‘Surely You Can't Be Serious’: How ‘Airplane!’ Crashed Onto Movie Screens in 1980

On the eve of July 4 in 1980, America was reeling. There were 52 U.S. hostages kidnapped by Iran and trapped in Tehran. Unemployment was at 7.2%. Inflation stood at 12.5%. Thanks to a decade of the aforementioned out-of-control inflation, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at an anemic 876.02, only about a hundred points higher than it was in 1970. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. A feckless Jimmy Carter saw his second-term hopes being challenged on the left by Ted Kennedy and on the right by Ronald Reagan.

As always when the nightly news is grim, Americans need something to laugh about at the movies. As former "Cheers" producer Rob Long wrote at Commentary last month, show business “is at its most successful when it counter-programs against a world that’s falling to pieces.” However, audiences had no idea that the hip comedy of that summer would change Hollywood forever. Or at least for the next several decades.

"Airplane!" was Paramount’s low-budget sleeper hit that dominated the summer box office in 1980. Today, the lines from the movie are indelible. “Surely, you can’t be serious. I am serious – and don’t call me Shirley.” Cream for your coffee? “No, thank you, I take it black, like my men.” “A hospital? What is it? It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.” “Excuse me stewardess, I speak jive.”

While filming was ongoing, it helped the "Airplane!" production immensely that Paramount’s ozone layer of management had a far more pressing issue to obsess over, rather than a low-budget countercultural comedy. With the mammoth success of "Star Wars," which kept the film near the top of Variety’s box office chart every week from mid-1977 through 1978, and produced countless imitators, Paramount’s management belatedly discovered that they had a science fiction property of their own that was worth exploiting at the box office, after years of stillborn efforts to revive it. 

Related: Building the Perfect Comedy: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at 'Airplane!'

Unfortunately, once it finally did go into production in mid-1978, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" suffered from a poor script that was being constantly rewritten, a veteran director who didn’t quite grasp the underlying TV show’s concepts, and the creator of said TV show now believing that he was a science fiction superstar whose TV hack writing chops were suddenly on par with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. Most pressing from the Paramount brass’s point of view, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" also had a runaway special effects budget that threatened to devour the entire – pun very much intended – enterprise.

With so many fires to put out while attempting to recreate the 23rd century on the big screen, Paramount’s brass essentially left "Airplane!," budgeted at a comparatively $3.5 million, largely alone.

"Zero Hour!" –  how ZAZ struck gold 

"Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!" is the new oral history of how that titular movie made it onto the big screen, and it’s almost as funny as the movie itself. It begins with the backstory of “ZAZ” – the Zucker brothers and fellow writer-director Jim Abrahams. The trio began life as high school and later college clowns in Milwaukee in the mid-to-late 1960s. After having some success locally, they eventually decided, based on the burgeoning underground comedy movement of the early 1970s, to relocate in 1972 to Los Angeles, where they opened up a comedy club in an otherwise unused storage building that they dubbed the Kentucky Fried Theater. 

In 1977, ZAZ were able to raise sufficient funding to turn Kentucky Fried Theater into the "Kentucky Fried Movie," directed by a tyro young director named John Landis, who would quickly parlay his Kentucky Fried success into even bigger hits, including "National Lampoon’s Animal House," the Blues Brothers movie, starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, and "Trading Places," starring Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy.

Before "Kentucky Fried Movie’s" script was underway, ZAZ kept an early VCR rolling each night to hoover up late-night TV in search of TV commercials to parody in sketches at the Kentucky Fried Theater. One night, the VCR managed to capture what would become comedy gold, in the form of a 1957 disaster film called "Zero Hour!" (note the exclamation mark) that ZAZ would mine for all that it was worth, and far more. Because Hollywood studios saw little value in their old properties aside from various network and local TV late-show broadcasts, the trio would eventually buy the rights to "Zero Hour!" for a song ($2,500), which allowed them to steal vast quantities of the 1957 film’s plot and dialogue. Much of "Airplane!" is simply "Zero Hour!" with added over-the-top gags and punchlines.

"Top Gear" co-writer Richard Porter once called the show’s recurring “Cool Wall” segment, in which the hosts argue about their newest favorite cars, “an aircraft carrier for gags.” "Zero Hour!" gave ZAZ an actual aircraft (“actual” in the sense of a plastic model, wooden sets, and deliberately even more wooden actors) to hang their gags off of. It punched up their writing immeasurably.

Of course, "Airplane!" also allowed ZAZ to parody Universal’s "Airport" series of disaster films, which appeared periodically throughout the 1970s with increasingly over-the-top and unintentionally silly results. As ZAZ notes in "Surely You Can't Be Serious," Universal were not at all happy with Paramount sending up their movies, which in 1980, they still viewed as an ongoing franchise. (And might have remained so going into the ‘80s, had "Airplane!" not exposed them for the ridiculously bloated melodrama the films increasingly became.) ZAZ even wanted George Kennedy to play the character eventually they gave to Lloyd Bridges, but Universal refused. (ZAZ finally got to work with Kennedy in their "Police Squad" movies of the late 1980s.)

Subverting Hollywood macho via postmodernism

As Instapundit has charted over the years, there’s a cliché among television commercials for a good twenty years or more, where white males are only there for comic relief and to be the butt of jokes. It’s an increasingly exhausted TV trope, but it wasn’t when ZAZ, directing "Airplane!," took the most macho male stars of the 1960s – Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, and Leslie Nielsen – gave them some of the silliest dialogue ever written, and told them to play it as straight and as seriously as possible. A whole new genre was instantly born, one that is still causing ripples in comedy today.

And might be even more so, if Hollywood hadn’t lost its nerve. In November of 2021, David Zucker wrote in Commentary:

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Airplane!, the comedy I wrote and directed with my brother Jerry and our friend Jim Abrahams. Just before the world shut down, Paramount held a screening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, followed by a Q&A in which an audience member asked a question we never used to receive: “Could you make Airplane! today?” My response: “Of course, we could. Just without the jokes.”

Although people tell me that they love Airplane! and it seems to be included on just about every Top Five movie-comedy list, there was talk at Paramount of withholding the rerelease over feared backlash for scenes that today would be deemed “insensitive.” I’m referring to scenes like the one in which two black characters speak entirely in a jive dialect so unintelligible that it has to be subtitled. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said to me, “You couldn’t do that scene today.” But I always wonder, why not? Half the gags in that joke were aimed at white people, given that the translation for “S**t” is “Golly!”—and the whole gag is topped off by the whitest lady on the planet, the actress who played the mom on Leave It to Beaver, translating.

The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view. No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do. But in today’s market, if I pitched a studio executive a comedy in which a white lady has to translate the speech of black people; in which an eight-year-old girl says, “I like my coffee black, like my men”; or an airline pilot makes sexual suggestions to a little boy (“Billy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”), I’d be told, in Studioese, “That’s just fantastically great! We’ll call you.”

By contrast, in 1979, Michael Eisner, then the president of Paramount, didn’t feel that he had to censor, take apart, or micromanage the jokes in the Airplane! script, even the ones he didn’t understand. Eisner somehow knew that comedy requires a certain amount of recklessness and that comedy writers and directors need to experiment until they hit that perfect note where a joke can illuminate uncomfortable subjects by giving us permission to laugh at them.

When principal photography ended on "Airplane!," ZAZ assembled a trailer to promote the movie in theaters. ZAZ debated the results in "Surely You Can’t Be Serious":

David: At that time, there were a lot of big movies slated for the summer release. [Frank Mancuso, Paramount’s head of distribution] suspected that some of them might not perform as well as expected. He shrewdly strategized to position Airplane! to fill what he thought might be a vacuum. We worked on the trailer with Don LaFontaine, famous for intoning in a deep voice full of gravitas, “In a world…”

Jim: We modeled it heavily on the trailer of Zero Hour!

Jerry: At first, we didn’t want to give away so many of the best jokes in the trailer. We were afraid people wouldn’t laugh at them when they saw the movie. [Paramount executive Jeffrey] Katzenberg of course knew better. He said, “Guys, there’s only one thing that matters right now: a**es in seats.”

After the pandemic of 2020, studios and movie theater owners would love to salvage the revenue they’ve lost. It’s unfortunate that Hollywood has lost its collective nerve in the years since the 1970s. With inflation rising, political turmoil, and a nation’s economy teetering on the brink just as it was in the late ‘70s, the ability to focus on nothing but putting a**es in seats should be its only priority.

If only that was true, as we’ve been seeing for at least the last decade, where Hollywood’s PC sensibility has significantly ruined their ability to actually tell jokes. "Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!," itself incredibly funny, is a reminder that Hollywood, from its writers to its studio chiefs once knew how to get out of their own way, and let the jokes do the work. One day, the industry could eventually return to such a mindset.

No really — I am serious.

And don’t call me Shirley.