Airplane! (1980 - again)
Dir. David & Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams / Dur. 87 mins
What’s It About? Plot-wise? As traumatised war veteran Ted Striker boards a flight to try and win back his estranged girlfriend Elaine Dickinson, a series of escalating tragedies mean that the flight is not going to go as planned. In reality? It’s a highly efficient delivery system for a large number of very silly and very funny jokes.
Why’s It Any Good? Look, there’s a huge risk that I could just sit and list you out a load of quotes to prove that this is one of the funniest films there is so I’ll do my best not to do that right now. It works because it’s a mix of the serious and the utterly silly. The serious in the sense that not only do you have a number of actors playing it completely deadpan straight (most notably Leslie Nielsen as Dr Rumack and Robert Stack as Rex Kramer) but it’s also technically a remake of a genuine disaster film. Yep, not a huge number of people know that but the film was largely based around the 1957 B-movie Zero Hour (to the extent that it was so similar in structure that they bought the rights to Zero Hour prior to starting production to avoid any potential lawsuits). The silly in the sense that… well, all of the rest of it.
Where Airplane! benefits is that it comes out of the sketch-based tradition that Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker had started with the Kentucky Fried Theatre improv troupe (inspiration for the Kentucky Fried Movie which preceded this) so the gag rate is almost ludicrously high. What stops it from just being a collection of sketches and gags like the Kentucky Fried Movie (which is a fun film but doesn't hit anywhere near the heights of Airplane!) is that they have the serious disaster movie plot to hang it all around.
Does it have some jokes that misfire? Sure, like any comedy rooted in a sketch-based format, sometimes the odd joke doesn’t quite land. With Airplane! though, the rate at which it burns through is so high that those misfires barely notice. It’s also stuffed full of lovely background gags too which mean that, even on a tenth rewatch, you might spot a gag that you hadn’t caught before.
I was too young to watch this when it came out but I was still pretty young when I watched it. The benefit to doing this is that, as I got older, more and more of the jokes landed with me. As a kid, the slapstick gags were the ones that landed. As a teenager, suddenly the sex-based gags made sense. Subsequent rewatches have unpicked more and more gags hitherto unnoticed or not quite understood.
The odd contemporary reference aside, this is a comedy that absolutely stands the test of time and deserves its place up there on any “All Time...” lists.
2 comments:
I remember watching Airplane! with a mate in a cinema in Bournemouth. We pretty much cried with laughter throughout the entire film. Nobody else laughed. Nobody.
I mean...that just seems utterly baffling to me...
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