Movies sometimes take a while to truly connect with audiences, often due to initial misconceptions or release timing that doesn’t favor them in gaining attention. In the case of “Idiocracy,” released in 2006, its rocky start wasn’t just about being misunderstood. Instead, it was largely because the studio didn’t back it sufficiently. Despite being a major comedy from 20th Century Fox featuring a notable cast, “Idiocracy” received a very limited release and practically no marketing effort. Over time, however, it carved out a niche for itself, growing in popularity as a unique mainstream American comedy that voices the chaos of modern times.

The movie’s unique storyline follows Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson), an underperforming army librarian, alongside Rita (played by Maya Rudolph), a sex worker. These characters are chosen for a U.S. government hibernation experiment and wake up 500 years in the future to find a dystopian society comprised of extremely unintelligent people, oddly wearing Crocs. Directed by Mike Judge, who co-wrote the script with Etan Cohen, “Idiocracy” tackles 21st-century consumer culture and anti-intellectualism with a bold and outspoken style, making it resonate with audiences today amidst societal chaos and political absurdity.

For those who discovered “Idiocracy” in the years following its understated release, there are several films with the same comedic flair worth exploring. Here are five essential picks for any fan of “Idiocracy.”

An excellent place to explore similar comedy styles is through the works of Mike Judge himself, co-writer and director of “Idiocracy.” Known for creating “Beavis and Butt-Head” and co-creating “King of the Hill,” Judge is also recognized for crafting one of the ’90s standout comedies: “Office Space.”

Penned and directed by Judge, “Office Space” initially struggled at the box office but later amassed a devoted following through home video due to its mockery of dreary office life—a notion shared by other 1999 hits like “Fight Club,” “The Matrix,” and “American Beauty.” However, “Office Space” added a sharp, sarcastic twist that predicted the dry humor in workplace sitcoms of the 2000s. The film features Ron Livingston as Peter Gibbons, a programmer at a Texas software firm who, after a hypnotherapy mishap, becomes emotionally detached from his job, embracing a carefree outlook that uncovers the ridiculousness of corporate life.

Supported by a talented cast, including Stephen Root, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole, John C. McGinley, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, and Diedrich Bader, “Office Space” delivers humor that sharply captures the mundane challenges of IT work. Even decades later, it remains relevant. “Idiocracy” fans will appreciate this film’s clever satire and the playful absurdity characteristic of Mike Judge’s work.

If you’re looking for other political satire films that play on the idea that common sense is a thing of the past, Adam McKay’s 2021 Netflix hit “Don’t Look Up” is a great call. Featuring a star-studded cast boasting Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Rob Morgan, Ron Perlman, Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande, Himesh Patel, Scott Mescudi, Melanie Lynskey, and Michael Chiklis, “Don’t Look Up” tells the story of Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio), a doctoral candidate and a professor in astronomy at Michigan State University who discover a comet on track to collide with the Earth in six months time.

The comet is big enough to cause human extinction, yet U.S. government authorities, including the president herself (Streep), are apathetic to the news, forcing Dibiasky and Mindy into a desperate quest to get the public to pay attention to the situation and take action — any action — to stop literally everybody on Earth from dying. It’s a frantic, exasperating, frequently hard-to-watch reckoning with the sheer helpless irrationality of today’s political world, featuring a metaphor for climate change that doesn’t even try to be subtle or politically noncommittal. But the wonder of the film, which netted it a surprise Oscar nomination for best picture and also makes it perfect viewing for “Idiocracy” fans, is that it makes its political points with razor-sharp, unabashedly dark humor.

Written and directed by regular collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the cameo-heavy meta-satire “This Is the End” is the movie that started the duo on the path that would eventually lead to “The Studio” and its Emmy successes. And, like much of Rogen and Goldberg’s subsequent output, “This Is The End” exists in the same continuum of vulgar-yet-slyly-intelligent comedy as “Idiocracy.”

The premise is simple and to the point, as is the execution: The apocalypse begins just as a bunch of actors and famous people (all playing themselves) convene at a house party in the fancy Hollywood mansion of James Franco. Following a wave of deaths, Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and an initially oblivious Danny McBride must huddle up in the house and survive an onslaught of biblical calamities, including murderous creatures and even a bizarre demonic possession. Their friendships become increasingly strained as they attempt to navigate the end of the world.

In case it’s not clear from that description, everything in the plot — including the comically exaggerated personalities of the ensemble — is amped up to maximum ridiculousness. It’s a brilliantly dumb comedy that shares tonal and narrative ground with “Idiocracy,” offering a hilarious mixture of a high stakes situation with people incapable of rising to it. When you set the wackiness aside, “This Is the End” is actually a scathing critique on how Hollywood stars like to preach but are generally inept when it comes to dealing with real crises.

“Borat” (or, to give the film its full title, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”) is different to “Idiocracy” in that it features real people. That makes it simultaneously more funny and more worrying. A British-American co-production made for the relatively modest sum of $18 million, “Borat” had a wild journey to the big screen. The film essentially consists of a large-scale stunt, with Sacha Baron Cohen playing his “Da Ali G Show” character Borat Sagdiyev while having interactions with members of the public out and about in the United States. Somehow, Cohen, his co-star Ken Davitian, and the film’s crew were able to steer and then edit those interactions into a coherent narrative comedy film that feels entrancingly caught between fiction and documentary.

The premise is that Borat, a Kazakh journalist, is making a documentary about the United States at the request of the Kazakhstan government. Oblivious, intrepid, and deeply preposterous in everything he does, he sets out to get to know everyday Americans as well high-profile figures like politicians and celebrities (including a very game Pamela Anderson, years before her ongoing renaissance). While Borat himself is a caricature of a typical American’s idea of a strange foreign man from a faraway land, the real target of the film is the carnival of absurdities, moralistic hang-ups, and sociopolitical hypocrisies of the United States that he unearths by brushing up against unsuspecting citizens. Like “Idiocracy,” it’s a movie that takes aim at American society at its most hilarious yet depressingly familiar — with the added benefit, here, of much of the tomfoolery being real.

It could be argued that the basic concept of “Idiocracy,” like a lot of 21st century comedy, has its roots in “The Simpsons,” the original great audiovisual work about the folly of average post-Cold War American life. If Homer Simpson is an avatar for the mediocrity and lack of intellectual ambition of the stereotypical average Joe, then the world encountered by Joe and Rita in “Idiocracy” is not too far off from a world entirely populated by Homers. In that sense, “The Simpsons Movie,” released one year after “Idiocracy” and kindred to it in multiple respects, was kind of a full-circle moment, not least because it’s one of the best “Simpsons” installments when it comes to directly grappling with the toll of Homer’s buffoonery.

Directed by David Silverman from a screenplay penned by no fewer than 11 writers (including original series creator Matt Groening and executive producer James L. Brooks), “The Simpsons Movie” follows the mayhem that takes over Springfield when a series of reckless and selfish actions on the part of Homer lead to the city being deemed an environmental hazard by the U.S. government and sealed off from the rest of the world under a glass dome. The film draws buoyant, blockbuster-sized humor not only from Homer’s typically terrible behavior, but from the similarly outrageous actions of the government and the Springfield populace. As such, it’s a rare mainstream comedy movie that matches “Idiocracy” in the scale of its satire, as well as in its willingness to make cogent points while not taking anything too seriously. Plus, both films are pretty much a hoot from start to finish.