[For this year’s
April
Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. I know you’ll have responses and
nominations of your own for this series, so share ‘em for a high-larious
weekend post, please!]
On what makes a
successful parody, and what makes a truly great one.
1980’s Airplane! wasn’t the first comedic
parody film made by the brothers
David and Jerry Zucker (that would be 1977’s
Kentucky Fried Movie), and it
certainly wasn’t the first prominent American parody (that honor might go to Washington
Irving’s 1809 History of New York).
But Airplane! was one of the most influential
parodies and comic films of all time, in many ways launching both the Zucker
Brothers and a decade of high-profile parodies including This
Is Spinal Tap (1984), Spaceballs (1987),
and many many others. It certainly achieved that level of influence first and foremost
through doing what a
good parody has to do: identifying and ever-so-slightly tweaking a large
number of elements of its main target, disaster films (along with many late 1970s secondary targets
along the way), until we see them for the true silliness they are. Perhaps the
best single example of that is the airport manager played by Lloyd Bridges,
a high-profile serious Hollywood action star whose role in the film (as that
hyperlinked montage illustrates) starts with a classic disaster movie cliché (“Looks
like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking”) and gradually devolves until
total comic chaos (until he’s sniffing glue and hanging upside-down from the
ceiling, natch).
Yet Airplane! is more than a successful
parody: it’s a truly funny and enduring film, one that stands alone even for
audiences who are not particularly or even at all familiar with serious
disaster films (which was the case for me when I first saw Airplane!, and likewise for my sons who enjoyed it a great deal as
well). One big reason why is its introduction of an element that would remain
key to all of the Zucker Brothers films: truly inspired comic wordplay. We’re
all familiar with “Surely
you can’t be serious!” “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley!,” and I
may well have used that line a couple or a couple thousand times in my life to
date. But for my money, that’s neither the funniest individual moment of wordplay
nor the best recurring wordplay joke: for the first I’d go with, “It’s an entirely
different kind of flying. Altogether.” “[Everyone] It’s an entirely different
kind of flying!”; and for the second I’d go with the film’s many variations
of, “We have to get him
to a hospital!” “A hospital? What is it?” “It’s a big building full of sick
people, but that’s not important right now.” I suppose you could argue that
these lines are still parodying clichés from disaster films, but I would say
that they’re more representative of the comic genius of the Zucker Brothers and
their collaborators, and add a vital layer to the film in any case.
That wonderfully
witty wordplay helps individual lines and moments stick with an audience, but
for a film as a whole to stick, even a comic parody film, I think it also needs
memorable characters, and Airplane!
has them in spades. Bridges’ airport employee and Leslie Nielsen’s doctor (he
of the “Shirley” lines) are probably the most famous, and rightly so: both of
them were well-known as serious actors and action stars, and Airplane! thus both cast them against
type very successfully and launched their wonderful second acts as comedy
legends. But the film is full of amazing supporting characters, including
one (Stephen Stucker’s
Johnny) who in the 21st century treads pretty close to offensive
or even homophobic but who (thanks to a very effective performance and some
really great one-liners) is also still just consistently funny. And as the
straight-man hero and heroine (and romantic leads), Robert Hays and Julie
Hagerty take what could be thankless roles and invest them with not only
humor but genuine backstory and emotion as well. For all these reasons, Airplane! remains one of the great comic
parodies and films of all time, and there’s no better movie to launch a decade
of comic films (and a series on said decade!).
Next comedy
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment