Best Ever
Comedy Movie?

The secret to Airplane! isn’t the jokes. Oh, the jokes are there—approximately 1.5 per second by some counts, a relentless barrage that practically invented the modern spoof. But jokes alone don’t explain why this particular film endures while its imitators (including the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team’s own later efforts) have aged into quaintness. The secret is that everyone in Airplane! is performing in a different movie—a deadly serious disaster film where hundreds of lives hang in the balance—and the comedy emerges from the collision between their commitment and our awareness.

Consider Leslie Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack. In 1980, Nielsen was known exclusively as a dramatic actor—decades of stern authority figures in films like Forbidden Planet and television’s The Poseidon Adventure. When he delivers the line “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley,” there’s not a trace of winking self-awareness. Rumack genuinely needs Ted Striker to understand the gravity of this situation. The fact that Ted has just made an obvious pun doesn’t register; doctors don’t have time for wordplay when passengers are dying. This is the Airplane! method in miniature: hire actors trained to project unimpeachable sincerity, then surround them with absurdity they refuse to acknowledge.

The casting across the board reflects this strategy. Robert Stack brings the same granite-jawed intensity to Rex Kramer that he’d deployed in countless war films. Lloyd Bridges plays McCroskey’s sweating, sniffing breakdown with the gravitas of a man facing genuine career-ending catastrophe. Peter Graves—Mission: Impossible’s Jim Phelps—delivers Captain Oveur’s increasingly inappropriate questions to young Joey with the warm avuncularity of a mentor figure in any family film. None of them are doing comedy. They’re doing drama that happens to be surrounded by visual non sequiturs, puns, and a inflation autopilot named Otto.

The source material—1957’s Zero Hour!, a Canadian disaster film the ZAZ team had discovered while scanning late-night television for unintentionally funny movies—provided more than just a plot scaffold. They licensed the actual screenplay and used significant chunks of its dialogue verbatim. “The life of everyone on board depends on just one thing: finding someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.” That’s not a parody line. That’s the original, delivered with precisely the same urgency. Airplane! recognized that disaster-movie dialogue was already inherently absurd; it just needed a context where the absurdity could breathe.

The visual gags operate on a similar principle of escalating commitment. When Striker describes his drinking problem and literally throws water on his face, the movie doesn’t pause for laughter. When the “shit hits the fan” (depicted literally), no one reacts. When the inflatable autopilot gradually deflates during Elaine’s attempt to, uh, reinflate him, the camera observes with the same clinical neutrality it would bring to any mechanical failure. The commitment to the bit extends to every frame: Airplane! is shot and scored exactly like the disaster films it’s satirizing, complete with dramatic low angles during Kramer’s walk through the terminal and swelling orchestral cues during Ted’s romantic flashbacks.

Those flashbacks—set in a bar “where theichiban wasn’t watered down”—showcase another dimension of the film’s genius: its willingness to let gags breathe. The disco-parody dance sequence with Striker and Elaine runs nearly two minutes, escalating from Saturday Night Fever pastiche to full From Here to Eternity beach-rolling to something approaching abstract expressionist body horror. It’s not efficient joke delivery; it’s the confidence to commit to a single absurd premise until it transcends its origins.

Directors Jim Abrahams and brothers David and Jerry Zucker had honed this sensibility in their Kentucky Fried Theater stage shows, but Airplane! represented something new: the industrial application of their technique to mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. The film cost $3.5 million and grossed $171 million, proving that uncompromising absurdism wasn’t a cult taste but a universal one. Every spoof that followed—from Top Secret! through The Naked Gun series through increasingly diminishing returns—drew from this well.

But none quite captured the lightning. By the time of Scary Movie and its endless progeny, spoof had become its own genre with its own conventions, actors mugging for the camera, telegraphing that yes, they know they’re in a comedy. Airplane! succeeds because nobody knows. Robert Hays plays Ted Striker as a genuine romantic lead traumatized by genuine tragedy. Julie Hagerty’s Elaine is a real flight attendant facing a real crisis. They’re in love, the plane is going down, and hundreds of people are counting on them.

The jokes are just weather.

Decide for Yourself:

• The 2020 Paramount Presents Blu-ray offers a new 4K scan that reveals details previously lost—you can finally read all the background gags on the airport signage.
• For the complete ZAZ experience, the Kentucky Fried Movie Blu-ray shows where the sensibility originated—cruder, more uneven, but featuring an extended martial arts parody.
• The original Zero Hour! is essential viewing for understanding just how precisely Airplane! reverse-engineered its source.