I decided to add this to my list after watching the new The Naked Gun. I must have seen Airplane! as a child at some point and I keep coming across clips of it online but it was worthwhile for me to watch the whole thing as an adult. This is now considered one of the greatest comedies of all time and practically pioneered a genre of its own. This slapstick parody style isn’t my favorite type of comedy but I have to admit that it pulls it quite well. Particularly delightful are the sex jokes and racial humor that would never pass muster these days but don’t feel too hurtful either.

One busy night, flight attendant Elaine Dickinson arrives at the airport in Los Angeles. She is accosted by her boyfriend Ted Striker who she wants to break up with. Formerly a fighter pilot, Ted was traumatized in a war and is now a taxi driver as he refuses to fly. Determined to fix their relationship, Ted abandons his taxi and buys an air ticket at the last minute to get onboard Elaine’s flight. The other passengers are an eclectic group including nuns, a pair of jive-speaking blacks, a child urgently needing a heart transplant and many others. All goes relatively well on the flight despite Ted apparently boring his fellow passengers to death with the story of his relationship with Elaine. But after the in-flight meal is served, everyone who ate fish falls sick including both pilots. Elaine manages to activate the autopilot, which turns out to be an inflatable pilot named Otto. Naturally it is Ted who must master his fears to save the day.

This is a parody of a much older film, Zero Hour! from 1957 but it is much better known and successful than the original. Its makers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker have since refined the formula in countless other films either working as a trio or separately but this was their directorial debut and so it all started here. There’s a central plot sure enough but the relationship between the two leads are probably the least entertaining part of the movie. Everytime Ted’s storytelling sets the scene to somewhere else than the interior of the aircraft, I started to get as bored as the other passengers. The best parts of the humor are the random throwaway gags from everyone else including the ones involving Otto. Leslie Nielsen is fantastic as the doctor and you can see they tapped him for his comedic timing and perfect deadpan face from here on out. That said, maybe a couple of jokes were still beyond the pale for me, such the pilot being a closet paedophile.

I enjoyed this well enough as a product of its era but I have to confess that it’s probably not my favorite even among the oeuvre of the Zuckers. It’s funny in parts and mild entertaining, but in a way that requires me to turn off my brain. I suppose I prefer humor that’s at least a little more witty now and this was just aiming at low-hanging fruit. Plenty of people now still profess to love it but I suspect that they may be looking back at it with rose-tinted glasses and it might not hold up too well on a rewatch.