Airplane!

Airplane! copied a serious film's plot and flipped each scene's expectations. Airplane! follows the 1957 drama Zero Hour almost exactly, so the structure was already built and only the surprises needed writing.

The method is to watch straight genre movies and take their scenes and lines, then reverse what the audience expects. Zucker adds that a surprise alone is not funny; it has to be a surprise that gets a laugh. "We just take those scenes and reverse the audience's expectations."

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Mine many straight movies in the genre for lines and scenes. Airplane!'s "Surely you can't be serious" came from another airliner-in-trouble film, Crash Landing, and nobody remembers who suggested using it.

The team kept the same habit later: for Star of Malta they watched about 20 noir films, starting from Detour (1945), and took dialogue, plot and scenes.

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Serious actors who never try to be funny make the jokes land. Rule one is no joke on a joke: Peter Graves was funny because he played the straight man, so the lines did the work.

The rules date from 1972 and are used mainly as a list of what not to do. Zucker cast Priscilla Presley in Naked Gun the same way, telling her to play it as she did in Dallas, and he never had to direct her.

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Never acknowledge the joke; let the audience find it. Leslie Nielsen tends a patient whose legs are in stirrups and never reacts to it. Zucker estimates a reaction shot or acknowledgement cuts the laugh by about 50%.

He prefers a two-shot to cutting to a reaction. "We know the audience loves finding things for themselves."

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Background gags work only when they relate to the scene. An unrelated spear and falling watermelon in the background of Airplane! got no laugh.

The team learned to throw jokes away in the background from Harold and Maude, where a man sets himself on fire behind a conversation that carries on.

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Audiences cared about the couple, not whether the plane landed. Previews showed audiences stayed with Airplane! for the love story. Ending on a plane simply landing would have failed, however many jokes came before it.

Zucker says the story matters more than the jokes, and without a story to hang them on, more jokes become tiring by the third act. Top Secret had some of his best jokes but no clear emotional story and did less well.

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Give the hero an inner problem in the first act. Airplane!'s pilot has a fear of flying from PTSD, which gives the plot a human need beyond hardware.

Zucker learned this from Top Secret and BASEketball, which lacked a clear inner problem. Naked Gun fixed it by making Frank Drebin a man whose girlfriend left him.

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Keep laughs coming because restarting a cooled audience is harder. Zucker's flywheel theory holds it is easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up again, so every beat should be a setup or a joke.

The pace came from the trio's 70-seat Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison in 1971, where silence was dangerous. He trims any speech longer than six lines.

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Preview with real audiences and cut everything that doesn't get a laugh. Airplane! was previewed at about 100 minutes and cut to about 80. A joke that drew "that's funny" without an actual laugh was cut.

Zucker thinks 80 to 90 minutes is all a comedy audience can take and enough for three acts. The team later cut a director's cut of Airplane!, which he calls the only one in film history shorter than the original.

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Running gags build with repetition until they start to annoy. The man who keeps wishing the pilots luck gets funnier by the third time, but too much repetition turns a gag annoying.

Zucker also asks whether a joke must stay once it has landed: "a joke can't stay after it's a joke." Offscreen crashes, he says, earned a smile at best.

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Topical references stop working once nobody knows them. Airplane!'s Anita Bryant line and an old 1960s coffee ad are among its few dated jokes. Zucker now asks whether a joke will still be funny in a year.

"I want to make it to last 50 years." He also says axe grinding and big special effects slow a spoof, which should not look expensive.

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Only the test audience's laugh decides what a joke can do. The jive subtitle scene came from watching Shaft and played well, yet Paramount executives were too afraid to re-release Airplane! for its 40th anniversary because of it.

When a joke goes too far, a test screening shows it as a "huge sucking sound" and it is cut. Before letting the team direct Airplane!, Paramount made them list 15 jokes that could not happen.

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