The Funniest Episodes of the Entire Star Trek Franchise of All Time, Ranked

As Star Trek: Lower Decks closes out a fourth season filled with more laughs than hungry Tribbles can fit in a storage container of quadrotriticale, tapping the comedy potential of Star Trek franchise — a tradition dating all the way back to the first season of The Original Series over 50 years ago — has proven incredibly durable; even the latest live-action series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, has frequently, and quite successfully, plotted a course into humorous territory.

Indeed, the whole Star Trek franchise has a long and storied history with comedy, with just about every corner of the franchise firmament mining the series' sci-fi premise for laughs. Here then, are the 20 funniest installments of Trek (not including Lower Decks, with its Prime Directive of jokes-at-warp-speed, or any episodes that, frankly, are so unintentionally bad that they're kind of hilarious — sorry, "The Way to Eden" and "Up the Long Ladder").

20. "The Trouble with Edward" (Short Treks, Season 2, Episode 2)
Taking both a cue and plot inspiration from one of Trek's most legendary forays into humor, this Short Treks take adds its own quirky and daresay macabre twist on the venerable Tribble trope via Edward Larkin, a stubbornly single-minded, malcontent scientist on the USS Cabot (played to prickly perfection by H. Jon Benjamin), whose misguided attempt to create a perpetually self-sustaining food source out of the adorably fuzzy aliens leads to darkly comic catastrophe.

19. "Body and Soul" (Voyager, Season 7, Episode 7)
In a variation on the tried-and-true body-swapping genre, the Doctor's holographic essence is incorporated into Seven of Nine's Borg matrix when Voyager runs afoul of aliens with anti-photonic being sentiments. The principal pleasures of this episode come from Jeri Ryan's wickedly spot-on impression of Robert Picardo's cranky EMH's tone and mannerisms whenever Seven cedes control of her form to him.

18. "The Elysian Kingdom" (Strange New Worlds, Season 1, Episode 8)
Among the handful of Trek episodes that thrust familiar crewmembers — and the actors behind them — into alt-reality roles, none are as indulgently, deliriously silly as this one, which finds the Enterprise immersed into a Princess Bride-esque fairy tale narrative, one that allows the cast — in particular, Anson Mount as a fawning/scheming courtier and Christina Chong as a sing-song, tiny-dog-toting princess — to gleefully chew the scenery in their storybook personas.

17. "The Magnificent Ferengi" (Deep Space Nine, Season 6, Episode 10)
Brilliantly casting the franchise's most notoriously scruples-free species, led by Quark, Rom and Nog, as a gang of misfits united Dirty Dozen-style for a heroic mission, this episode deftly juggles all its comedic elements, action beats, and plot-twists — it even unexpectedly but successfully veers into Weekend at Bernie's territory. All that and Iggy Pop as the Cardassian Big Bad!

16. "The Escape Artist" (Short Treks, Season 1, Episode 4)
After two decidedly menacing outings as Harry Mudd, actor Rainn Wilson (who also directed) at last gets to delve into the more amusing aspects of the intergalactic con artist in this cleverly plotted ode to Mudd's boundless capacity for duplicity in pursuit of profit, with a novel payoff that's both funny and a fitting callback to Mudd's funniest TOS appearance.

15. "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy" (Voyager, Season 6, Episode 4)
An espionage spoof that takes great advantage of both actor Robert Picardo's facility for comedy and The Doctor's overabundant confidence and equally fragile ego as aliens mistake the EMH's "daydream" subroutine for Voyager's reality — yet it somehow also delivers a poignant take on the Doctor's bid for greater respect and responsibility among the crew. And the B-plot — featuring Paris' novel solution for Tuvok's pon farr problem — is about as deadpan amusing as a Vulcan storyline can get. 

14. "Ménage à Troi" (The Next Generation, Season 3, Episode 24) 
Deanna's "Auntie Mame"-channeling mother Lwaxana Troi always livens up the proceedings whenever she pops into the Trek-verse, but none of her escapades are as fast-paced and funny as this farcical bit of business, in which a besotted Ferengi kidnaps her in hopes of forcing a tactically advantageous marriage. Majel Barrett is at her most formidable and funny in the role here, and her persistent flirtations with Picard provide a terrific climatic punchline.

13. "Shore Leave" (The Original Series, Season 1, Episode 16)
After some tiptoeing into comedy, this episode marks The Original Series' first foray into a largely humorous episode (even with ravenous tigers, marauding samurai, and strafing fighter planes), and the planetary playground where random musings come to thrilling life set the template for the future holodeck, the stage-setter for many of Trek's best comedies. It smartly leans heavily on the wry, laid-back charms of DeForest Kelley and offers an early reveal of William Shatner's inherent comedic gifts during his donnybrook with his obnoxious Starfleet Academy tormentor Finnegan.

12. "Spock Amok" (Strange New Worlds, Season 1, Episode 5)
In another wittily plotted body-swap, Spock and T'Pring's Vulcan soul-sharing exercise inadvertently causes them to switch minds just as Spock must help conduct a crucial diplomatic mission with an empathetic species uber-sensitive to nuance, resulting in a classic comedy of manners as the engaged Vulcans try each other's lives on and gain a better understanding of the demands each grapples with. The "Enterprise Bingo" B-plot, showing off the lighter sides of Starfleet super-pros Una and La'an, is equally disarming.

11. "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" (Deep Space Nine, Season 7, Episode 4)
The usually very straightlaced and disciplined Sisko drives the comedy — much to actor Avery Brooks' clear delight — as he unravels while trying to best his longtime Vulcan rival Solok in a game of holodeck baseball. Does the storyline of a ragtag group of players coming together as a team against all odds, with the least of them — Rom — getting a shot to shine, smack of The Bad News Bears and a zillion similarly structured sitcom episodes? Absolutely. Does it all still work wonderfully? Absolutely. Go Niners!

10. "Q-pid" (The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 20)
There's a lot of setup in the first half of the episode, reuniting Picard with Vash, his scoundrel dalliance from Risa and creating romantic tensions between them, while also bringing Q into the mix late in the game, but the payoff is totally worth it when Q's omnipotent powers transport the crew to his vision of Sherwood Forest and the subsequent swashbuckling silliness is amped up to 11, and Worf irritably delivers one of the funniest line readings in all of Trek history: "I am NOT a Merry Man."

9. "I, Mudd" (The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 8)
The mothership series always demonstrated an ingrained sense of playfulness, but really cuts loose in this outing, which in his second appearance transforms Harry Mudd from a dangerous conniver into a much more comedic rogue (both incarnations deftly played by the great character actor Roger C. Carmel). The society of assorted identical android models is minded for every amusement, the entire supporting cast gets in on the fun (Chekov's Cossack dance! Spock's android-breaking amore!), Shatner plays Kirk with the lightest possible touch without ever sacrificing his dignity, and Mudd is served with some hilarious (if perhaps outdated, to current sensibilities) poetic justice.

8. "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang" (Deep Space Nine, Season 7, Episode 15)
Inspired by great caper-film jaunts like Ocean's Eleven, this is similarly brimming with a sense of Rat Pack-y fun and swagger from start to finish as the crew of the space station crafts a dizzying, clockwork plot — complete with unexpected complications and a reluctant hero (for compelling reasons) in Sisko — to restore photonic crooner Vic Fontaine, deposed by gangster rivals and a glitchy holodeck program, to his rightful place atop the swinging version of '60s-era Las Vegas.

7. "Bride of Chaotica!" (Voyager, Season 5, Episode 12)
Among the top-tier of the "holodeck goes awry" sub-genre and filmed largely in glorious black-and-white to evoke the low-budget, kinda-cheesy sci-fi movie serials of old that inspired Tom Paris' "Captain Proton" hologram — mistaken here by light-based beings for the crew's actual reality — the episode is a lark from start to finish, but never more amusingly so than when Kate Mulgrew takes center stage when Janeway swans imperiously around posing as the titular bride Queen Arachnia. 

6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
While the first series offered a fair share of comedically inclined episodes, this entry in the film franchise cemented Trek's willingness to have fun with itself — with terrific results — in the public consciousness, well before the many spin-offs joined the sandbox. Credit Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer's inspired script for tweaking conventional Trek tropes and finding fish-out-of-water hilarity (not to mention Meyer's particularly sparkling, witty dialogue), director Leonard Nimoy's established facility for handling both light comedy and the demands of the franchise framework, and the classic crew's sheer gameness to add renewed twinkle to their long-established roles.

5. "A Piece of the Action" (The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 17)
Bouncing off a fresh sci-fi story springboard involving the unintentional cultural contamination of an alien planet — a left-behind book about the Chicago mobs of the '20s remade the world into a planet of tough-talking, Tommy gun-toting gangsters — this episode runs headlong into its comic Guys and Dolls potential, with William Shatner utterly stealing the show (amid sharp performances including Nimoy and those of guest actors Vic Tayback and Anthony Caruso) as a pinstripe-suited Kirk leans harder and harder into his newly adopted, tough-talking performance as the ultimate boss of bosses.

4. "Those Old Scientists" (Strange New Worlds, Season 2, Episode 7)
The anarchic comic energy and furiously paced one-liners of Lower Decks merged seamlessly with the majestic, old-school sensibilities of Strange New Worlds — itself no stranger to embracing the off-kilter — when the former's Boimler and Mariner make a live-action beam-in to crossover with the fellow Trek franchisee. Thanks in large part to the fact that Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome could also perfectly physically embody the Lower Decks characters they give voice to and serve the meatier timey-wimey story well, the episode is packed with laughs without violating the established tone and tenor of SNW.

3. "A Fistful of Datas" (The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 8)
"Fistful" finds countless opportunities to satirize the well-worn Western genre, particularly by casting three of the series' most unlikely characters — Worf, Alexander, and Troi — in the Frontier Hero roles. But using the holo-glitch at the center of the jeopardy to populate the program with multiple Old West iterations of Data — each brilliantly dileneated and mined for maximum hilarity by Brent Spiner — was the stroke of genius that makes this one the ne plus ultra of holodeck-mishap episodes, and the final riding-off-into-the-sunset visual gag is the cherry on top.

2. "Trials and Tribble-ations" (Deep Space Nine, Season 5, Episode 6)
It's as if this episode — made to fondly mark by franchise's 30th anniversary by paying tribute to one of TOS's most beloved episodes — is just daring die-hard and casual Trek fans alike not to grin from ear to ear throughout, with the DS9 crew traveling back in time and becoming enmeshed in the classic "The Trouble with Tribbles" mission. Its retro production and costume design, devilishly clever weaving of new characters and plot into decades-old footage, and nods to Trek lore both savvy and subtle make it packed with warm humor as it is with storytelling creativity.

1. "The Trouble with Tribbles" (The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 15)
Long the gold standard for the lighter side of Star Trek, one of the aspects that makes this episode such tremendous fun is that with all of its baked-in comedic elements — the adorable, prolifically reproducing, Klingon-hating fuzzy aliens; a trash-talking Klingon igniting a full-on barroom brawl by disparaging the Enterprise, rather than its stalwart captain; smooth-talking trader Cyrano Jones; and Kirk's not-so-veiled contempt for uptight middle managers — all of the merriment somehow still fits perfectly within the series' established sci-fi framework, bending but not breaking the format. Audiences may have previously laughed at cheap, clunky, and ill-conceived genre efforts before, but here they got to laugh with the smartly made, ambitious showas it winked knowingly at itself. Thus "Tribbles" boldly set — and maintains — the high bar for all Trek romps to follow.

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