Airplane!

“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. It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc.

“Airplane!” has a couple of sources for its inspiration. One of them is obviously “Airport” (1970) and all of its sequels and rip-offs. The other might not come immediately to mind unless you're a fan of the late show. It's “Zero Hour” (1957), which starred the quintessential 1950s B-movie cast of Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, and Sterling Hayden. "Airplane!" comes from the same studio (Paramount) and therefore is able to cheerfully borrow the same plot (airliner is imperiled after the crew and most of the passengers are stricken with food poisoning). The “Zero Hour” crisis situation (how to get the airplane down) was also borrowed for the terrible “Airport 1975,” in which Karen Black played a stewardess who tried to follow instructions radioed from the ground.

This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny. Movie comedies these days are so hung up on being contemporary, radical, outspoken, and cynically satirical that they sometimes forget to be funny. And they've lost the nerve to be as corny as “Airplane!” — to actually invite loud groans from the audience. The flop “Wholly Moses,” for example, is no doubt an infinitely more intelligent comedy—but the problem was, we didn't laugh.