By Jackson Alpern

The comedy relief character—it’s a concept at least as old as Shakespeare…possibly older, depending on how funny you find Oedipus banging his mother. But its purpose as a storytelling device is obvious—to take a little bit of the tension out of a really serious or scary story so the audience doesn’t get too overwhelmed or desensitized.

When it works well you get characters like Hudson in Aliens or Hiro on Heroes—genuinely funny and relatable characters who add to the story and nearly steal the show from the main characters. When it doesn’t work well, you end up with an unfunny, obnoxious drain on the audience’s patience that has them checking their watches every time he’s on-screen. And it almost never works well.

Nine times out of 10 these characters are simply annoying as all shit, and below you’ll find 10 of the most annoying to ever look into a camera and plead to the audience, “Laugh, you bastards!” And Jar-Jar isn’t #1! Now you want to know who is, don’t you…?

10) C-3PO from Star Wars

If you think Threepio is annoying in the movies, imagine how annoying he’d be if you were in the Rebel Alliance. You’re trying to raid the Death Star and capture the Princess, and you’re running and hiding from Imperial troops, and here’s this bright-ass, waddling robot slowing you down and screaming constantly because his voice has only one volume setting. As Star Wars fans we love Threepio, so we’ve kind of blinded ourselves to the fact that we wouldn’t want to spend 30 seconds in a room with him in real life. Remember in Episode IV when Threepio asks Luke if he can switch himself off for the night and then slumps forward lifelessly? Why oh why didn’t he do that more often?

9) Ruby Rhod from The Fifth Element

Notice I didn’t name this list the worst comic relief characters, just the most annoying. In many cases those two overlap nicely, but not so for screeching, grating talk radio host Ruby Rhod. Ruby’s incredibly annoying, but that’s what makes him so fantastic. He’s even engendered in me a goodwill towards Chris Tucker that even three Rush Hour pictures can’t entirely extinguish. I can’t help it. Every time I hear the guy’s voice I just picture him shouting “Corben Dallas!” The movie is ridiculous. Ruby is six kinds of ridiculous. And I love it just for that reason.

8) Wreck-Gar from Transformers the Movie

On the scale of annoying ideas, having a character who speaks only in recycled TV clichés has got to be right up there with, oh I don’t know, sampling just the shriekiest part of “It’s a Hard Knock Life” for your rap song. Wreck-Gar goes even beyond the baseline annoyance level of his basic conceit by saying all these annoying catchphrases (sample witty dialogue: “Film at 11!”) through a sound effects filter that sounds like a robot with a throat full of robo-phlegm. Then there’s that whole “Bah weep grahna whatever the fuck” thing. Consider this: Eric Idle barely remembers having given voice to this character, possibly as a self-defense mechanism for not thinking about how annoying it was.

7) Herman Ferguson from Judge Dredd

I don’t hate Rob Schneider in everything. Honest. I don’t even hate him on principle as a comic relief character in a Stallone action flick. He’s was perfectly serviceable in Demolition Man (which, incidentally, belongs on a separate list with Fifth Element of “Top Two Totally Ridiculous and Awesome ‘90s Action Movies”). But he was both out of place and patently awful as a Rob Schneider lookalike who somehow gets mixed up with a bad-ass super-cop in Judge Dredd. Just watch this scene, which features some really cool, straight-from-the-comics makeup effects on Mean Machine, plus Schneider, acting like a Mennonite who’s never seen a movie but has had comedy described to him, then was told to act out a comedy script. A really, really shitty script.

6) Scrappy Doo from Scooby Doo

There was this weird phenomenon in the ‘70s where it wasn’t enough for comedy sidekicks and tagged-on characters to be “funny” (meaning not funny), they also had to be “cute” (meaning hideous). Scrappy Doo was the cartoon incarnation of this phenomenon—the Cousin Oliver of Hanna-Barbera. Here was a cartoon character who took everything the audience loved about Scooby Doo (which, apparently, was the size and shape of his head) and slapped it onto a midget body full of spunk and go-get ‘em attitude. Man, was this little shit annoying. He didn’t even have Scooby’s lovable speech impediment or obvious love of ganja. It’s like if some studio executive had decided that Cheech and Chong needed to be a threesome and paired them with 1930s-era Mickey Rooney. I defy you to get more than two minutes into this episode before you smash your computer monitor with your face.