The only joke too offensive for ‘Airplane!’: “That didn’t occur to us, so we cut it out”
What the general public deems as funny has changed drastically over the years, and cinema is the best way to chart humour’s evolution. The medium has directly affected the way humour has developed – you only have to look at how the lack of sound during the silent era led to physical and slapstick humour triumphing for many years. This kind of comedy made its way into the screwball genre that was popular during the 1930s and 1940s, although with sound cinema becoming the norm by the early ‘30s, comedy became much more nuanced and varied.
While some love the self-deprecating and neurotic humour popular in certain American films of the 1960s and 1970s, others prefer cringe-worthy 2000s comedy, full of crude references and fart jokes. Perhaps you’re more into darkly comic forms of humour, best seen in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, which makes topics like murder or war strangely hilarious.
No matter the form of comedy, the one thing that is hard to avoid is offending people. Something is always going to cause someone to feel as though their morals and beliefs have been insulted and ridiculed, or, in many cases, a joke can run the risk of going ‘too far’, perhaps pushing the boundaries of what is seen as socially acceptable.
The transgressive humour in John Waters’ movies is a great example. Topics like incest, murder, cannibalism, and rape (involving chickens) in Pink Flamingos have certainly rubbed many viewers the wrong way, although the film has since become a heralded cult classic.
One of the most beloved comedies of all time, however, is Airplane!, which emerged in 1980 to widespread acclaim. Directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the film is widely beloved, with its sharp and silly parody of the disaster genre proving to be a huge success, grossing $171 million. It’s a fantastic comedy, yet during early test screenings of the movie, the filmmakers wanted to ensure that the jokes landed well, and they soon realised that some of their ideas might have gone a little too far.
David Zucker once explained, “Sometimes stuff just isn’t funny, and that’s our fault. If the audience doesn’t get it, we haven’t done our job, and we cut it out.” This was the case when a screening resulted in concerns that one of the jokes would be too offensive. He revealed, “We had this joke about Air Poland where the pilots were Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and José Feliciano. Somebody from the Anti-Defamation League called and said that young Polish kids growing up had a bad self-image because of these sorts of jokes. That didn’t occur to us, so we cut it out. And I’m glad we cut it out.”
“One of the reasons Airplane! has lasted so long is because the jokes are timeless. Nobody does Polish jokes anymore, and the thing is that they’re mean-spirited. It’s not funny, so we were saved from that,” he concluded. Evidently, the secret to writing great comedic scripts can be found in being open to criticism, and by allowing honest feedback about their jokes, the filmmakers were able to make one of the most enduring comedies of all time.
