“Can you fly this plane and land it?” “Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am serious — and don’t call me Shirley.” This seriously hilarious line, which is in the running for most often-quoted movie line ever, is from the 1980 disaster movie spoof Airplane!, one of the greatest comedies of the past 50 years. Airplane! initiated a run of spoof movies that led to Hot Shots! and The Naked Gun and whose comedic DNA can be found in the Scream series, Austin Powers, and Tropic Thunder. But for many cinephiles, none of those movies can rival Airplane! itself, which contains so many memorable gags and jokes that it seems semi-miraculous that they could all be squeezed into an under-90-minute movie. If you dare to sit through all two hours and 40 minutes of Wicked (and that’s only Part 1!), you may find yourself wanting to go back to tidier, lighter, and funnier movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun. And you may find yourself thinking about Jim Abrahams, one of the three pioneering comedic filmmakers who created them.

James Steven Abrahams, who died on Nov. 26 at the age of 80, was born on May 10, 1944, in Shorewood, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. He and his future filmmaker collaborators, David and Jerry Zucker, knew each other from youth; all three had attended the same high school and college. After having bonded over their mutual love of humor, when the Zucker brothers were thinking about starting their own comedy troupe, they reached out to Abrahams, asking him if he could help them write material for their sketches. With Abrahams on board, they founded the Kentucky Fried Theatre Company in 1971, a kind of Second City (the famous Chicago comedy club) for Wisconsin, where they presented improv skits as well as parodies of TV shows and commercials. After experiencing some success in their home state, the following year they moved the theater to Los Angeles, hoping to catch the attention of Hollywood directors and producers. Their plan worked. During one performance, the young director John Landis (of future Animal House and Trading Places fame) was in the audience. Impressed with the trio’s comedy chops, Landis connected with Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker — or “ZAZ,” as they’d later be known — and talked them into compiling their sketches into a movie that he’d direct. The resulting film, Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), put ZAZ squarely on the American comedy map.