Creator of ‘Airplane’ and ‘Scary Movie’ Says Comedy Cannot Thrive in a State of Fear
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David Zucker, the creator and/or writer of the Airplane, Naked Gun, and Scary Movie franchises, says in an essay he penned for Commentary magazine that comedy cannot thrive in a state of fear.
Below are some highlights.
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Airplane!, the comedy I wrote and directed with my brother Jerry and our friend Jim Abrahams. Just before the world shut down, Paramount held a screening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, followed by a Q&A in which an audience member asked a question we never used to receive: “Could you make Airplane! today?” My response: “Of course, we could. Just without the jokes.”
Although people tell me that they love Airplane! and it seems to be included on just about every Top Five movie-comedy list, there was talk at Paramount of withholding the rerelease over feared backlash for scenes that today would be deemed “insensitive.” I’m referring to scenes like the one in which two black characters speak entirely in a jive dialect so unintelligible that it has to be subtitled. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said to me, “You couldn’t do that scene today.” But I always wonder, why not? Half the gags in that joke were aimed at white people, given that the translation for “Shit” is “Golly!”—and the whole gag is topped off by the whitest lady on the planet, the actress who played the mom on Leave It to Beaver, translating.
The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view. No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do. But in today’s market, if I pitched a studio executive a comedy in which a white lady has to translate the speech of black people; in which an eight-year-old girl says, “I like my coffee black, like my men”; or an airline pilot makes sexual suggestions to a little boy (“Billy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”), I’d be told, in Studioese, “That’s just fantastically great! We’ll call you.”
By contrast, in 1979, Michael Eisner, then the president of Paramount, didn’t feel that he had to censor, take apart, or micromanage the jokes in the Airplane! script, even the ones he didn’t understand. Eisner somehow knew that comedy requires a certain amount of recklessness and that comedy writers and directors need to experiment until they hit that perfect note where a joke can illuminate uncomfortable subjects by giving us permission to laugh at them.
HUMOR happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes.
People look at the mass exodus of comedy writers and proclaim that comedy must be dead. That’s not true. Comedy is not dead. It’s scared. And when something is scared, it goes into hiding. I do admire those comedy writers who can pour their creativity and talents into non-humorous projects. Unlike my peers, who can channel their rage into more socially acceptable psychological projects, I have no marketable skills aside from crafting jokes. As a teenager, I was fired on my second day on a job as a store clerk at a pharmacy because I couldn’t do the very two things that the job required: making change and finding things.
COMEDY cannot thrive in a state of fear. For me, as for many comedians, the need to get laughs is greater than the risk of getting hurt. This doesn’t mean that funny people have a higher tolerance for pain or that they aren’t affected by what others say about them. On the contrary, people in comedy spend much of their time beating themselves up over the jokes that didn’t land or were taken seriously.
David Zucker is a writer and director.
