Mastercrash

Zucker sells comedy writing as a learnable craft, not raw talent. David Zucker, creator of Airplane and The Naked Gun, says you can learn to be funny, and that without the course you are just raw talent.

He keeps the course light so it is fun to watch even for people who don't want to write comedy. His summary of the craft: "It looks easy but it's not. And there's a million things that can go wrong in comedy."

How I Write

Audiences care about a simple love story more than any gag. In Airplane, audiences cared most about the love story, not whether the plane landed. Zucker says love is the only thing the audience cares about and hardware does not matter.

The story should be short, believable, between one or two people, give a rooting interest and never preach. The same boy-gets-girl ending carried Naked Gun 2½ and 33⅓.

How I Write

Give the hero a clear human problem in the first act. Top Secret gave its hero no inner problem in the first act; Naked Gun fixed that by making Frank Drebin a man who needs love. In BASEketball the friends split in act two, but their problem was never set up, so audiences ask "Who cares?"

Zucker learned this from his own mistakes, though Top Secret and BASEketball are loved anyway.

How I Write

Too many jokes only becomes a problem when no story carries them. Without a good third act the jokes get tiresome; each film needs a payoff, like protecting the queen in Naked Gun and Leslie and Priscilla ending up together.

Ending Airplane on the plane simply landing would have failed however many jokes came before. Eighty to ninety minutes is enough for three acts.

How I Write

Reverse the expectations of a serious movie, played by serious actors. Airplane spoofs Zero Hour, a serious 1957 film with the same plot; the writers lift scenes and lines from straight movies. Serious actors say "bingo" and the surprise is that it is a bingo card.

Peter Graves was funny because he played the straight man. Priscilla Presley worried she could not be funny and was told to do what she did in Dallas; she never auditioned and never needed direction. A surprise alone is not enough: it has to get a laugh.

How I Write

Rule one: no joke on a joke, so let the audience find it. Leslie Nielsen tends a woman in stirrups and never acknowledges the joke; acknowledging it would make it "half as funny". Zucker prefers a two-shot, because cutting to a reaction shot cuts the laugh by about 50%.

The writing note is subtlety and the directing note is letting the audience find it.

How I Write

A related joke in the background beats one placed up front. O.J. tumbling down the steps behind Leslie and Priscilla in Naked Gun raises the joke by 50%. An unrelated spear and falling watermelon in Airplane got no laugh.

They learned to throw the joke away from Harold and Maude, where a man sets himself on fire behind a conversation that carries on. Offscreen crashes are never funny, earning a smile at best.

How I Write

Keep laughs coming: restarting an audience is harder than sustaining it. Zucker's flywheel theory says it is easier to keep an audience laughing than to restart them. Airplane was previewed at about 100 minutes and cut to about 80.

Every beat should be a setup or a joke, and a speech longer than six lines gets trimmed. The pace came from live theater: the trio started in a 70-seat theater in Madison in 1971, and saw stand-ups lose audiences by waiting for each laugh to die.

How I Write

Running gags build with repetition until they turn annoying. The man wishing the pilots luck gets funnier by the third time, as does the car that keeps crashing in Naked Gun.

The team later cut Airplane down for a director's cut, the only one in film history shorter than the original.

How I Write

A rule list from past failures stops mistakes being shot twice. The rules date from 1972 and work mainly as a list of what not to do. Before letting them direct Airplane, Paramount made them list 15 jokes that could not happen.

Jokes that date (topical trivia like the Anita Bryant joke), axe grinding and expensive special effects do not last; a spoof should not look expensive.

How I Write

Only the laugh counts: cut clever jokes that audiences don't laugh at. If a preview audience said "that's funny" but did not laugh, the joke was cut. Nothing is prohibited if it gets a laugh, and a joke that goes too far shows up as a "huge sucking sound".

Paramount executives were too afraid to re-release Airplane for its 40th anniversary because of the jive subtitle scene.

How I Write

Blame yourself for flops to learn the most from them. Zucker never blamed the studio for a failure; he asked what he did wrong, and the answer was usually himself.

His father said, "I never learned a lesson that didn't cost me money." Zucker's own line: "I never had any flops, only cult classics."

How I Write

Start every script from existing movies, then rewrite until shootable. Naked Gun combined several films, including Telefon; for their noir comedy they watched about 20 noir films and took dialogue, plot and scenes. The Naked Gun script took a year and a half: "No one hits a hole in one."

Zucker arrived on set with two or three finished pages a day and no improvising. When An American Carol was rushed, he and Lewis Friedman rewrote the next day's pages in the trailer.

How I Write