When you talk about “classic cinema” you talk about motion pictures that influenced the culture. Films that inspired other films, established careers, wormed their way into the memories of audiences, endured in our cultural heritage in some way…
Well, by that definition, you could argue Airplane! is of greater cultural significance than Citizen Kane.
It’s sure a lot funnier.
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Pace
Airplane! belongs to a subgenre of movie comedies that parody existing films or film types—the most obvious predecessors to Airplane!’s style would be things like Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, or High Anxiety. And these in turn owed a debt to earlier works by Abbott & Costello and Bob Hope. But Airplane! brought something significantly new to the party in terms of its overall comic pace.
Even the most gag-addled of Mel Brooks’ works spent the first reel establishing the characters, setting, and premise, so that there would be a framework on which to hang the rapid-fire jokes. But consider the opening title sequence to Airplane! On a loudspeaker, two different announcers make contradictory public alerts about which color courtesy phone to use for which purpose, and this quickly descends into a domestic squabble between them. Now, neither of these announcers are named, nor are they characters in the story ahead, and nothing about this means anything other than that it is funny. Remember, this is still just the opening titles—many audience members are still taking their seats and settling into their popcorn, few are paying attention to much of anything at this point, much less attuned to the nuances of the background chatter that in any other film we’d be expected to ignore.
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Meanwhile, other jokes whizz by in the background—absurd magazine titles on the newsstand racks, a man removing an artificial leg to go through a metal detector, a stewardess punching a monk, scattershot blackout gags all over the place—and we haven’t really gotten going yet. It’s almost exhausting.
Anyone who came to this expecting an amiable and undemanding 90 minutes of comedy is now put on notice—sit up straight, don’t blink, take notes if you have to. This will all be on the test. (There’s a gag involving a taxi driver that is set up here in the opening titles that will be paid off an hour and a half later, during the closing titles.)
I remember seeing this in 1980 and being stunned. I’d never seen anything like this before (mostly because I hadn’t seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail until two years later).
Taking It Seriously
It’s perhaps less easy today to recognize the stunt casting at work, because Leslie Nielson went on to a thriving second career as a deadpan comedian in the wake of this, but the casting of Nielson, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges was integral to the film’s success. None of these people (again, at the time) would have been seen as comedians, and they played their parts completely straight.
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On top of that, the film around them seems to play it straight—despite the aggressive barrage of jokes, they aren’t presented as jokes. There’s no wa-wa trombone, no rim shot, no Jimmy Finlayson doing double takes. The jokes are presented with a po-faced pomposity as if it was all earnest—which makes the silliness of the proceedings that much more exhilarating.
But when I say “silliness” I mean the stuff crammed into the margins. The plot itself is serious: a passenger jet loses its crew to food poisoning and can only be landed by an emotionally damaged passenger who must face not only the physical hazards of landing in a storm but also his own personal demons. This is a serious plot, because it was poached intact from an actual non-comedy, Zero Hour (1957).
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Breaking the Fourth Wall
In addition to Nielson, Graves, Stack and Bridges, there’s another bit of stunt casting in the person of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It was and is a common enough approach to casting to bring in a famous athlete looking to diversify into acting. (Just think of OJ Simpson, who went from football star to dramatic actor to being turned, a la Nielson, into a spoof of himself by the very makers of Airplane! before he went and definitively changed how the world saw him). But throughout Airplane!, the other characters keep drawing attention to the fact that co-pilot Roger Murdoch is played by a world famous NBA star—until he cracks and seemingly admits that somehow he is Abdul-Jabbar, in what is a gloriously meta-punchline.
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Robert Stack takes a windy road, courtesy a back projection screen, only to have the screen’s existence as a screen take over and defy any attempt at suspension of disbelief.
Lloyd Bridges strikes a commanding pose… in front of a photograph of him in the exact same pose. Is this a joke? It’s funny, and memorable, and distinctive—but it’s to the credit of Airplane!’s unique comic intensity that it make such silly abstractions as giddily entertaining as more elaborately conceived jokes.
Suspense
Any reader of this blog has surely figured out by now I love the intersection of comedy and suspense. Like jalapenos and cheese—or to choose a less savory combo, chocolate and peanut butter—these are two things that are very nearly perfect on their own, but magically become even more sublime when brought together. Comedy enhances suspense (go see Foreign Correspondent) and suspense enhances comedy (go see To Be Or Not To Be), and sometimes the two are so intertwined there is no clear way to separate one from the other (go see Sunrise).
Thanks to Airplane!’s insistence on having the cast play everything straight, and to have the film itself pretend to take the plot seriously, the audience gets pulled into the escalating tension inherent in the material. This allows third-act jokes to wring nervous laughs out of bizarre material—like Nielson extracting egg after egg from a sick man’s mouth (this particular scene traumatized my son for years, because of the violative body horror and nightmarish imagery).
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Legacy
The measure of Airplane!’s lasting cultural imprint can best be taken by noticing how many of its lines have become part of our lexicon. (My wife actually said “I picked a bad day to quit sniffing glue” during a job interview. At a law firm. And got the job. Oh dear Lord I love her.) For my money, you could stop there.
I mean, yes, it made a boatload of cash (earning back its budget in just days). It was nominated far a host of prestigious awards, and won some of them. It was selected for the National Film Registry. Blah blah blah.
It was funny. It still is. People liked it then and they still do now. There was almost nothing like it before it came along, and now its style and pace of comedy are prevalent. It launched the careers of its makers and created a new career path for Leslie Nielson. Sounds like the definition of a classic to me.
