Over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed many of the most popular parody comedies including the Naked Gun series and the Hot Shots movies but I’ve never watched Airplane!. What these shows have in common is the creative team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. Airplane! was the first and, judging by how it often pops up near the top of lists of the best comedies of all time, the best of these parodies.

Broken Forum regulars also tend to speak highly of this one, especially in comparison with more recent spoof movies. One point that is often raised that while its story is neither original nor very good, it actually does tell a comprehensible and coherent story. The gags, however absurd or silly, hang off of the main plot. What makes this film work is that most of the actors are playing it straight just as the story itself ignores whatever weirdness that happens in the gags. It’s like stretching a baseline reference across the whole movie and no matter how far it wanders away, things always snap back to normality every so often.

After watching the lectures on humor in the Language of Hollywood course, I’ve gained a more conscious understanding of how it is invoked here. As the professor states, it’s all about adding incongruities into the narrative, as quickly as you can, and boy the gags in here never let up even while the story marches on. Unfortunately, I have to say that the humor here doesn’t really work on me. Most of it is just far too juvenile. Others I could see coming a mile away, such as the opening gag about no-stopping zones at the airport.

There are also aspects that modern audiences just wouldn’t get due to the casting choices. Leslie Nielsen was a dramatic actor back then so just casting him in a comedy was funny to audiences then. But modern audiences only know him as a funny man. Similarly the filmmakers apparently thought that Robert Stack as the pilot who advises on the ground was the most important casting decision in the entire film due to his extensive filmography as a Hollywood leading man. But I only had a very vague idea of who he was. The whole film is just full of these references that are lost on us.

One thing that surprised me was how politically incorrect some of the jokes were. I don’t think Hollywood would be able to get away with treating black Americans speaking jive as a foreign language today. Plus the sex jokes were kind of funny in a naughty way. There is also a completely gratuitous, and therefore incongruous, boob shot. That’s worth a chuckle at least.

Thinking about some of the best humor that I’ve liked best recently, I have to go back to This is Spinal Tap. While that one has silliness in it as well, what makes it funny for me is that its gags are based on truisms, however exaggerated they are. There is actual insight underneath the jokes. Here, it’s just silliness all the way. To win me over, it would need to be exceptionally clever or creative and Airplane! just doesn’t reach that bar.

This means that while it felt good to finally watch this granddaddy of spoof movies, I neither found it to be very funny nor was I very entertained. I guess you really had to be there to appreciate it.