Sometimes, movies take a while to find their audience because they’re initially misunderstood, or because the particular circumstances of their release don’t favor them in the attention economy. But, when it comes to 2006’s “Idiocracy,” the movie’s initial commercial failure was more a case of the studio refusing to even give it a chance. Although it was a big, star-studded comedy distributed by 20th Century Fox, “Idiocracy” was not given a wide theatrical release and received virtually no promotion. Even so, as the years passed, “Idiocracy” found its audience, and it now enjoys significant popularity as a rare mainstream American comedy that truly speaks to the insanity of our time.

In the film’s high-concept plot, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), an underachieving army librarian, and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a sex worker, are selected by the United States government for a hibernation experiment and end up awakening 500 years later to a dystopian world where the whole of society is now made up of extremely unintelligent people and everyone wears Crocs for some reason. Directed by Mike Judge from a script by himself and Etan Cohen, “Idiocracy” is brash and loud in its satire of 21st century consumerism and anti-intellectualism, which is partly why it’s gained a lot of new fans in recent years — it’s an apposite film in this era of institutional collapse, lowest common denominator economics, and unlimited political clownery.

If you’re one of the millions of fans who discovered “Idiocracy” in the nearly two decades since its unceremonious theatrical release, there are several other movies that might scratch a similar comedic itch. Here are five must-watch films for every “Idiocracy” fan.

Naturally, a great starting point for those looking for movies with a similar comedic sensibility to “Idiocracy” is the oeuvre of its director and co-writer. In addition to being the creator of “Beavis and Butt-Head” and the co-creator of “King of the Hill,” Mike Judge is also notable as the man behind one of the most beloved American comedy flicks of the ’90s: “Office Space.”

Written and directed by Judge, “Office Space” was a box office flop but later gained a legion of fans on home video with its send-up of soul-sucking white-collar work — a theme that puts it in the company of other 1999 classics like “Fight Club,” “The Matrix,” and “American Beauty,” but with a particularly snarky spin that anticipates the bone-dry workplace sitcoms of the 2000s. Ron Livingston stars as Peter Gibbons, a programmer at a Texas software company who undergoes a hypnotherapy procedure that causes him to become completely emotionally unfazed by his work life. As a result, he adopts a new, carefree attitude that lays bare the absurdities of the office culture of the time.

Featuring a strong comedic ensemble also made up of Stephen Root, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole, John C. McGinley, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, and Diedrich Bader, it’s a movie with humor so relatable and searingly specific to the everyday indignities of IT work that it still feels sharp a whole quarter-century later. Fans of “Idiocracy” will find that it’s buoyed by the same mixture of brainy satire and goofy cartooniness that is Mike Judge’s creative trademark.

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.