Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades. Some viewers too young to have caught it in its theatrical release even take the Benjaminian view of it as the kind of great work that creates its own genre: the rapid-fire deadpan joke machine, we could call it. But as the InCinematic video essay above reminds us, Airplane! belongs, at its core, to that venerable comedic form of the parody. The key lies in its titular exclamation point shared with Zero Hour!, a conventional Paramount disaster movie from 1957 also about a disgraced fighter pilot forced to assume command of an airliner, albeit one with nary a laugh in its 81 minutes.
Though it actually runs six minutes longer, Airplane! feels much shorter, thanks in part to its mercilessly constant volley of humor. But unlike so many major parodies of this century, which feel like nothing so much as a tissue of rapidly expiring pop-culture references, it also tells a genuine story with momentum of its own.
The film’s writer-directorial trio of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker understood that viewers would come for the laughs, but as with Zero Hour! and the countless other disaster pictures at which Airplane! pokes fun, they’d stay to find out what happens. Hence the inspired choice to play the whole thing perfectly straight, no matter how groan-inducing the visual or verbal gags being delivered.
All this works only because Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker cast the right actors: that is to say, non-funny ones. At the time of Airplane!‘s release, “most comedies relied on actors to be funny, but nobody had really tried making a comedy without comedians before.” This meant that “the comedy had to be there before the camera started rolling,” so that the actors being seemingly unaware of the humor would only make it funnier. The personification of this method is, of course, Leslie Nielsen, who’d already put in a quarter-century of dramatic performances (including in no less a seventies disaster spectacle than The Poseidon Adventure), but whose deadpan turn as Dr. Rumack elevated him into a kind of superstardom of the absurd. Whether a parody like Airplane! would work if made today is difficult to say, but it nevertheless remains a lesson in storytelling for young filmmakers — comedic or otherwise.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
