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This might make me sound like an old fogy, but they just don’t make comedies the way they used to. So many of the “comedies” that hit theaters nowadays are just plain unfunny or rely too much on cheap bathroom humor. Oh, sure, there’s the occasional comedic gem like The Producers, but I generally haven’t been too impressed with the caliber of comedies to come out in the last few years.
Thankfully, even after viewing a bomb at the box office, I know that I can look forward to coming home and popping a real comedy into my DVD player. And the best one I can think of to rekindle my sense of humor is 1980’s Airplane!
The plot of Airplane! is paper-thin, but you don’t even notice it because you’re having so much fun watching. Due to some bad plane-food fish, most of the passengers and the entire crew on an airplane flight become violently ill. It’s up to three passengers—a doctor (Leslie Nielsen), an ex-war pilot (Robert Hays), and the pilot’s ex-girlfriend, one of the attendants (Julie Hagerty)—to work together with the ground crew to land the plane safely.
The real gold of the movie isn’t in the plot. It’s in the wonderful puns and plays on words that come at you like machine-gun fire. It’s in the random cameos and star appearances by everyone from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to “June Cleaver” to Ethel Merman. And it’s in the punchy jokes that everyone knows by now, such as: “Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”
This movie is a classic. It’s unabashedly and shamelessly funny. It doesn’t take anything seriously, least of all itself. It’s definitely one of the top comedies of all time.
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