Does ‘Airplane!’ still hold up?
The golden era of comedy has long since passed us, with many people lamenting over the steady demise of a genre that once used to lift our spirits and tickle our pickles.
There was once a decade in which comedies were the bread and butter of cinema, with countless films being packed into the release calendar that weren’t intended to be taken super seriously. Whether it be tales of high school misfits or staggeringly stupid miscommunications that result in a string of easily resolved complications, cinema has always been populated with light-hearted stories created with the pure intention of making us laugh and briefly escape the drudgery of the world around us.
However, after the 2010s, it felt like the genre completely disappeared, with a real-life recession seemingly pointing towards the fact that it wasn’t the right time to be laughing, with a whole slate of projects swiftly fading from our screens. Everything became distinctly more serious, leading us to reminisce about an era when we could abandon our worries and let go through the shared experience of laughing with strangers in a cinema.
There is one era of filmmaking that is most infamous for the streak of comedies that were released, leading to widely loved gems like The Naked Gun, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Spaceballs. However, there is one that is still heralded as the funniest film of all time, and one that I recently revisited in order to test if it still holds up.
Airplane!, directed by Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker, follows the fateful journey of one plane that is plagued by a life-threatening bout of food poisoning, with one unlikely pilot being tasked with the job of safely landing the aircraft and saving everyone’s lives.
To this day, many people still cite jokes from the film’s script, with quips in our daily vocabulary originating from the dialogues and cemented in our collective subconscious. However, while some elements held up and sparked a vaguely warm response, others I found completely tedious and left me feeling bewildered as to how it was ever considered the peak of comedy.
Sure, the “and don’t call me Shirley” joke still holds up, with a few others that surprised me with their endearing silliness, but amongst those, there were many that purely relied on misogyny and racism to elicit a response. The subtitles for the Jamaican characters are a running gag throughout the film, and one that I didn’t find remotely funny the first time and sighed each time they returned to the screen.
The same goes for the humour that entirely revolves around women being naked for no apparent reason, along with the imitation of oral sex on the blow-up pilot. It is probably hilarious to really old men, but more than anything, it just feels like dated Boomer humour that relies on tired stereotypes and ideas that punch down at everyone who isn’t a white man.
All the jokes performed by characters played by Leslie Nielsen and Robert Hays are actually funny, and do so through smart writing and without dumbing down the characters they play. The humour comes from bigging them up, heightening their stoic sense of masculinity and authority in any given situation—something that only inflates their egos and leaves them the only people who come out on top.
The writers are capable of good jokes when it comes to most of the white or male characters, but anyone who occupies a marginalised identity is subjected to humour that mocks this identity and punches down through problematic cliches. Perhaps it remains a comedic masterpiece to those who grew up during the time of its release, with some believing that this is the only way to be funny, but humour has evolved since then, and there are plenty of modern comedic writers who are smart enough to know that this is a lazy formula.
While it is not hard to see why Airplane! would be popular among older audiences, its good moments are weighed down by many distinctly average ones, also managing to be offensive while not in the slightest entertaining. It makes it hard to see why it could still be considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, with many recent shows and films that far exceed the humour of this comedically ancient relic, leaving it with just a couple of timeless jokes.
