s Her is focused on the limitations of relationships. But where the apocalyptic trio is concerned with group dynamics, Her focuses on inner-space and the relationship between a broken man and a miraculous piece of technology that holds out the possibility of the most profound form of human connection, albeit with an inhuman operating system. Her has much to say about the way people use technology to mitigate sadness and the unbearable burden of being alone, but it’s also about the psychic damage incurred when people try to control each other, and about the tragic impossibility of ever truly knowing another person. Her is incredibly melancholy and soulful, but also hilarious. Like Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, it would be unbearably sad if it weren’t. Her is bravely, boldly, and nakedly sincere, but never in a way that undermines the comedy or humanity at its core.

Ben Stiller’s fascinatingly overreaching The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, in sharp contrast, tries to transform the plight of an everyman into a soaring cinematic symphony. The film broadcasts its naked aspirations to greatness with every coffee-table-book-worthy image, but its remarkable visual achievements are wildly disproportionate to its rinky-dink story, bland screenplay, and underdeveloped characters. Visually, Walter Mitty is a masterpiece of soaring production design, but thematically and comedically, it ranks somewhere between a non-starter and a nonentity.

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty speaks the hyperbolic language of trailers, where every moment reaches for epic bigness. In other words, it embodies the movie-world pompousness and phony showbiz aggrandizement adroitly spoofed in Lake Bell’s winning writing-directing debut In A World…, in which Bell also stars as the daughter of a legendary voiceover artist struggling to emerge from her father’s outsized shadow. Where The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty is obsessed with telling the story of man’s search for purpose in a vast universe, In A World… smartly limits itself to a fascinating specific milieu: the voiceover community of Los Angeles. The film also benefits tremendously from a sharply specific, explicitly feminist viewpoint. Instead of trying to tell a story about humanity, In A World…tells a story about people. That proves to be a more winning narrative strategy than trying to encapsulate the joy, wonder, and mystery of the world in a single movie.

As evidenced by Her, The Wolf Of Wall Street, The World’s End, and Frances Ha—Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s charming exploration of the joy and pain of being young and in a state of perpetual flux—comedies can do anything, as long as they commit to telling good stories and populating them with interesting characters, and scoring a few laughs along the way rather than, say, trying to teach audiences how to live, how to feel, and how to be. Where the top-grossing comedies of 2013 were generally slaves to formula and convention, the year’s best comedies were the products of clear, strong voices with something to say, and a willingness, even eagerness, to transcend the clear-cut boundaries of straight comedy in favor of funky hybrids that reflect the fractured, niche-oriented world we now inhabit. The year’s explorations of greed, sociopathy, and the comic potential posed by the end of the world generally aspired to do a whole lot more than make people laugh, but they did a pretty bang-up job at that as well.