When I was 8 years old, life seemed so very serious to me.
I remember it as an age when truths are told by parents: Yes, there will be bullies in the schoolyard; no, not every test is going to result in an “A.” Explanations are offered of the news glimpsed on television or (these days) the internet. I will never forget my father explaining to me that the Gulf War, which ended the month before my eighth birthday, was a grave matter, even if it supported our action in the Middle East. About this time, I remember being chosen to recite the Pledge of Allegiance over my grade school intercom, careful not to flub words that I had come to regard as sacred.
Maybe I was a little self-serious for my age, but I contend that many 8-year-olds go through a phase in which they put away childish things and start to reckon with the wider world. Imagine, then, my delight at being made aware of a movie in which everything — and I mean everything — was grist for the comedic mill.
Airplane!, the comic masterpiece released by Paramount Pictures in the summer of 1980, was already a decade old by the time I encountered it on home video, but to me, it was startling in its indiscriminate selection of satiric targets. I wasn’t familiar with the term “sacred cows” at that age, but if I had been, I would have told you that I loved the movie for denying the very existence of sacred cows. This could be made fun of? That could be turned into a joke? It seemed too good to be true. A 40th anniversary Blu-ray edition of the film has just been released.
Of course, I was also blissfully unaware of the sort of films that were being lampooned in Airplane!, specifically, a series of increasingly lame-brained disaster movies that centered on planes in distress: Airport, released in 1970, followed by a parade of sequels — Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde … Airport ’79.
Yet a movie that parodied only the cloddish Airport series would have had a relatively short shelf life. Instead, Airplane! writer-directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker fixed their comedic gaze not only on that lamentable series, not to mention the equally pitiful 1957 disaster film Zero Hour!, from which the filmmakers appropriated key story elements, but the dramatic arts more generally. After watching Airplane! for the first time, it’s difficult to embrace storytelling conventions in full innocence ever again.
Airplane!’s plot is pure pablum: Robert Hays plays Ted Striker, an Air Force pilot whose harrowing wartime experience has led to the disintegration of his relationship with his stewardess girlfriend, Elaine (Julie Hagerty), and an ungovernable dread of air travel. Like the rest of the cast, Hays and Hagerty have been directed to behave as though they are unaware of the outrageousness that surrounds them. Early in the film, having decided that the best way to hold onto Elaine is to join her on her next flight, Ted is asked at the ticket counter whether he would prefer “smoking or nonsmoking.” Upon being handed a smoke-emitting ticket, Hays does not so much as bat an eye.
This brand of comedy called for performers (or personalities) not usually associated with cutting it up, including Peter Graves and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as part of the flight crew and Lloyd Bridges as an air traffic controller. None were tempted to wink at the audience. As Capt. Rex Kramer, Robert Stack dramatically whips off one set of sunglasses only to uncover a second underneath them without breaking character; later, Stack invigoratingly beats up a series of pushy proselytizers for religious sects he encounters while walking through the airport terminal. Playing an onboard physician, Leslie Nielsen is equally matter-of-fact when, in the film’s signature dialogue exchange, he mistakes the word “surely” for “Shirley” when he is told, “Surely, you can’t be serious,” and replies, “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”
Airplane! chews up narrative logic and spits it out: Although the film is obviously set in the early 1980s and Hays is clearly in his early 30s, Ted’s stock footage wartime flashbacks transport the viewer not to Vietnam but to what looks to be World War II; on the other hand, when Ted remembers better days with Elaine, he recalls dancing in a dive with her to the sounds of “Stayin’ Alive.” The filmmakers enjoy pushing otherwise credible scenes to the brink, as when Ted, having been appointed to land the plane after a mass case of food poisoning, intently surveys the plane’s controls, which stretch on longer than the cockpit could physically contain. Perhaps the most joyous sight of my childhood is that of Ted, understandably nervous while landing the plane, sweating with such intensity that a garden hose seems to have been placed on top of his head.
Of course, Airplane!’s spirit of jolly anarchy was not entirely without precedent. Reviewing the film in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert compared the film to artifacts of midcentury pop culture: “‘Airplane!’ is a comedy in the great tradition of high school skits, the Sid Caesar TV show, Mad magazine, and the dog-eared screenplays people’s nephews write in lieu of earning their college diplomas.” Comic extravaganzas were not new in cinema, and demolition jobs on specific genres had been attempted before in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Abrahams and/or the Zuckers bottled their formula and, for a while, had success with comedies in similar veins, especially the Naked Gun and Hot Shots! series.
Yet Airplane! remains singularly exhilarating in its relentless pursuit of humor — even the background noise of airport PA announcers gives rise to comedy when the announcers turn out to be a feuding couple — and its total disinterest in presenting its characters as credible humans or its plot as anything but an infrastructure on which to build jokes. As an 8-year-old, the film taught me that while there was much to be serious about in the world, it is healthy to keep a perspective on things. After all, Airplane! opens with a shot of the fins of a plane swimming through clouds in a direct rip-off of Jaws. There’s a lesson here: Yesterday’s nail-biting thriller can be tomorrow’s farce. That’s what they say about history, too.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
