Top Secret!

Top Secret gave its hero no inner problem, so the jokes had nothing to carry them. David Zucker says Top Secret has some of his best jokes but no clear emotional story, and it was less successful than Airplane! and Naked Gun. He learned from it that a hero needs "an inner psychological problem that he had to solve" in the first act, not just a hardware problem.

Airplane!'s pilot has a fear of flying from PTSD, and Naked Gun fixed the gap by opening with Frank Drebin as a man whose girlfriend left him, so the plot became boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl. Zucker says audiences stay for the love story, not the plane or the assassination plot, and without it more jokes become tiring by the third act. He puts Top Secret alongside BASEketball as films people love anyway but that taught him this lesson.

How I Write▶ 15:35

Cut jokes that are only clever and don't get a real laugh. Zucker uses Top Secret, which has some of the cleverest jokes in his films, as his example of the trap of being merely clever. If a preview audience said "oh, that's funny" instead of laughing, the joke came out.

He compares it to Vince Lombardi: for humor, the laugh is the only thing. The rule is part of a list the team has kept since 1972, used mainly as a list of what not to do so mistakes are not shot twice. "Merely clever isn't enough. You have to get the laugh."

How I Write▶ 14:04