The Genius of Airplane!: How to Make a Comedy by Playing Everything Completely Straight

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sein­feld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Ger­vais Dis­sect the Craft of Com­e­dy (NSFW)

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

Why Is Jack­ie Chan the King of Action Com­e­dy? A Video Essay Mas­ter­ful­ly Makes the Case

The Air­line Toi­lets The­atre Com­pa­ny: Watch One Man Stage Com­i­cal Shows in Air­plane Bath­rooms

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.