Airplane! and Naked Gun director and filmmaker David Zucker says that a “fear of offending anybody” is to blame for the demise of movie comedy.
It’s a joke that David Zucker, the influential filmmaker behind Airplane!, Top Secret! and The Naked Gun films has told before, but he let it loose once more this week, ahead of a criticism of Hollywood’s current attitude towards comedy. “When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today,” said Zucker. “The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.’
Zucker would go on to give an example whilst speaking on PragerU, adding that “my current writing partner Pat Proft and I wrote a parody of James Bond and Mission: Impossible,” related Zucker.
“One female executive said ‘this joke is getting pretty risqué here.’ It was a mild joke about the lead female character. Because she had come up through the police department and through the FBI…she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.”
This isn’t a case of Zucker and his sensibilities being trapped in the 1980s either. The filmmaker directed a both Scary Movie 3 and 4 in the mid-2000s, so he’s presumably railing against the more recent trend of comedy and comedians feeling censured, a topic that has never been too far from the headlines of late.
“I thought if this was the criteria for it, we’re in big trouble. They’re destroying comedy because of nine percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humour.”
Zucker would go on to recall the way classic films such as Airplane! were created, adding, “we could be as offensive as we liked. We went where the laughs were. We never thought that we were offending anyone, but if we were offending people we knew we were on the right track. As time went on, it got to be the 90s and the 2000s and it did change… We never worried about any of this stuff with the Naked Gun or Scary Movie films.”
As for the future of the genre, Zucker would go on to say “comedy’s in trouble, but I think it’s gonna come back. I think there’s a pendulum and it’ll swing back. I’d just like to see comedy filmmakers do comedy without fear”
It’s an interesting addition to the ongoing conversation as to the right of comedians to be offensive. As to whether ‘the pendulum’ will swing back in the other direction, we’ll have to wait and see.
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