Best Movies Where Hilarious Yoga Happens

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is one of those few films where the premise is baked right into the title: after a brutal breakup with the titular Sarah Marshall, her boyfriend goes to Hawaii to try to get over her. This becomes more difficult, of course, when she appears on the same island at the same time. And we can see how funny this difficulty can really be during the movie’s yoga class scene.

The awkwardness starts right away as Jason Segel’s character must watch the yoga instructor gushing over his ex-girlfriend (a famous television star) and her new boyfriend (a famous rockstar). He then has trouble keeping up with the yoga positions and questions the instructor on whether arching one’s back and keeping it flat are contradictory ideas. As he continues to have difficulties with other poses, the instructor frequently–and sarcastically–reassures him it’s fine to just get in the child’s pose if he can’t handle anything else.

Grown Ups 2 is an Adam Sandler film, and you know what that means: the movie is really just a thinly-veiled excuse for him to hang out with his friends and fellow comedians and shoot a few scenes between laughs.

The plot (such as it is) involves Sandler’s character moving his family to his hometown, which leads to more shenanigans with his old friends. And one of the film’s stranger–and funnier–scenes occurs when Jon Lovitz, secretly a janitor, impersonates a yoga instructor.

Initially, most of the humor comes from the fact that his character is bad at both yoga and lying. But things quickly take a pervy twist when he discovers that he can order the all-female class to do things like jackhammer squats, which is really just an excuse to see their breasts jiggle. By the time he has everyone bending over and spanking their own butts, you’ll be making a mental note to check the credentials before you choose a yoga instructor.

Couples Retreat is a fairly by-the-numbers comedy about multiple couples engaging in the titular retreat, with everyone involved hoping that their time away from home in an exotic location will help bring their relationships closer together.

But the film has a pretty high creative pedigree: it was co-written by and stars The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau. And he helped bring us a yoga scene that was short in length but long on laughs.

As the handsome, shirtless instructor helps the couples with yoga poses, it becomes abundantly clear that much of what he is saying and doing seems like a form of sexual innuendo. Men and women alike seem to be his targets, and much of the humor comes from watching everyone try to figure out whether this is real yoga or just sexual harassment.

And, of course, we laughed when the sarcastic Kristen Bell told Jason Bateman to “keep your chin up” as the instructor repeatedly twerked over Bateman’s helpless face.

If you mostly know Chris Evans as Captain America, then you may have trouble playing it cool when watching Playing It Cool. In this film, Evans plays a world-weary writer who has trouble believing in love, but that all changes when he meets a character played by Michelle Monaghan. As he pursues her, she invites him to a “charity event,” and he is shocked to discover that he was actually invited to her yoga class.

Rather than run away, he gamely makes attempts at doing the various yoga poses. We say “attempts” because, in quick cut after quick cut, we see that he’s completely terrible at this, but it doesn’t keep him from winning her over through his charm (yes, Virginia: Captain America can be very charming).

And considering that we cut from his struggles in the class to the two of them bonding over those struggles in a local diner, it’s fair to say that his time on the mat (as bad as it was) helped bring them together.