Airplane! (1980)

Film: Airplane! (1980)
Stars: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Lorna Patterson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Barbara Billingsley, Maureen McGovern
Director: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, & Jerry Zucker
Oscar History: Nothing with AMPAS, though it did get a Best Picture nomination from the Golden Globes
Snap judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

One of the big things you need to realize when judging a "classic" comedy is, if it's truly a classic, it's been ripped-off, parodied, and been seen with countless knockoffs so many times it's difficult to find it properly funny when you finally get to it because so many of its successors have already trod that territory.  Perhaps there is no modern film where that's more true than Airplane!, a 1980-spoof comedy that used surreal humor and slapstick bits in bold new ways, building off of the works of Mel Brooks and Monty Python to pave the way for comedians like Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and Seth MacFarlane in the coming decades.  I realized its impact by watching the picture for the first time last week, realizing almost every sequence in the movie has some sort of homage in a Family Guy episode.  The problem is, though, if you've already seen it, how do you pay credence to what is before you without also admitting that you just aren't laughing at the jokes?

(Spoilers Ahead) Airplane! is a spoof of the disaster films of the previous decades, particularly Zero Hour! and the Airport series.  The plot is relatively simple, as a bunch of people of various walks and backgrounds board an airliner that is doomed.  The crew is serving a meal that gives most of the pilots on the plane food poisoning, resulting in Ted (Hays), a traumatized pilot from the Vietnam war, to have to take the reigns of the plane.  His girlfriend Elaine (Hagerty) is a flight attendant on the plane, and has been rejecting him throughout, but finally comes around to a romance when he saves everyone on board the plane with a successful landing.  All-the-while, we learn more about all of the supporting players, both in the air and on the ground, who are impacted by the plane's stormy journey.

This all sounds admittedly like your average disaster film, with a handsome man and a beautiful woman falling in love in the roughest of situations, all while surrounded by a hodgepodge of supporting players.  Except, of course, with Airplane! it's played for laughs.  The film parodies all of the romantic feelings between Ted and Elaine as comedy, and all of the characters in the film are played frequently for dry, sarcastic humor, contradicting the actors' real-life personas.  It's worth noting that at this point in their careers Stack, Bridges, Graves, and Nielsen hadn't done comedy, or done a spoof of their work in such a way.  They were serious actors known for 1950's and 60's dramatic television (with series like The Untouchables, Sea Hunt, Mission: Impossible, and Hawaii Five-O giving them actorly heft).  This is bizarre now, particularly for Nielsen, who is basically only remembered for this style of comedy rather than his first three decades in film considering his followups in the Naked Gun series made him a matinee idol in the way that drama never could, but at the time this was a really neat trick, the equivalent of someone like Mariska Hargitay doing a film about cops where she's serious but no one around her is.

The problem is that the humor in Airplane! is not just borrowed from (something I think I'd be able to respect), but it's truly, horribly dated.  This is something you always have to keep in check when talking about an older film, but if the main goal is to make you laugh, it just didn't.  The film is frequently sexually regressive (there's one scene where literally a woman's naked breasts are onscreen for a second, though there's literally no other purpose to her being there), and the racism is omnipresent.  There are two black characters who speak "jive" toward each other, unable to properly communicate with the white characters in the film save for Barbara Billingsley (like the men we listed above, this was an against type role for Billingsley, most well-known for playing the "All-American Mom" June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver), and this is all played for laughs, as is the effeminate man prancing about making gay jokes among the other straight characters.  Most of the humor in the film is mined from these sort of regressive stereotypes, and while it's 1980, Mel Brooks, for example, had done better in pictures like Young Frankenstein (though of course even Brooks had struggled with indulging stereotypes in movies like Blazing Saddles).  All of this is to say that while I understand that Airplane! is an important milestone in modern comedy, I just didn't like it.