Chow understood quickly that he had to team up with the very best of local artists to gain success. Some of the most memorable directors he worked with were Wong Jing, for 8 movies mainly displaying his farcical and toilet humour skills, Lee Lik Chi for 7 films, Jeff Lau for 4 films, Johnnie To, Gordon Chan and Ching Siu Tung (mostly to choreograph action). His best accomplices were undoubtedly Lee Lik Chi and Jeff Lau with whom Chow made his best film to date (God of Cookery, King Of Comedy and Shaolin Soccer with the first one and All For The Winner and A Chinese Odyssey 1 & 2 with the second one).

As a king of comedy, Chow had various sidekicks at his service and some of them were pretty loyal. Ng Man Tat first worked with him on the serious crime drama Triad Story and has followed him in more than 15 movies ever since. Ng Man Tat is a middle-aged man with grey hair, grey eyebrows and grey moustaches and he is considered by aficionados as Chow's lowbrow stooge by excellence. The one he can heavily insult, beat up, spit on but also count on to make the audience giggle. Alternatively Nat Chan Pak Cheung replaced Ng Man Tat as Chow's scapegoat in some movies but he never really reach the same results as the pitiful and laughable old boy.

As for female sidekicks, even if Sandra Ng teamed up a few times with Chow, early nineties, as the little duckling, Sharla Cheung Man brought a touch of femininity and sometimes eroticism to eight of Chow's movies in the first half of the nineties. She was replaced from 1995 onwards by another HK popular actress, Karen Mok Man Wai. She has contributed to Chow's three last movies (God Of Cookery, King Of Comedy & Shaolin Soccer) considered by many as his more mature and best directed features. Stephen Chow even dared to make Karen Mok look tomboy-ish or even ugly in numerous occasions, which didn't seem to bother her (see her interview).

In the long run, Stephen Chow's success has permitted other actors and actresses to emerge such as Ng Man Tat or Karen Mok, and more recently Cecilia Cheung and Vicky Zhao Wei. Cecilia Cheung's very first role as a heavily-made-up prostitute dressed as a high school girl in King Of Comedy is unforgettable.

Since his success with All For The Winner (1990), Chow consistently ranked at the top of the box office and he became the number one top-grossing artist of the nineties. Box office figures are eloquent: from 1990 to 1997, at least two Stephen Chow's movies ranked amongst the top five movies of the year. 1992 was a particular good year since the five first movies were all from HK number one clown, grossing more than HK$ 210 millions in total! (Justice, My Foot!, All's Well Ends Well, Royal Tramp, King of Beggars & Royal Tramp II). Not only the entire Asian audience has overwhelmingly supported Chow for many years but he is also well acclaimed by film critics. Stephen Chow was nominated five times in a row Best Actor at the Annual Hong Kong Film Awards from 1990 to 1995. In 1995 he won the awards of Best Actor and Film Of Merit for A Chinese Odyssey by the HK Film Critics Society and he won the Film Of Merit award for Forbidden City Cop the following year. Stephen Chow won also the Best Director and Best Actor awards for Shaolin Soccer at the 2002 Hong-Kong Film Festival.