How Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker spoofed their way to a serious comedy legacy
Looks like we picked the right month to celebrate the silly and sublime genius of Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and more
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Even if you’ve never seen a single film by the writing and directing team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ), surely you’re familiar with the ubiquitous references to their work in popular culture. And if you just read that sentence and heard the words “don’t call me Shirley” in your head, then you’ve just proved the point.
The true story of how two Wisconsin-born brothers and their childhood friend rose from obscurity to create some of the zaniest film comedies of all time, only to break apart at the height of their success, has as many twists and turns as any Hollywood movie. Together, they managed to blend camp and earnestness in their genre sendups, mining both high and low sensibilities for comedy gold. Directing duos aren’t unheard of in Hollywood, and writing teams of three or more are common, but not many films can boast having three writer-directors (Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse being a recent and rare exception) working together in harmony. For a while, at least.
Since it’s Comedy Month here at The A.V. Club, we thought it would be fun to take a look at the ZAZ filmography, specifically the projects they worked on as a team before separating to pursue their individual careers (with mixed success). Within the span of a decade, their collaboration produced five classic films and a remarkably resilient television series, all packed with memorable sight gags and rapid-fire humor, performed with deadpan precision by some of the brightest stars of the era. Sure, some of the material feels very much of its time, but a lot of their jokes and parodies are still just as funny today as they were in the 1980s. And no one has done it quite as well since.
Kentucky Fried Origins
The Zucker brothers and Abrahams got their start making fun of pop-culture in comedy sketch shows, and never really stopped. While at The University of Wisconsin in the late ’60s and early ’70s they founded The Kentucky Fried Theater, where they would routinely spoof B-movies, TV shows, and the nightly news. Instead of taking shots at political targets like Nixon and Vietnam, though, they were more interested in “the silly stuff in media,” according to Abrahams. While other students were protesting the draft, they were busy studying kung fu films, women-in-prison melodramas, blaxploitation, beer commercials, pharmaceutical ads—whatever they happened to come across that made them laugh.
It would all become fodder for their first feature film project, The Kentucky Fried Movie. The trio moved their theater from Madison to Los Angeles in 1972 and started working on ideas to turn the multimedia aspects of the stage show into a big-screen production. After seeing a young director named John Landis promoting his debut film, a monster movie tribute called Schlock, on The Tonight Show, they reached out to him and convinced him to come on board the project. Following rejections from investors and every major studio in town, Landis—who would go on to direct comedy classics like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and Coming To America—helped produce a 10-minute short to test the concept. All it took was a few screenings in front of actual audiences, and the project was back on track.
Still considered the “gold standard for sketch movies” The Kentucky Fried Movie is a little rough, decidedly crass, and feels hopelessly dated looking back on it, but it delivers so many laughs that at least few are bound to land even now. The cast features cameos from the likes of George Lazenby, Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, Donald Sutherland, Tony Dow, Stephen Bishop, and Bong Soo Han. It now enjoys a cult status, if not on its own merits then as an impressive first outing for team ZAZ.
Airplane! takes off
With one moderately successful film (thanks to a shoestring budget) under their belts, ZAZ decided to take the unusual step of writing and directing their next project on their own. Rather than an anthology, the entire film would be a parody of a single genre—specifically disaster movies, and more specifically airplane disaster movies.
For his oral history on the making of Airplane! for The A.V. Club in 2015, (soon to be released in book form) Will Harris spoke to as many of the people involved in the film as he could, including the Zuckers and Abrahams. It’s clear from the interviews that no one, not even the filmmakers, really knew what they had until they saw the completed film for the first time. Their idea was to hire serious actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen (who, as luck would have it, had a secret desire to be a comic actor and would go on to work with ZAZ as the star of Police Squad! and the Naked Gun films) as straight men, so the audience could better appreciate the wackiness unfolding around them. It proved to be a winning formula.
The template was Zero Hour!, a low-budget adaptation based on a Canadian teleplay by author Arthur Hailey. A veteran pilot with PTSD trying to save his relationship, the food poisoning from the in-flight meal, the tough-as-nails ex-military officer who talks him through the landing—all of that came from Zero Hour! It was so similar, in fact, the filmmakers actually purchased the rights to remake it in order to avoid copyright issues.
“We were so fortunate to have had Zero Hour! as our blueprint,” Jerry Zucker told The A.V. Club in 2015. “Because we really knew nothing about film structure. We were funny guys, but we knew nothing about crafting a movie. The people at Paramount really taught us about making plot points into jokes, about making jokes into plot points.”
Of course, they also threw in references to Airport and its sequels, Airport 1975 and Airport ’77, not to mention jokes based on completely unrelated films like From Here To Eternity, Jaws, and Saturday Night Fever. There are too many great gags to list here, but our favorites include Barbara Billingsley talking Jive, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar insisting he’s not himself, every moment Stephen Stucker is on screen, and the recurring “but that’s not important right now” bits.
It all somehow works together brilliantly, and upon its release Airplane! became a huge hit with audiences. With a budget of just $3.5 million, it grossed $158 million worldwide and still consistently ranks high in lists of the best comedies of all time.
Police Squad! and The Naked Gun
Having conquered the cinema, ZAZ turned their attention to the small screen. Their next project was the short lived but much loved series Police Squad! As the name implies, it sends up overly serious cop procedurals of the past and present (the present at the time being 1982), like Dragnet, M Squad and Felony Squad. In the leading role of Det. Frank Drebin they cast Leslie Nielsen, who enjoyed his experience playing the doctor on Airplane! so much he couldn’t wait to come back for more self-serious silliness.
The show received critical acclaim, but that didn’t help it in the ratings. ABC didn’t even opt to air all six episodes before canceling it (only four originally premiered on the network). The short-lived series eventually found an audience thanks to cable reruns and home video, and became such a cult hit that six years later it was revived as a film, The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! Nielsen returned alongside George Kennedy, who replaced Alan North in the role of Captain Ed Hocken. ZAZ had previously pursued Kennedy for Airplane! but he’d turned it down because of his involvement in the original Airport films. And yes, we have to mention it, O.J. Simpson is also there.
The Naked Gun would prove to be the most successful of all of the ZAZ films, spawning two more films—The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult—though David Zucker would be the only one of the three to return for the sequels.
Top Secret!
Among the spoofs ZAZ produced, Top Secret! didn’t enjoy the lasting success of Airplane! or the Naked Gun films, but it’s worth revisiting for Val Kilmer’s performance alone as Nick Rivers, an American rock star who gets caught up in an East German plot while performing overseas. Combining elements of war films, espionage thrillers, and an Elvis musical (somehow it works, trust us), it follows the same joke-a-minute formula the filmmakers had perfected by this point in their careers. As usual, they assembled an unlikely cast of hidden comic talents, including Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing. It bombed at the box office, but has held up over the years, and even grown in estimation. Memorable sight gags and lines like, “I know a little German” have kept its humor in the public consciousness, if not the film itself.
Ruthless People and parting ways
The 1986 film Ruthless People would be the final collaboration between Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. It was more of a farce than a spoof, with a story not specifically based on anything that had previously existed. ZAZ directed the film as a trio, but the script is credited to Dale Launer (who also penned Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and My Cousin Vinny). It starred Bette Midler as Barbara, who’s so annoying her odious husband Sam, played by Danny DeVito, schemes to get rid of her. In an O. Henry-style twist, Barbara is kidnapped by Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater, but rather than being distraught by his wife’s abduction, Sam is delighted. The film is chock full of terrific performances, and represented a promising evolution for the directors. Unfortunately, it would prove to be the last time they would work together as a team.
“After a while, it became too many guys sitting in the same chair,” David Zucker told Premiere magazine in 1988. The trio split amicably not long after that. Beyond their desire to create projects on their own, there was also the financial reality that as long as they worked as a writing-directing trio, the studios paid them each a third of the salary for a single writer or director. You can’t really blame them for wanting to grab a bigger piece of the pie.
Jerry Zucker left writing behind for the most part, but would go on to direct the films Ghost, First Knight, and Rat Race. David Zucker continued to make spoofs as both a writer and director, including the two Naked Gun sequels, High School High, and several entries in the Scary Movie franchise. Abrahams, too, stayed in the spoof business, writing the mob satire Mafia! as well as the Top Gun parodies Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux (guess he also retained the copyright on the exclamation points in titles). Some of these separate projects were more successful than others. None of them, however, ever came close to achieving the kind of success the filmmakers enjoyed when they were working together as a team.
97 Comments
As a child of the 70’s who saw most of their movies on cable, I got some of the jokes when these ran during the 80’s. As I got older, I got more of the jokes.
Doesn’t one of them make/produce horrible right wing movies now?
They did in the early 2000s. David Zucker went nutso shortly after 9/11 (just like David Mamet did). He became obsessed with Hillary Clinton conspiracies and proving Micheal Moore wrong on everything. I don’t think they’ve made anything recently.
Yeah, David Zucker went full neocon wacko after 9/11.
Such a buzzkill. Still, you got to separate the artist from the art. A real cunty move, though.
“None of them, however, ever came close to achieving the kind of success the filmmakers enjoyed when they were working together as a team.” Ghost tripled the box office of any movie they made together.
Yeah, but did it triple the box office of my heart?
I’m assuming you haven’t seen Ruthless People, since the plot is that DeVito is planning to murder Midler and then doesn’t have to when she’s kidnapped by Reinhold and Slater. He’s caught because he throws the chloroform he’s planning to use to knock her out into an overgrown area behind their house.But that’s not important right now. What is? Reinhold deciding to go full mercenary salesperson and sell huge overpriced speakers to Dave from Summer School.
And “Give the Bag to Bozo” scene. My goodness.
Seriously underrated movie. I had no idea the same guy wrote Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, another seemingly forgotten gem of the era. Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma!
RUPRECHT… THE GENITAL CUFF!
“…Not Mother?”
‘May I take your trident, sir?”Gets me every time.
“No, after that. What did we do? We apologised.”
The first time I saw it I nearly cried laughing when he pulls out the rubber glove and starts lubing it up.
Such a great movie, and my favorite bit from it. (also the “why the cork” line seconds before he pokes himself in the eyepatch .. God that makes me crack up so hard)
“This may very well be the stupidest person on the face of the Earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.”The delivery of that line in context may be one of cinema’s greatest moments.
Genius. “Crockett and Tubbs are floatin’!”
That’s a great movie. Perfect casting.
“Well, Ralph, uh, Debbie can’t talk right now, my dick’s in her mouth.[hangs up]I love wrong numbers.”
Nice to see “Top Secret” mentioned with some praise. So under-rated.
That is such a perfect movie and it is Kilmer’s first credit on IMDB. What a way to announce yourself.
I like it better than Airplane! My go-to phrase for something done haphazardly is “dried seaweed and snot”. No one ever gets it.
I always liked the wounded spy handing over the envelope and saying that it needed to be postmarked by midnight tonight. It was addressed to “Publisher’s Clearinghouse”.
“We have a traitor in our midst!”*slams a pigeon on the table*“I see you have dealt with him accordingly”“Not the BIRD you idiot!”
I’m fond of “Your life will be worth less than a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory,” myself.
Tuesday? That’s simchat torah!
I have to say that I have never laughed harder in a theater than I did at the scene in the restaurant in which the waiter’s supposed German is actually a string of Yiddish curses, part of the joke being that no one else in the theater had any clue why me and my parents were laughing so hard. (Okay, I might have laughed harder at the mirror scene in Duck Soup)
You’ve got to hand it to the Germans, they make great cars.
Always have loved the way that German soldier just blows up on his own.
The first time I watched this movie as a kid, my dad and I cracked up at that for completely different reasons. Him more than me.
“They will kill my daughter!”“That suuucks!”
Latrine!
“ …. and Deja Vu.”“Have we met not before?”
I LOVE Airplane and Naked Gun, but Top Secret tops them both for me. So damn funny. I can rewatch it endlessly.
Too many great lines “Yes I am Albert Potato” executing the priest who prays in pig latin, the phone gag, the underwater fight.
You can tell they ran out of coke and went f it with the ending though. That’s the movie’s only flaw.
My favorite minor point about TS is how it invisibly shifts from being a Cold War spy thriller to a WWII resistance movie.(I’m lying, “I know a little German” is the best, but it got mentioned already.)
This:
The Groove Tube and Kentucky Fried Movie were ahead of their time.
Nobody will ever top this scene. Ever.
Having not seen Dirty Harry until after seeing The Naked Gun did not make that scene any less hilarious, and when John Vernon told Callahan he didn’t want any trouble like he had last year in the Filmore district, it only got funnier.
In a one-on-one gunfight, I’d take Drebin or MacGarnagle over that sissy Dirty Harry.
“Billy’s DEAD, MacGarnagle! They slit his throat from ear to ear!”“Hey. I’m tryin’ to eat lunch here.”One of favourite Simpsons exchanges that plays in head way more often than is healthy.
“Because he gets results, YOU STUPID CHIEF!”
“blpppt, sit down.”
That was the beauty of early Zucker/Abrahams. They could do direct parody/reference humor but in such a way that you didn’t need to know the source to get the joke.
Dude, that’s not even in the Top 10 moments in that movie.
They actually admitted that they had no idea what the From Here to Eternity beach kissing scene was from. It had just become such an iconic scene that everyone knew the image even if they’d never heard of the movie.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Pure savagery:
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I really dislike that character. He doesn’t fit the humor of the movie at all.
BOO-URNS
“He doesn’t fit the humor of the movie at all.” I think that was deliberate.
Probably, but it doesn’t work for me. He’s too overtly clownish in a deadpan world.
That’s the entire point – he plays against type/trope. He’s awesome!
He’s like comic relief in a comedy, and you’re right, that’s very unusual. I think it works BECAUSE the rest of it is so deadpan and serious, and because his interactions aren’t noted as unusual by the other characters at ALL.
I watched “Zero Hour!” a few years ago and was surprised just how much of it was lifted, almost verbatim, into “Airplane!” Whole scenes and chunks of dialogue with the absurdism just stitched on top.Also, you had to be around at the time to appreciate just how thoroughly Barbara Billingsley stole the movie.On a sidenote, back when Joe Dante was filming an episode of “Police Squad!” on the old RKO backlot that Paramount had just purchased he noticed workers emptying the contents of the studio warehouses into dumpsters and went rummaging through one of them where he found (and took home) one of the actual Rosebud sled props from “Citizen Kane.”
The characters are mostly named the same too – the washed-up military pilot is named Ted Stryker just like in Airplane! Zero Hour! is also amusing to people from Wisconsin because it featured Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch as the pilot. Hirsch was a Wisconsin football star who later became athletic director for the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s and 1980s, but in the 1950s tried and failed to become a movie star.
Leslie Nielsen pretty clearly stole the movie – hell, he crafted an entire career that riffed off of his performance in Airplane!.
It was damn near a shot-for-shot remake:
It took me over 40 years after seeing Airplane! to finally see Zero Hour! (yay Internet Archive). Kept flashing to the ZAZ bits ripped verbatim from it. Good times…
A lot of gags from the Naked Gun films are lifted from Police Squad. Though, for different reasons.
Still one of the funniest movies ever made.
Their work, especially Airplane!, had a huge influence on me growing up.
Zucker left writing behind for the most part, but would go on to direct
When you have two different people named “Zucker” you shouldn’t use that name to refer to just one of them.
Take my star for bringing out this classic.
Directing duos aren’t unheard of in Hollywood, and writing teams of three or more are common, but not many films can boast having three writer-directors (Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse being a recent and rare exception)Directing duos – even trios – are a lot more common in animation, so I feel like Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t really count.
Kentucky Fried Movie is a stone cold classic film. Absolutely hilarious.
Take him to Detroit.
“That sounds like an adventure of extraordinary magnitude!”
Seriously hot sex scene too.
It’s where I learned the value of Zinc Oxide.
This is a thought provoking history I’ll have to read about in depth on my next flight to Hong Kong.
Unpopular opinion: Airplane and Police Squad! were fantastic. The Naked Gun movies were trash.In Airplane and PS, Nielsen plays his role completely straight, and that’s what makes it so funny. It’s a farce all around him, but he’s Robert Stack-ing his way through it all.In the NG movies, he’s suddenly mugging for the camera and doing ridiculous umpire impressions. The humor went from puns to slapstick. NO THANK YOU.
Negatory. The first Naked Gun film is phenomenal.
God, I loved the ‘Hot Shots!’ movies growing up. I still giggle like an idiot at the line, “These men are completely celibate, like their fathers, and their fathers before them.”
The Martin Sheen scene in Part Deux kills me.
“I loved you in Wall Street!”
“These men have taken a strict vow of celibacy, like their fathers, and fathers before them.”
“War. It’s fantastic.”
Hot Shots! Part Deux is absolutely the magnum opus of the genre. Airplane may be funnier on balance, but Part Deux is smarter. From bone-dry 4th wall breaks (“She’s CIA. The other man’s an extra.”) to grim-faced idiocy (“I can’t walk, they’ve… tied my shoelaces together.” “…Bastards.”) to Simpsons-level metapolitics (“War. It’s FANTASTIC.”) to lines that are just plain genius by any measure (“Sorry sweatheart, but this all-day sucker is down to the soggy white stick.”) it’s an absolutely brilliant film probably doomed never to get the respect it deserves.
Finally saw Top Secret! for the first time a few years ago. It is really good and deserved better. Kilmer is indeed astoundingly good in it.Watching The Naked Gun again after seeing Police Squad! really reminded me why the show is so much better. The movies are funny enough, but they’re not as dense on gags, and they’re a lot broader than the show. And I find the deadpan but entirely competent Drebin funnier than the often-buffoonish movie version.I wrote an article a few years back talking a little about Police Squad! and mentioning a couple of more recent worthy inspired successors that understand that same deadpan commitment and use it well, MacGruber and Angie Tribeca:http://www.the-solute.com/we-would-have-come-earlier-but-your-husband-wasnt-dead-then-the-absurd-influence-of-police-squad/
Shit I need to get back to watching Tribeca. Picked it up during the pandemic and then got so drowned in material I never finished season 2.
When I was maybe 13, my brother and I rented the Naked Gun on VHS, not knowing anything about Police Squad! (and having seen Airplane! only when we were too young to get it). It was the most I have ever laughed in my life. We were in shambles on the floor. I’m certain I will never have another movie experience like that as long as I live.
I find Top Secret to be superior to Airplane. It’s far more surreal and unashamedly swings for the fences at every turn.
The image of the cow in boots is fantastic
That’s probably why Airplane had the more lasting legacy. It’s a bit easier to digest as a parody than Top Secret.
agreed, however, the movie’s ending is way too abrupt.
Yeah, surely its ok to ignore all the r@cism. Right?
“none of them, however, ever came close to achieving the kind of success”…my friend, Ghost made over $500M worldwide and was the top grossing movie of 1990.
Just rewatched Airplane. It still holds up.
And yes, we have to mention it, O.J. Simpson is also there.
I rewatched Naked Gun a year or two ago, and realized that OJ spends about 95% of the movie getting the utter shit kicked out of him, which these days makes the movie that little bit better.
“Their idea was to hire serious actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen (who, as luck would have it, had a secret desire to be a comic actor and would go on to work with ZAZ as the star of Police Squad! and the Naked Gun films) as straight men, so the audience could better appreciate the wackiness unfolding around them. It proved to be a winning formula.”As a kid who watched reruns of Sky King, Mission: Impossible, and various 1950s/60s movies, this was the best concept brought to life in AIRPLANE! To this day, whenever someone uses “Surely doctor,” in a question, I always finish my answer with “…and don’t call my Shirley.”
I used to refer to one of my old supervisors as “the Peter Graves to my Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”I don’t think any of the younger people we worked with got the reference.But we knew.