Anyone who knows movie comedies of the 1980s knows David Zucker. As a director, right out of the gate, he delivered four iconic comedy classics – the legendary “Airplane!” (aka. “Flying High”), “Top Secret!,” “Ruthless People,” and the iconic “The Naked Gun”.
He also worked as a writer and/or producer on those films along with the likes of “BASEketball,” “The Kentucky Fried Movie” and the “Scary Movie” franchise. He knows his style of broad and slapstick comedy quite well, but in a recent video for Prager U, he says those kinds of films can’t be made today.
Zucker starts off the video by saying: “When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today. The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.'”. He then goes on to talk about the state of comedy in films today:
“My current writing partner Pat Proft and I wrote a parody of James Bond and Mission: Impossible. One female executive said, ‘This joke is getting pretty risque here.’ It was a mild joke about the lead female character. Because she had come up through the police department and through the FBI…she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.
It was pure oatmeal, so mild. Not one of our funniest things, but [even] this was too much. I thought, ‘If this was the criteria for it, we’re in big trouble.’ They’re destroying comedy because of 9% of the people who don’t have a sense of humor.”
Looking back, Zucker says in the old days, they “could be as offensive as we liked. We went where the laughs were. We never thought that we were offending anyone, but if we were offending people we knew we were on the right track.”
Then times changed with the new century, and things that weren’t a worry on “The Naked Gun” or “Scary Movie” suddenly were. He says he still ultimately has hope comedy will come back: “I think there’s a pendulum and it’ll swing back. I’d just like to see comedy filmmakers do comedy without fear…we just want to make people laugh.”
Source: YouTube
