Airplane! at 40: The Best Spoof Comedy Ever Made?
The tirelessly joke-packed 1980 film might have dated in some ways but its relentless desire to amuse still makes it an undeniable winner.
The Guardian
Scott Tobias
Even in the anarchic heyday of the Marx brothers at Paramount Pictures, when they turned out vaudevillian free-for-alls such as Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, or Mel Brooks parodies like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, audiences had never encountered the sheer volume of gags that hit them in Airplane!, which are so relentless that the bad ones don’t have time to develop an odor. There are puns, pratfalls, provocations, foreground/background dynamics, double entendres, references to film and TV and popular commercials, random acts of silliness and absurdity, and every possible strain of what would later be categorized as a “dad joke”. Even at 40, when a handful of the references and bits have grown whiskers, Airplane! still absolutely kills. Rarely has a film so eager to please been so successful in doing so.
And yet, as easy as it might be to tally up 87 minutes of laughs or marvel at the high batting average of its creative team – David and Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, better known as Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (ZAZ) – the non-jokes are a key part of what makes it work. That may sound like asking jazz aficionados to listen between the notes, but the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team understood (at the time, anyway) that a good comedy needs a straight man, and they found one in Zero Hour!, a largely forgotten 1957 drama that served as a primary source of inspiration. And not a source like Top Gun would be to the Abrahams solo projects Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux, but the entire foundation on which the comedy would rest.
Though Airplane! riffs on the Airport series (particularly Airport 1975) and Irwin Allen disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, it’s a straight-up remake of Zero Hour!, with just a little spin on the ball. Key elements are exactly the same: a hero named Ted Stryker, a former second world war fighter pilot still haunted by the six comrades killed because of a decision he made in combat. A flight he catches at the last minute to win back a woman who’s left him a “Dear John” note. An illness that sweeps through the airplane cabin, debilitating all the passengers who ordered fish instead of meat, including the pilot and the co-pilot. Stryker getting called up to steer the plane to safety, guided on the ground by the no-nonsense captain who was his superior during the war.
Not only are some of lines repeated verbatim, but tiny details survive, too, like Stryker’s refusal to stay in the air another two hours until the stormy weather clears, or the ridiculous geysers of sweat that pour down his face as he approaches the landing. Much of the fun of Airplane! comes from Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’s instinct that just the tone of an average 1957 melodrama would sound funny in 1980, when a more naturalistic style of acting and screenwriting had fully taken over the industry. When the Stryker in Airplane!, stewing bitterly about the pilots who died under his command, says a line like, “A lot of people had plans before the war. Like George Zipp,” it’s hilarious in 1980 (and 2020) in a way it might not have been in 1957. The film goes off on crazier tangents, but often it doesn’t need to depart from Zero Hour! much at all.
This post originally appeared on The Guardian and was published July 2, 2020. This article is republished here with permission.
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Or Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? Or The Dictator? 
Those are like double AA ball.
Sorry.
but that's not important right now. 
