DVD: Car 54, Where Are You?, and 4 Other Cop Shows That Make Us Laugh

Given that sitcoms and shows about policemen have dominated American television since the days of the picture tube, it's probably inevitable that these two popular genres have cross-bred from time to time. The tradition probably started with the still-hilarious Car 54: Where Are You? (Shanachie Entertainment releases "The Complete First Season" on DVD today), a show that combined men in blue -- Joe E. Ross as the excitable Gunther Toody and a pre-Munsters Fred Gwynne as his laconic partner Francis Muldoon -- with a sharp sense of humor. Check out these other po-pos who make us laugh -- and suggest your own favorite cop-coms in the comments.

Police Squad!: Airplane! creators Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker brought their signature brand of outrageous sight gags, deadpan punnery, and general lunacy to prime-time TV, only to discover that boob-tube audiences wanted -- as one of the creators later noted in an interview -- "radio with pictures"; the show became a cult hit for people actually willing to pay attention, but it wasn't until the Naked Gun movies that the exploits of Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) reached a broad audience.

Barney Miller: Very little police work ever got done on this droll and laconic 1970s sitcom, but the characters were so indelibly drawn and the banter was so sharp that it became of the decade's biggest hits. Mixing Broadway stalwarts like Hal Linden (as Barney) and Barbara Barrie (who played the long-suffering Mrs. Miller in early seasons), comedians like Steve Landesberg, and show-biz vets like James Gregory (even while watching The Manchurian Candidate I think of him as Inspector Luger from this show) and Abe Vigoda, Barney Miller boasts one of TV's greatest ensemble casts.

Sledge Hammer!: By the mid-1980s, there were a whole lot of cops on a whole lot of edges, so the timing was perfect for this satire about a policeman (David Rasche) who played by his own rules and wasn't all that concerned with collateral damage. Hammer loves his gun so much that he sleeps and showers with it; he's less enamored, as you can imagine, with police procedure and the rights of the accused. Which made him perfect for the Reagan era.

Dragnet: Forget the unintentionally unfunny movie with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks and instead check out the show that inspired it, the often unintentionally hilarious and exceedingly iconic procedural drama about cops in L.A. Producer-star Jack Webb's politics were way, way rightward-leaning, and he often used the show as his soapbox against society's moral decay. I wish I could find the clip of the monotonal Webb saying the phrase "hopped up on goofballs," but this other anti-drug jeremiad gives you an idea of the laughs this show frequently delivers: