Airplane!

There is a scene in Airplane! where a stewardess picks up a guitar to soothe a sick little girl. The cabin watches, rapt. You think you know where this is going. You do not. I will not spoil it except to say I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, and then it kept going.

The movie is a spoof of the 1970s disaster picture craze that, in retrospect, feels like a gag unto itself. A commercial flight from Los Angeles to Chicago loses its pilots to food poisoning, and it falls to Robert Hays as Ted Striker, a traumatized ex-fighter pilot, to land the plane. If you have seen Airport or any of its sequels, you know the template. If you have seen 1957’s Zero Hour!, you know more than the template—you know the actual plot, because the filmmakers lifted it wholesale.

The creative team—Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker—stumbled onto Zero Hour! while reviewing late-night TV recordings they’d taped for sketch material. They decided to remake it as a comedy, keeping the skeleton but hanging every conceivable gag from its bones. They had proven they could sustain this kind of lunacy with The Kentucky Fried Movie, and the studio let them direct.

What separates Airplane! from lesser spoofs is the discipline underneath the anarchy. The Zuckers and Abrahams recorded test audiences and went back to the editing room like scientists, trimming jokes that died, retiming ones that merely wounded. The result is relentless. Gags arrive in layers—a sight gag playing over a parody playing over something purely absurd. They would refine this technique later in The Naked Gun, but the instincts are already sharp.

Hays and Julie Hagerty, as his love interest, play it straight and competent, which is exactly right and exactly not enough. The movie slows whenever it flashes back to their romance and the supporting players vanish. It is the difference between reliable and unforgettable.

The unforgettable ones have transcended the picture. Leslie Nielsen, that granite slab of procedural authority, delivers lines like “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley” as though he is reading an autopsy report. Peter Graves has a recurring bit so dark I kept expecting the movie to flinch. It never does. It doubles down. Robert Stack does a straight-faced parody of himself, pitched just a quarter-tone above normal, never once letting you catch him smiling. And Lloyd Bridges, as the increasingly unraveling air traffic controller, picked the wrong week to quit everything. You sense all of them believed in what they were doing. That belief is the secret ingredient.

Not every joke ages gracefully. A handful rely on sheer shock, and shock has a short shelf life. On a second viewing, you can spot them—they’re the ones where you remember laughing but can’t quite remember why. The ratio is forgiving, though. For every gag that fades, five others hold up.

I would love to see Airplane! and Zero Hour! programmed as a double feature. It baffles me that no home video distributor has thought to pair them. Watching the original, with its earnest melodrama and clenched-jaw heroism, would make the parody even funnier. Then again, Airplane! is plenty funny on its own. It is a comedy that knows exactly what it is doing and refuses to apologize for any of it.