If I Didn't Have You (Monsters, Inc.)

Two men who probably shouldn't be friends — a furry monster and a one-eyed green blob — belt their way through a show-stopping Broadway pastiche, and the joke is that it absolutely works as a love song. Newman builds the number like a classic MGM musical cue: swelling brass, theatrical key changes, a tempo that keeps threatening to tip into chaos. Billy Crystal and John Goodman play the comedy with abandon but also, crucially, with sincerity — you believe they mean every word even as they're mugging through every beat. The lyric celebrates the math of friendship: two flawed, complementary people who make each other's existence better by showing up consistently. There's vaudeville in its bones, the kind of number where performers lean into the audience with a wink. But underneath the elaborate staging is something genuinely moving about platonic love, the kind that doesn't get enough songs written about it. It's the song you put on when you want to celebrate a friendship that confuses other people.