My Favorite Films: Airplane!

Airplane! (1980)

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Context:
In the '70s, a small comedy team comprised of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker decided to bring their sketch comedy to the big screen in the form of The Kentucky Fried Movie.  A series of sketches was composed, some of which were based on the oddities of late night television.  To draw inspiration for the scenes, the boys would record hours of late night television.  After the film was a modest success, the trio planned a sequel following a similar format.  The centerpiece of this sequel was going to be a long spoof based on one of the late-night movies they happened to record.  As more and more ideas were added into this long spoof, it was decided that the next film should just comprise of the "feature presentation" alone.

The recorded film in question was a 1957 drama called Zero Hour! which concerned an airline jet filled with passengers who had succumbed to food poisoning from the fish dinner offered in flight.  When the pilots also fall deathly ill, Ted Stryker (an ex-war pilot with PSTD for a faulty decision he made whilst in the war) is the only one on board with any experience to land the plane in time to save the passengers.  And he has to fix his failing love life in the process!  While the film was fairly well-received at the time, the Zuckers and Abrahams found the cheesy dialogue and melodramatic plot perfect for parody.  With airplane disaster movies being popular at the time thanks to the successful Airport franchise, Airplane! was written as a deliberate spoof.

Because the trio worked for Paramount who owned the rights to Zero Hour!, they were allowed to use the original script as a structure for their jokes, keeping budget costs low.  With only the goal of making this the most over-the-top spoof imaginable, the brothers injected the dry script with their signature cartoonish humor and wordplay.  It was a risky maneuver, but they succeeded in creating the funniest film of all time (according to science).

Plot:
Ex-fighter pilot Ted Striker follows his stewardess girlfriend Elaine onto her flight from LA to Chicago in an attempt to win her back, despite his fears of flying.  Unfortunately, he is called upon to save the day and get back into the action when the pilots all fall ill and the crew must find someone who "can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."

Analysis:
To me, the best movies are the ones you can watch repeatedly and still find enjoyment in, like a great song.  And it's hard for a comedy movie to fall into this requirement because humor relies on the unexpected.  After you hear a joke once, it's hard for that same joke to stay funny upon multiple repetitions.  Airplane! circumvents this problem by putting so many jokes into it's 87 minute runtime that you are bound not to catch them all on your first viewing.  I first received this film as a 10-year-old, meaning I have watched it many times over the last 17 years, and what always kept me coming back was the fact that I'd always catch some new joke that I'd missed on previous viewings.

(Even as I sat down to watch it again for this review, I was certain that I had finally caught them all, but lo and behold, one more joke appeared.  It's a visual joke that was difficult to catch and I had to rewind to make sure it actually happened.  It involves Striker's old commanding officer Rex Kramer as he's getting dressed in his house.  He gets ready in front of a full-length mirror and we see him and his reflection.  The camera cuts away then cuts back to nearly the same position, only this time we only can see his reflection.  He then says, "Let's get out of here," and his "reflection" steps through the mirror frame to leave.  It blew my mind that I had never noticed this before.)

Because there are so many jokes in this movie, I decided to actually keep track of how many there were.  By the end of the film, I counted 238 jokes of all sorts of types (verbal humor, audio jokes, visual gags, etc.).  This number is by no means accurate, as I'd usually classify longer situational bits as one joke (such as the pilots Roger, Victor, and Clarence Oveur getting confused during their reports to each other when using the words "roger," "vector," "clearance," and "over").  But I felt safe in saying that there were roughly 2.8 jokes per minute.  I decided to look up the statistics to see if any other comedy movies had this rate.  What I found instead was a study that had audiences watch multiple comedy films and chart their laughs per minute.  Airplane! came out way on top with the audiences laughing 3 times per minute (meaning multiple laughs for those longer jokes), while the second place film The Hangover averaged 2.4 laughs per minute.



Now, this isn't to say that a lot of jokes makes a film great.  A lot of films try this technique of "nothing but funny," and fall flat.  Somehow, Airplane! manages to stay consistently funny.  In looking at my checklist, I noticed some interesting elements emerging.  First, I realized that there weren't as many background jokes as I was expecting.  And there was almost never an instance of jokes overlapping.  Nearly every scene after the intro sequence had a set up and a punchline.  The film lulls you into a zone where you come to expect a joke for every situation.  If nothing visually humorous is happening at the moment, it means you are supposed to listen to the dialogue to hear the joke/pun/wordplay.  If the dialogue is normal or expositional, then you are encouraged to look around the screen to where the "funny" visual gag is happening.  It almost becomes a game with the audience.  Find the Joke.  Even if the joke in itself isn't funny, the fact that the audience is rewarded with a little treasure every 20 seconds keeps the film engaging.

I also noticed that there were far more visual jokes than verbal ones (and about a third of the visual jokes are punctuated with an audio cue to draw attention to them).  Although the whole film doesn't quite fit this structure, the movie would alternate its joke pattern with roughly 2-4 verbal jokes followed by 4-7 visual jokes, back and forth.  This kept the dialogue from getting stale and made the jokes more easy to digest.

Airplane! spawned hoards of imitations, the worst of which were prevalent in the 2000s where it seemed that every year came with it's own terrible spoof film (some of them were even helmed by a Zucker brother or two).  Most of these "parodies" lacked the attention to detail that Airplane! had.  Jokes were often dull, mean-spirited, or "random" and just lacked the magic of the original.  So what else was missing?



I think the most important element of Airplane! that makes it a classic is that the characters don't realize they're in a comedy (well, one does, but we'll discuss him later).  Everything is played with the utmost seriousness, encouraging the audience to find the comedy themselves.  The Zuckers and Abrahams even went as far as to fill their cast with older actors who were solely known for their dramatic roles.  Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack were all famous for their no-nonsense roles, and they continue playing those characters in the film.  It makes the lines they say all the more absurd, and it single-handedly redefined Nielsen's acting career as being one of the master's of the deadpan (even though he'd go on to play more buffoonish characters than he did here).  By sticking so close to the original Zero Hour! script and style, the ZAZ directors could lampoon self-righteous dramatic filmmaking.  The plot is kept simple enough that the jokes can be the stars of the film.

Only Stephen Stucker as the unhelpful air-traffic controller Johnny is allowed to "be funny," which works so well because of how incongruous he is with the rest of the cast.  Stucker was given free range to ad lib and improvise and he plays his part with a manic glee.  He's the only one who seems aware that he's not actually in a life-or-death situation, which allows for a burst of energy during the final act of the film.  It keeps the stakes of the situation from getting too tense if the audience can rely on Johnny to provide a smart-aleck retort to anything one of the serious characters say or do.

I don't want to really discuss any of the jokes further as to analyze humor is to rid it of it's impact.  All I can say is, with nearly 260 laughable moments, you're bound to find something you enjoy in Airplane!  It's a comedy film that doesn't let up but it doesn't overwhelm either.

The Sequel:
I'm not exactly planning on discussing sequels as part of this trip through my favorite films, but I thought it was worth noting that there was a sequel to Airplane!, and while it has it's funny moments and much of the same cast, the Zuckers and Abrahams didn't return as they felt they had used all the jokes they could for one Airplane! movie, and to that, I agree.

Final Thoughts:
While I've focused mostly on the series of humorous moments this movie offers, I've neglected how much comedy is infused into the core of this movie.  I couldn't really keep track of elements like the music and pacing and effects and sets of the film that give this movie it's humorous flavor.  Sure, people may not laugh out loud at the fact that the images of the jet-engine plane in flight have the sound effects of propeller plane, but it's elements like that that really strengthen this film.

If you've never seen Airplane! (or you have seen it and hate it like some humorless monster), go into it as you would a stand up comedy routine.  This is just a vehicle to expose you to as many jokes as possible and it doesn't shy away from that.  One could almost consider it a piece of experimental film, in that it doesn't adhere itself to standard comedy or parody rules.  It defined a genre, and for that, it should be considered worth many viewings.  It's an entirely different kind of movie altogether.

"It's an entirely different kind of movie."