Airplane!
Composite Score: 82.2
Starring: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Lorna Patterson, Robert Stack, Stephen Stucker, and Otto
Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker
Writers: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker
Genres: Comedy, Romance, Spoof
MPAA Rating: PG
Box Office: $83.45 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Airplane! is the 1980 spoof comedy about a retired military pilot whose fear of flying has resulted in his girlfriend (a stewardess) threatening to leave him, which forces him to board her plane and then try to land it after the pilots and most of the passengers fall ill to a very bad form of food poisoning – not the lightest premise for a comedy, but it’s a classic. The film is full of great visual bits and quality witticisms, placing it very firmly in the vein of Mel Brooks or the Scary Movie franchise. Despite its genre, Airplane!’s humor helps it stand out with consistent and regular joking throughout, leaving you with very little room to breathe between laughs.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
As is the case with most spoof comedy, the humor comes before everything else in Airplane!, often at the expense of characters and story. Obviously, I didn’t go in expecting anything else and didn’t leave disappointed. The best way to approach this one is to temper expectations – not looking for the greatest story ever told or massive amounts of well-crafted character development definitely helps. This is pure comedy for the sake of comedy, and it delivers strongly in that vein.
Not all of the bits in Airplane! have aged well at all. Much of the humor is irreverent in a good way, but some of it does not land anymore. Particularly, the film’s racial humor is tough to construe as anything but tone deaf and racist in a modern context. The film’s writers/directors are three white guys, and jokes about black people playing basketball well or talking differently from white people or a person with a turban blowing himself up just don’t hit coming from them. For a film with so many great bits, having those jokes thrown in with it feels pretty lazy and offensive, even in context – the 1980s. We have moved beyond those jokes for the most part now probably should have by then as well.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
If you can watch it with some modern awareness, a lot of the rest of the film’s humor still holds up. The comedy is solid in its brand of humor. I still laughed at most of the rest of the jokes. It’s not scathing satire or anything, but the inspiration of future comedy is still very present. The consistent use of pun and double entendre follows in the footsteps of comedy predecessors and carries the preludes of a lot of comedy in the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s. It’s easy to see the set-ups for the physical and dialectical humor that you get in shows like Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, Friends, and even The Office present in the comedy of Airplane!. Even some of the more long-form bits (like the flower people or the announcements at the film’s start) preclude some of what might be called “modern” or “Millennial” or even the self-deprecating “Gen-Z” humor. I trace that brand of humor back to the 2007 SNL Digital Short “The Shooting”, which is itself a spoof comedy short in the Airplane! style, referencing other dramatic works in an exaggerated comedic style with a few celebrity cameos to sell the humor even to the most “basic” audience.
All told, Airplane! is an imperfect comedy whose spiritual successors and homages make it into the classic that it is, worthy of a place somewhere on a list of Greatest Films of All Time. It should not be watched without acknowledging the problematic nature of some of its humor. The flawed nature of the spoof comedy may in fact be part of what keeps it worth revisiting, as a reminder that no piece of film or comedy is untouchable or perfect in and of itself. If you want to watch it, it’s available to rent on Amazon Prime Video now.
