I admit that “still funny” is a broad, somewhat facile label to apply to the films we’ve shown in the “Is It Still Funny?” film series, at least so far. They’ve all been “still funny” for the most part, and they’ve all had elements that were not funny at all. Then the question becomes whether those elements ever were funny in the first place.
There really wasn’t much suspense over whether “Airplane!”, which screened last week at the Music Box Theatre, would still be funny. Among those who attended the first four “Is It Still Funny?” screenings this spring, this was the most-requested comedy and with reason.
The movie is a nonstop assault on the funny bone, with nothing else on its mind. “Airplane!” isn’t trying to move you or get you wrapped up in a story. Come back Sept. 7 for “Harold and Maude” for that.
No, “Airplane!” (1980) has one purpose: to make you laugh, as often as possible and by any means necessary. If something silly isn’t happening right in front of your face, look to the background for wacky antics or green-screen silliness. If any dialogue comes across as straightforward, wait for the reactions — or listen to the man and woman arguing about parking zones over the PA system.
“Airplane!” — which came out in the wake of the “Airport” disaster movies and also borrowed heavily from the 1957 airborne drama “Zero Hour!” — was far from the first spoof out there. Mel Brooks had been in parody mode from “Blazing Saddles” (1974) onward, and Woody Allen favored the gag-a-minute approach back when he was making “the early, funny ones.”
Yet the go-for-broke mania of “Airplane!” — as if Mad magazine had come to life — felt new on the screen. It certainly opened the floodgates for more such zany comedies, including the Zucker-Abraham-Zucker team’s own “Top Secret!” and “The Naked Gun” movies and Jim Abraham’s “Hot Shots” spoofs as well as the “Scary Movie” franchise (David Zucker directed a couple of those as well) and other often-grating imitators.
I would think that such joke-reliant comedies would be more vulnerable to the passage of time than comedies that are rooted in characters and their behavior. You can relive situations and become emotionally involved again, but how often do you want to hear the same jokes?
Well, in the case of “Airplane!” the apparent answer is a lot. Several in the audience said they’d seen the movie more than five times, though rarely (if ever) on the big screen with a laughing audience. As likely will be the case with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when it screens Oct. 19, the “Airplane!” screening had the feel of watching your favorite band play its greatest hits, as well as a few album tracks you hadn’t thought about in a while. You remember the best bits but still revel in how well they’re executed.
Given that this was the first ZAZ directorial effort (after they wrote the John Landis-directed “Kentucky Fried Movie”), the skill level is surprisingly high. With composer Elmer Bernstein (who got in the comedy game with Landis’ “Animal House”) offering a straight-faced accompaniment to the melodramatic action, the ZAZ team gets masterfully deadpan performances from such previously serious actors as Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen, who would become a staple of the ZAZ movies (“The Naked Gun” ones in particular) and other spoofs.
The Nielsen doctor pronouncement of “I am serious—and don’t call me Shirley” not only still gets a laugh, it triggered applause at the Music Box screening. The evening’s other applause line was a less-often-repeated one: control-room goofball Johnny (Stephen Stucker) responding to the warning “The fog is getting thicker” by grabbing a controller by the love handles and proclaiming, “And Leon’s getting larrr-ger!”
If you were reviewing this screening as a theater production, you’d say that Stucker’s Johnny stole the show with his campy, non-sequitur outbursts; the actor and character also received the loudest applause over the end-credits roll call. He was like the guy you hadn’t anticipated running into at your high-school reunion who reminds you: Oh, yeah, he was funny.
At the same time, some other long-celebrated lines now arrive with cultural strings attached. When Graves’ pilot asks his boy cockpit visitor, “You ever seen a grown man naked?” and later about being in a Turkish prison, you still can appreciate the expert set-up and payoff, but there’s a part of your brain—or mine at least—that may involuntarily go to the Jerry Sanduskys of the world and ask: Can I still laugh at this? Maybe the answer is yes, but that moment of thinking dulls the reflex.
Likewise, the two black men speaking “jive”—and Barbara “June Cleever” Billingsley translating for them—remains a memorable bit that feels conceived without malice, but it also reminds you that almost everyone else on screen (aside from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) is white, and the intended audience pretty much is too. That blacks are on the outside of this world is underscored by the movie’s most cringe-worthy scene: Ted (Robert Hays) and Elaine (Julie Hagerty) in the Peace Corps teaching basketball to native Africans who soon are dunking and spinning like the Harlem Globetrotters.
What else doesn’t hold up? The “Stayin’ Alive” flashback seems to go on forever, and there are a few too many silly, boingy sound effects.
But the Music Box crowd offered mostly positive comments:
“The visual gags and visual puns (e.g. “Mayo Clinic full of mayonnaise jars) were especially great.”
.“Amazing editing. Craftsmanship is one reason the movie still works.”
“Loved it! Even the outdated jokes were so bad they were good.”
“Comedy seemed dated, but that is to be expected.”
“There’s a reason this is close to the top of so many lists: Its humor is timely and almost impossible to duplicate these days.”
“The jokes that everyone quotes were funny, but I enjoyed more gags that are forgotten—sight gags, etc.”
On our “Is It Still Funny?” scale of 1 to 5 (1 = “Ugh—how did anyone ever laugh at this?” 4 = “Very funny—lived up to my expectations.” 5 = “Hilarious—even funnier than I anticipated”), “Airplane!” scored a 4.29. So, yeah, that would qualify as “still funny,” though that number ranks it as No. 4 among our five films so far:
“Duck Soup”: 4.64
“Animal House”: 4.46
“Blazing Saddles”: 4.43
“Airplane!”: 4.29
“There’s Something About Mary”: 3.65
I’m eager to see how “Harold and Maude,” a black comedy that requires your emotional investment in a way that most of these do not, fares under these same conditions: big screen, glorious theater filled with people like you. That one should be a treat. Please join me.
You can buy tickets here: https://ticketing.musicboxtheatre.com/…/visSelectTickets.as…
Thanks!
Mark
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