Superheroes are everywhere these days. From the popularity of the MCU to HBO projects like Watchmen and the upcoming Green Lantern series, it seems that these costumed crime fighters have finally been accepted into the mainstream. As such, it can be hard to remember just how patently absurd these characters really are. These are people with impossible powers who dress up in gaudy bright costumes and save the planet from cosmic and real-world evil by exchanging fisticuffs. If the stories weren't so captivating, they'd be funny.

Of course, there are plenty of characters meant to be funny. In fact, there are whole superhero teams whose dedication to saving the day seems second to their commitment to cracking wise. These are Marvel's 10 funniest superhero teams, ranked:

10 Runaways

The Runaways is a comic about angsty teenaged kids dealing with the fact that their parents are supervillains. From the very first page of the very first issue, this comic set itself up as a brilliantly funny team book that would subvert expectations.

In the opening scene, the Avengers are fighting the Hulk outsider the White House when Captain America (using a dated ableist term) refers to another character's behavior as "retarded." It turns out that this is actually just an Avengers MMORPG and one of the actual characters is playing Cap as his avatar. Throughout the series, humor continues to be consistent, lightening the mood so dramatic moments are even more intense by contrast.

9 The Craptacular B-Sides

The Craptacular B-Sides are another team of teenaged superheroes. They came together out of a mixture of vanity, ambition, thrill-seeking, and pigheadedness. The three members of the team have the comically unimpressive superhero names Fateball, Mize, and Jughandle.

They debuted in the three-issue miniseriesB-Sides in 2002 and appear not to have seen print since. The comic exists somewhere at the interstice between being intentionally funny and laughably bad. If that wasn't already damning, their main villain is Doctor Dark, whose name shines a spotlight on the terrible naming conventions in comics.

8 Excalibur

The team Excalibur is a mix of X-Men with various characters associated with Britain's superhero and intelligence communities. The team travels to parallel realities, regularly encounter ridiculous over-the-top worlds that parody the characters of the main Marvel Universe.

One of the characters, Captain Britain, is powered by his own massive ego. Others include long-time X-Men regulars Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler, both of whom have a long history as humorous characters whose antics inspire laughter. While Excalibur could be serious at times, it was also so ridiculous one couldn't help but laugh.

7 X-Men

The X-Men are simultaneously one of the most tragically grim superhero teams and one of the most sidesplittingly funny groups. When not dealing with stories about genocide, xenophobia, and political violence, the X-Men books are consistently rife with humor.

Whether it's Beast's lack of social skills, or Kitty Pryde's ridiculous costume changes, or Oya's shy insecurities as she says the worst thing possible, or Wolverine's torrid love affair with beer, there are literally hundreds of running jokes among the X-Men.

6 Web Warriors

Spider-Man's powers include crawling up walls, enhanced physical strength, a supernatural danger sense, and a nigh-infinite amount of one-liners. This holds mostly true in his various incarnations across the multiverse.

The Web Warriors are a team of various Spider-Men, -Women, -Punks, and -Pigs who banded together during the Spider-Verse crossover event and who have since worked to monitor potential enemies that could threaten their respective dimensional timelines.  The Web Warriors are basically the comedy troupe of interdimensional superhero teams.

5 New Avengers (by Bendis)

To date, there have been four teams of Avengers to appear under the New Avengers comic title, the first two of which were written by Brian Michael Bendis.

These days, people like to talk trash about Bendis, forgetting that he reinvented comic book dialogue. This really pays off in his work on New Avengers. The first series begins and ends with a dire serious tone, but the middle of the run allowed for character exploration in some really funny ways. Bendis's second New Avengers book is even funnier, with Jessica Jones trying to give her baby away to various female Avengers fawning over the child, Luke Cage fleecing Tony on a financial deal, and multiple heroes announcing that it's clobbering time before the Thing has a chance to say his catchphrase.

4 Deadpool and the Mercs for Money

Deadpool is the Merc with a Mouth, a Fourth-Wall smashing anti-hero whose healing factor seems to compensate for his being unmoored from reality. Eventually, he hires an entire team of mercenaries to work with him.

While Deadpool is morally about as grey as Cable's arm, he and his fellow mercs mostly did good work as a knockoff on the Heroes for Hire. The team included such characters as Slapstick, Madcap, and Foolkiller. A later incarnation of the Mercs for Money was set up by Domino. This later team had numerous primates on its roster, including Gorilla-Man and Hit-Monkey.

3 Guardians of the Galaxy

The Guardians of the Galaxy are like the Avengers in space...if the Avengers were a dysfunctional team led by a man-boy with daddy issues and accompanied by an angry forest critter and trisyllabic Christmas tree. While the comic characters differ noticeably from their movie counterparts--especially in the cases of Drax, Gamora, and Peter Quill--the team members constantly banter with one another.

Even before the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the humor in the book became more pronounced as the Guardians took on Tony Stark as their newest member.

2 Cable & Deadpool

This superhero duo is so famous their friendship is the basis for the film Deadpool 2. While Deadpool is always good for a series of wonky antics, Cable is the ultimate straight man, his serious brooding grimace making the chimichanga-addicted merc all the funnier by contrast.

The two have teamed up many times and even have had multiple series dedicated exclusively to them working as a team. In fact, the famous line about Deadpool looking like Ryan Reynolds crossed with a shar-pei comes from their first shared comic series--a single line of dialogue so funny it spawned a film franchise.

1 Nextwave

Written by futurist and chronically disappointed optimist Warren Ellis, Nextwave is an irreverent comic that set out to redefine what a superhero team book could do by telling a story so ridiculously dumb no one else would dare to try it.

The team was hired by the Beyond Corporation to fight terrorists, only to learn the Beyond Corporation were actually terrorists themselves. As such, the Nextwave squad decide to fight their former paymasters, battling against airborne koalas, broccoli assassins, samurai robot cops, Mindless Ones on skateboards, and even a baby MODOK.

NEXT: 10 Characters With Superhero Parents (Who Turned Out All Right)