AIRPLANE and THE NAKED GUN Director David Zucker Says Hollywood Is "Destroying Comedy"
I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and it was a very different time for films and TV shows in regard to comedy and being offensive. So many comedies were offensive for the sake of getting laughs. I grew up watching these things, Airplane, The Naked Gun, The Jerk, Blazing Saddles, and more. I loved these movies because they made me laugh! But, you can’t make these kinds of movies these days. It’s a very different climate in Hollywood where people don’t want to offend anyone. It is what it is, and filmmaker David Zucker feels that because Hollywood is in this state of being overly sensitive, they are “destroying comedy.”
He thinks the only way an Airplane type film could be made today is “without the jokes.” In a new interview (via Mediaite), he said:
“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.”
Zucker went on to share an experience he had with a film executive recently that complained about one of his unmade scripts because it featured a joke about a female character needing a breast reduction> He explained:
“My current writing partner and I wrote a parody of ‘James Bond’ and ‘Mission: Impossible.’ One female executive said, ‘This joke is getting pretty risqué.’ It was a mild joke about the lead female character, because she had come up through the police department and FBI, she said she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.”
“It was pure oatmeal, so mild. Not one of our funniest things but this was too much. 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 humor.”
Zucker concluded, “When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today. The first thing I could think of is sure, just without the jokes.”
Comedy certainly has changed over the years. Stand-up comedians have been talking about this for years, but yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever see the same kind of comedy from the ‘80s and ‘90s in major studio movies again. Maybe some indie films will be able to attempt it and get away with it, but the major studios aren’t willing to take the risk on offensive jokes these days.
Now there is a Naked Gun remake in development with Liam Neeson, and I’m curious to see how that will handle the comedy.