10 / 10
Official trailer
Why I Keep Rewatching It
It rewards every rewatch. Each viewing turns up a joke you missed before, a sign on a wall, a line mumbled in the background, a gag happening behind the actors while the camera looks elsewhere. I can’t give a comedy higher praise than that. Most comedies are funny once. Airplane! is funny forever, because it was built to be.
Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker wrote and directed it, and it came out in the summer of 1980.
It cost about three and a half million dollars and brought in something like a hundred and seventy-one million worldwide. Nobody expected a spoof of disaster movies to do that, least of all the studio. It had very little idea what the three young men from Wisconsin were making.
It’s a 10, and it’s one of the very few comedies I’d rate that high. It changed what American film comedy could look like, and nearly half a century later, nobody has done it better.
The Kentucky Fried Beginning
The three of them weren’t new to this. As students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, they started the Kentucky Fried Theater, a sketch comedy troupe mixing live performance with filmed segments. They moved to Los Angeles, and in 1977 they wrote The Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch film directed by John Landis that became a cult hit.
Sketch comedy was their training, and you can see it in how densely Airplane! is packed. What they learned from The Kentucky Fried Movie was the limit of the sketch format: a string of separate jokes has no momentum. Airplane! is what happened when they worked out how to hang the same density of gags on an actual story, one the audience wants to see through to the end.
A Remake in Disguise
Airplane! is very nearly a remake of one specific film, Zero Hour! from 1957, directed by Hall Bartlett with Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden, and based on a television play written by Arthur Hailey.
ZAZ bought the rights to Zero Hour! and took its plot almost whole.
The fish dinner that poisons the crew. The former fighter pilot who froze in the war and has to land the plane anyway. The veteran on the radio talking him down. Even the name Ted Stryker, spelled differently, comes from the original, and a good deal of the dialogue came across word for word.
It’s funnier here because nobody changed it. The same melodramatic lines, delivered straight in a world that’s gone completely insane around them, become hilarious. The joke is the gap between the dialogue and everything else.
The Story Underneath
Ted Striker was a fighter pilot. Something went wrong on a mission, he’s been afraid to fly ever since, and it’s wrecked his life.
His girlfriend Elaine, a flight attendant, is leaving him. He follows her onto her flight to win her back. The fish is bad, the pilots go down, and the only man on board who can fly the plane is the one man who can’t bring himself to do it.
It’s a good melodrama, and the film treats it as one. Ted’s trauma and the romance get the full swelling-music treatment. Elmer Bernstein, who scored The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, wrote a completely serious score, and it plays under the whole film without a single musical joke.
The story plays it straight, and everything around the story is a joke. If the melodrama wobbled for a second, the comedy would fall apart, because there’d be nothing to push against.
Bernstein’s score might be my favorite thing in the whole film. He writes it like he’s scoring a war picture, and when the strings swell under Ted and Elaine’s big romantic moments, I laugh harder than I do at half the sight gags.
Serious Actors, Absurd Lines
The casting was the genius move. Leslie Nielsen plays Dr. Rumack, Lloyd Bridges plays Steve McCroskey in the control tower, Peter Graves plays Captain Oveur and Robert Stack plays Rex Kramer. All four were serious dramatic actors with decades of stern roles behind them, and none of them winks once.
ZAZ had to persuade them. The actors were used to playing cops, captains and heroes, and the directors told them to do exactly that, with lines that make no sense. When Graves asks a small boy visiting the cockpit whether he likes gladiator movies, he does it in the same grave voice he used for Mission: Impossible. That’s why it’s so funny.
Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, as Ted and Elaine, are just as important. Hays plays Ted as a sad, earnest man who has no idea he’s in a comedy, and Hagerty’s flat, breathy sincerity makes the romance weirdly sweet. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spends the flight insisting he isn’t Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, until a boy in the cockpit tells him his father thinks he doesn’t try hard enough, and the pretence collapses in fury.
For Writers
Airplane! casts serious dramatic actors and tells them to play every absurd line completely straight. The gap between their gravity and the nonsense they say is where the laughs come from.
When you write a comic character, the instinct is to make them aware of the joke. That signals the laugh to the reader and kills it before it works.
Give your funniest line to the most serious person in the scene. Have them say it as if their life depends on it, and don’t let anyone react. For a deeper treatment, try Comedy Writing Secrets.
Don’t Call Me Shirley
Everyone knows this one, even people who’ve never seen the film. Striker asks Rumack if he’s serious. Rumack says he’s serious, and don’t call him Shirley. Nielsen doesn’t even look up.
It’s the most quoted line in the film, and it’s typical of how the whole script works: a pun so dumb it shouldn’t work, delivered by the least funny-looking man in the room with total gravity.
The film is full of these. Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor. Clearance, Clarence. Every one of them lands because nobody on screen thinks it’s a joke.
Nielsen’s delivery of that line is the purest deadpan I know of. He doesn’t pause for the laugh or glance up at Hays, and that refusal to sell it is exactly why it kills.
The Wrong Week
Lloyd Bridges has the best running gag in the film. Every time things get worse in the control tower, McCroskey decides he picked the wrong week to quit something. First it’s smoking. Then drinking. Then amphetamines. Then sniffing glue.
It’s the same line every time, and it gets bigger every time, because what he’s quitting gets more absurd and Bridges delivers each one with deeper exhaustion. Most comedies can’t pull off a running gag twice. This one does it four times and gets a bigger laugh on the last one than the first.
For Writers
McCroskey’s line is the same every time, and what he’s quitting gets more absurd with each repetition. The gag grows because the film escalates it.
A running joke gets weaker every time you repeat it unchanged. Readers recognize it and stop laughing.
Plan your running gag in four steps before you write the first one. Keep the frame identical and escalate the content, and make the last one the biggest. There’s more on this in my article on humor in writing.
Packing the Frame
The film is built on density. There’s a joke in the dialogue, another one happening behind the actors, a sign on the wall that’s a third joke, and somebody in the corner doing something stupid. An inflatable autopilot called Otto takes over the controls. A queue of other passengers holding weapons lines up to slap a passenger who can’t stand the tension. Ethel Merman turns up as a shell-shocked soldier who thinks he’s Ethel Merman.
You can’t see all of it the first time. You can’t see all of it the fifth time. That’s why it holds up to rewatching the way almost no other comedy does, and it’s why I keep going back.
For Writers
Airplane! puts a joke in the dialogue, another in the background and another on a sign at the same time, trusting the audience to find them over repeated viewings.
Go back through a finished chapter and plant one small thing in each scene that pays off later. Readers reread books they suspect they haven’t finished.
Any page you write can carry more than one layer: the plot, a detail in the setting, a thread the reader only notices the second time through.
What Hasn’t Aged
Some of it hasn’t aged gracefully. Captain Oveur’s questions to the little boy were a shock joke in 1980 and play a great deal more uncomfortably now. The jive-talking passengers, with Barbara Billingsley translating, are the kind of scene nobody would write today, and a couple of other gags lean on stereotypes that feel lazy now.
I still laugh at Billingsley, the prim mother from Leave It to Beaver, fluently translating street slang with total composure. I understand why some people don’t. None of it drags the rest of the film down, because there’s so much else happening in every minute.
The Leslie Nielsen Transformation
Before this film, Leslie Nielsen was a serious actor. He’d been the commander in Forbidden Planet in 1956 and the captain of the ship in The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, with a long run of stern television parts in between. Nobody thought of him as funny.
Airplane! changed that permanently. ZAZ cast him again as Frank Drebin in Police Squad! in 1982, and when the series was cancelled after six episodes, they turned it into The Naked Gun in 1988. He spent the rest of his life in comedy, and by the time he died in November 2010, most people had no idea he’d ever been anything else. I can’t think of another actor whose career turned so completely on a single supporting role.
The Jokes in the Margins
Some of the best jokes are the ones most people miss. Stephen Stucker, as the air traffic controller Johnny, reportedly improvised many of his lines, and his non sequiturs pop up in the background of the control tower scenes. After the end credits, the man Ted left in a waiting taxi at the start of the film is still sitting there, and announces he’ll give him twenty more minutes.
Stucker is the film’s secret weapon for me. I’d happily watch a cut that’s nothing but Johnny muttering in the back of the tower, and the man still waiting in the taxi after the credits is the kind of payoff most comedies don’t have the patience for. Those details are the reward for watching more than once. Airplane! was built to be rewatched, and every viewing turns up something the last one missed.
The Sequel and the Legacy
Airplane II: The Sequel came out in 1982, and ZAZ had nothing to do with it. Ken Finkleman wrote and directed it. It’s what you’d expect: the same kind of jokes without the people who understood why they worked. Skip it.
The American Film Institute ranked Airplane! tenth on its list of the hundred funniest American films, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2010.
The bigger legacy is everything that copied it: The Naked Gun films, Hot Shots! and the whole Scary Movie run all use the formula it built. Most of them manage one part of it. Airplane! manages all of it at once. That’s why it’s still the best.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Airplane! works because the story underneath is real. Take the jokes away and you still have Zero Hour!, a tense melodrama about a broken pilot, a failing romance and a plane that has to come down, and ZAZ never let that story wobble.
In comedy, the temptation is to build the jokes first and hang a plot on them afterward. That produces sketches, and sketches don’t make a reader care how things turn out. Write the straight version of your story first, all the way through. Then add the jokes on top, and never cut a story beat to make room for one.
The Verdict on Airplane!
Yes. It’s a 10. It’s the comedy I’d put on for anyone who says they don’t like old movies. The deadpan casting, the melodrama played dead straight and the sheer number of jokes all still work. A couple of scenes have aged badly without dragging the rest down.
Watch the original, skip the sequel, and watch it more than once, because you won’t catch half of it the first time. Every spoof since has borrowed from it, and not one of them makes me laugh this hard.
