Destroying Comedy

The 9–Percenter rule

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 "Shit" 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.

Today, we're faced with social and political pressures that are tearing our country and our families apart. Not that I couldn't do without some family members anyway, but the point is, we live in the most outrageous period in our recent history, when the need for humor is greatest, and yet we seem to be losing our ability to laugh at ourselves and our world.

HUMOR happens when you go against what's expected and surprise people with something they're not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges's character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his "addictions" were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today's studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes. Fear of backlash rather than the desire to entertain seems to be driving their choices.

I admit that their fear of audience retaliation is not entirely unwarranted. There is a very vocal, though I believe small, percentage of the population that can't differentiate between Glue Sniffing Joke and Glue Sniffing Drug Problem. It is these people whom studio executives fear when they think twice about rereleasing Airplane! on its 40th anniversary, when they put disclaimers in front of Blazing Saddles, or when they pressure writers to remove jokes that are otherwise perfectly offensive. As a result of these fear-based decisions, some of the best contemporary comedy minds are abandoning laughter in favor of admittedly brilliant but serious projects such as Joker, directed by Todd Phillips, and Chernobyl,written by Craig Mazin. These men collaborated on two of the Hangover pictures, which struck gold at the box office. Phillips summed up the general plight of the comedy writer when he said, "It's hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can't do it. So, you just go, 'I'm out.'"

Some people look at the mass exodus of comedy writers and proclaim that comedy must be dead. That's not true. Comedy is not dead. It's scared. And when something is scared, it goes into hiding. I do admire those comedy writers who can pour their creativity and talents into non-humorous projects. Unlike my peers, who can channel their rage into more socially acceptable psychological projects, I have no marketable skills aside from crafting jokes. As a teenager, I was fired on my second day on a job as a store clerk at a pharmacy because I couldn't do the very two things that the job required: making change and finding things.

This is still a problem. My life would be much simpler if I, too, had the ability to turn away from comedy during these dangerous times. But then I wouldn't have any place to turn to. For me, comedy isn't an occupation. I don't punch a clock to be "on" and punch out at the end of a workday. For whatever reason, it's the way I live. The most ridiculous path is the one I choose, intentionally or not.

Frank Drebin, the detective played by Leslie Nielsen in the Naked Gun movies, is not some made-up character. He is me. I'm the guy who ran out of electricity in my experimental electric car 30 years ago with a newspaper reporter in the passenger seat. I stopped the car at a motel and plugged it into the nearest outside outlet, which immediately blacked out the entire building. Angry residents poured out, yelling. It made for an interesting Los Angeles Times story the next day.

I'm the guy who, on a soundstage, yelled, "Who's blocking the camera?! I can't see what's on the monitor!" The assistant director replied, "It's you, sir, you're standing in front of the lens." And I'm the guy who, on the same stage at Paramount, tried to find the men's room through the maze of movie sets, went out the wrong door, and found myself locked out on Melrose Avenue. I was forced to reenter the studio gates with a tour group, while the entire production wondered what had become of its director.

Circumstances like these are a daily occurrence in my life, not only because I'm naturally inept, but also because somehow, abnormal seems to find me. During the great pandemic of 2020, I managed to quarantine with my ex-wife's current boyfriend, my ex-girlfriend who teaches meditation, the guitarist for the '80s rock band Ratt, and the reigning Miss Utah USA. My life could easily be a sitcom, except no one would believe it.

Perhaps I attract these situations to myself because I'm a middle child and need constant attention, or maybe it's because I'm a perpetually frustrated person who's annoyed and bored by the dullness that everyone else seems to tolerate so easily. I have a rage against mildness, against playing it safe, against political correctness. And to make matters worse, I've never been afraid of saying outrageous things, in private or in public. Jokes are my defense against normalcy, and as a comedy writer, if I'm not teetering on the edge of offending someone, then I'm not doing my job. Because I know that people get themselves stuck in a rut when they take things too seriously.

On the other hand, when we're willing to lean into comedy, it has the power to shake us out of our complacency.

The fact that my movies are apparently loved, referenced, and quoted by so many people after all these decades tells me that maybe I'm not the only one who enjoys shaking things up. I think maybe secretly we're all a little bored by our lives. Without boredom and anger, would there even be comedy? I also have a hard time censoring or toning down my jokes. They are equally tasteless whether I'm telling them to a theater filled with hundreds of people or to my own kids in the privacy of our home. In 2014, when my son, Charles, then a 14-year-old, wanted to attend a party unsupervised, my wife wanted to know whether there would be parents present. "You're not going to take drugs or drink alcohol, right?" she asked. "You know, there's going to be peer pressure."

I couldn't help myself. I jumped in immediately. "Charles, for example, you're at this party and everyone is sucking d—k. What are you going to do? You have to resist the temptation."

Charles laughed. His mom shook her head. And I found a way to not be bored.

I'm an equal-opportunity offender and usually nothing is off-limits, even my daughter, Sarah. About five years ago, when she was 13, I was driving her and three of her girlfriends back from the mall as they whispered about boys and giggled in the back seat, oblivious to the fact that I was right there, hearing every word. I finally had enough. "Let me tell you something about boys," I interrupted. They fell silent, listening for the words of wisdom. "Boys are only interested in your brains," I said. "You have to remind them that you have a body, too."

They giggled all the way home, after which one of the girls asked Sarah, "Did your dad really mean to say that?" Sarah nodded. She was used to it. Today's parents might be appalled to hear someone talk with their kids the way I do. I don't censor jokes even for my own children, because I know that comedy is supposed to be risky. As my alter-ego Frank Drebin famously said, "you take a risk getting out of bed in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan."

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