Timeless Comedy - Airplane!

When a movie makes me laugh in the theater, most of the time it’s because of something ridiculous and amazing and insane. Rarely do I laugh out loud from jokes and comedy.

This year’s The Naked Gun made me laugh more than any movie since probably Jackass Forever. Yet the genre of the wall-to-wall joke topical spoof movie has been out of fashion for the past several decades. On the Scriptnotes podcast, screenwriter Dan Gregor talked about the challenges of bringing the spoof genre back to the big screen, saying “there are many people under a certain age who have literally never seen this genre before.”

I hadn’t really considered it, but I think I really love a spoof movie. Blazing Saddles has always been one of my go-to answers whenever anyone asks me my favorite comedy. What makes Blazing Saddles interesting is how it cleared the way for this sort of irreverant, nonstop laugh riot film. A few years after that, writers/directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker (aka ZAZ) came out with their debut film, 1980’s Airplane!

Having seen Airplane! a couple of times, I’ve always liked it. It has some truly incredible jokes and even though some of it has dated a bit, it’s still a deliriously funny movie worth everyone’s time.

But there’s a mental block I have on “comedy”, and that’s kept it (and others like it) from being movies I regularly return to. When I think about films, I always think about them in terms of genre that don’t apply to straight comedy. One of my favorite films is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off but I always celebrate it as a funny high school film rather than a comedy set around a couple of high schoolers.

Airplane! is a parody, though it’s long since shed the references to the Airport films it so regularly riffs on. That series has long since receded into the annals of 70s cinema and now Airplane! stands on its own as one of the great cinematic comedies, fully outside of that Airport context. In talking about it, it would be so easy to just list out all the quotes and best gags and call it a day, but for me it’s drudging up questions as to what it is about comedy that has kept it from sinking its hooks into me, especially when I’m generally pretty affable. I love to laugh, I love making people laugh. It’s a good time.

But going to the movies to laugh? That’s never been a primary motivator. And the question is why.

Formative years

As I was starting to develop my tastes, I didn’t find myself drawn to comedy. Or, at least, it was never a prerequisite to me enjoying something.

Most of that early formation wasn’t in film, but rather the television I watched through high school. Yes, I regulary watched The Office starting with its third season and was watching 30 Rock by the halfway mark of season one, but those were the rare exceptions. I stuck to the hour long dramas that had comedic elements. It continued a bit in college, where I picked up Community and then Parks & Recreation. But the half hour format was never one that drew me in.

As for the ones that people talk about, I’m rarely in for the shows that exist purely to put jokes into the world. Shows like Happy Endings and Scrubs had their ardent fanbases, but that relentless jokes-first structure has always turned me off. Meanwhile, I didn’t watch Friends until I moved in with my partner, and Cheers was a big pandemic watch project that (while fabulous) still took a while to get through. Multi-camera sitcoms have rarely scratched any itch of mine, and outside of the legendary ones shows like How I Met Your Mother were great because of how they broke the format by junking the shooting schedule/studio audience to make something more narratively complex and involved.

But the larger conundrum is that writing comedy never interested me. I can be funny at times, but I’ve never trusted myself to be reliably on command. This is counter to the many, many people who enter narrative storytelling with the express purpose of making people laugh. The concept alone feels foreign.

For me, character has always been far more interesting than beating punchlines. This is probably a result of studying Whedon and his comedy stylings in Buffy. That show could be wickedly funny, but it always grew out of characters and reactions to organic situations.

To use an extremely specific example: when Joss Whedon wrote and directed The Avengers, he infused the film with his own trademark humor. There are a number of good jokes throughout the film, but the one I always come back to is the Galaga joke, where Tony Stark proudly calls out someone on the helicarrier bridge playing Galaga instead of working. At the end of the scene, Whedon cuts back to the accused SHIELD agent and shows him surreptitiously going back to his game. It gets a big laugh. Because Galaga.

I can appreciate the joke, but it’s never made me laugh.

What always gets me is Captain America’s “I understood that reference!” in response to someone mentioning flying monkeys. It stems entirely from Steve’s own lived experience and fits into the absurdity of everything going on. It’s a joke that can only come from him in that moment, and Whedon found it because of his innate understanding of character.

It’s this that has defined what makes me laugh. Comedy has always felt best when it’s a layer on top of some narrative or story. I only need it as a spice that enhances the flavor and experience. If it’s an entree on the menu, I never think to order.

Do you speak jive?

Airplane! is a relentless joke machine. ZAZ constructs the film in such a way that basically every shot has some joke, every line of dialogue exists to elicit a laugh. There’s minimal exposition, and what little there is also has some joke baked into the middle of it (here’s looking at you, beating/bouncing heart). It should feel sweaty, and there are points in the movie where characters go bigger than should be possible. Unplugging the sick kid’s IV results in some of the craziest, most forced faces out there, but ZAZ modulates the movie such that it fits into the cranked-up-to-eleven tone.

That’s why Airplane! breaks through my comedy barrier like so few others have. The jokes are so out there and so ridiculous that even the ones that haven’t held up (“you ever seen a grown man naked?”) are still hysterical on their own terms. Outside of that, the Airport references have long since passed into obscurity, but the lack of reliance on a source text means the movie doesn’t need to rely on the audience catching the exact references.

Is being wickedly funny enough, though? So much of what I write on here is about the emotional connection and how that forms the core of successful storytelling. The emotional story of Airplane! is paper thin. Focusing on Ted, the two major narrative thrust of his character center on needing to conquer his fear of flying (following his time flying planes in the war) or trying to win Elaine back after she breaks up with him at the beginning of the movie. ZAZ pays lip service to all of this, with Ted’s reminiscences resulting in the suicide of anyone who listens to him, as though the tedium of even having to go anywhere near this frivolous emotional story is worthy of seppuku.

And yet, while they plunder the emotional backstory for relentless jokes, ZAZ has Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty play the emotion perfectly straight for maximum impact. This tension within the narrative helps accentuate both extremes.

The same is true for the rest of the film, where even the moment of the one woman freaking out and everyone getting in line to slap her births from a place of inherent concern to keep the passengers safe and at ease. It’s just that ZAZ takes that idea to an extreme and keeps pushing it far beyond what is reasonable, where committing violence will help keep everyone else sane and do very little to assuage her concerns.

Same with the two lovers who separate as the plane is disembarking. It might be making fun of running alongside a train as it departs a station, but the two lovers feels like a more nascent version of Ted & Elaine, helping feed the center of that as the emotional core of the story.

And Elaine blowing up the autopilot adds to that as well. She’s technically single and going a little crazy. Good for her, man.

Keep it funny, stupid

All of this, though, feels like over explanation for comedy that might function better without explanation. But it’s worth saying that character-centric comedy (as opposed to setup/punchline comedy) is going to feel more timeless than the hot news of the day. It builds off an ethos and a narrative. It means cultivating an audience love and compassion for characters and their stories. These emotions care when characters are stupid or don’t listen to others. It matters to buy into the absurdity of the world around them. The simplicity of Ted’s fear of flying and his relationship strife with Elaine means the movie can play in the realm of the juvenile and purile. The emotions are obvious, so the jokes can be obvious.

What’s more: there’s also just so many of them. ZAZ oversaturating the film with relentless laughs overpowers any hangups about watching comedy. If one joke doesn’t work, there’s another coming immediately. There might be easy jokes, but they never feel like it. It’s rare to recognize the work they put into making every joke perfect, balancing the tightrope spanning obvious and sweaty.

It’s not that Airplane! is some unicorn, it’s that this film works because the studio entrusted ZAZ to make something fabulous and so they did. Much like this year’s The Naked Gun, there’s so much value in relentlessly going for the joke at every possible turn and giving just enough emotional throughline to keep audiences engaged.

This artform is one we’ve missed out on for decades, where the instant virality of YouTube and TikTok has killed it. Films take a long time. It’s hard to be topical, especially in a world like ours where time moves so fast and events happen in a flurry pace.

There’s opportunity there, though. Airplane! still works like The Naked Gun will continue to work. I might like Blazing Saddles more than those films, but I’m also at the age where I can still understand some of the dated jokes therein1. Eventually, it’s going to seem less funny than it was in the 70s because Brooks’s propensity for extremely topical humor will fade away as its contemporaries die off. Still, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!, and The Naked Gun crafted timeless comedy that’ll transcend generations. They might seem dated, but if the Marx Brothers can remain this funny a century after their heyday, there’s no reason the great comedies can’t as well.

And really, I should just be less precious about my weird lack of focus on comedy.