The Problematics: ‘Airplane!’ The Jokes We Roared At Then Are A Little Cringey Nowadays … Or Are They?

Is it possible to be suddenly and genuinely indignant over something 30 or 40 years after the fact? Recently I saw a social media post by an individual of (probable?) good faith, in which he cited a racially insensitive observation by a deceased critic he had long held in the highest esteem. This occasioned, for him, a fair amount of breast-beating about how he can’t believe he sat still for such stuff back when he first read it in 1971 or so.

While one may huff and puff all one wants, this solves nothing. Better to soberly examine the state of things now relative to the state of things then. It can be disquieting, true. Especially with respect to the things we used to laugh at, and still laugh at. A friend who has about fifteen years on me told me recently that he has a hard time watching Marx Brothers movies, because the sight of silent madcap Harpo Marx chasing and sometimes jumping on hapless young women leaves a bad taste.

I see his point. In the 1930s the avid male pursuit of females as staged in such pictures was taken lightly because of its particular outlandishness — Harpo’s actions seemed more anarchical than assaultive. But our enhanced consciousness on these matters sucks the antic quality out of these bits. They make you grit your teeth and wait for Groucho to come in with a wisecrack. Many of which are sexist. You kind of can’t win.

Aiplane!, the groundbreaking parody comedy concocted by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, and now streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime, will turn 40 next year. That’s just exactly middle age, given current trends in geriatrics. But while it’s not that old, a lot of its purposefully skating-at-the-edges-of-overt-bad-taste humor has not aged super well.

Watching it recently, I kept a running tally of all the jokes likely to give offense. I graded liberally, which is to say, conservatively: I included the Jewish jokes conceived and executed by the movie’s Jewish auteurs, and a twins-conjoined-at-the-head visual gag that I considered too improbable to get really worked up about, among other things. I also counted instances of characters just being gratuitously mean, like air traffic guy Gunderson’s immortal “What an asshole” aside. And I came up with a total of 45 (for running gags, including the notorious Captain Oveur musings, I kept the same number and subdivided alphabetically). That’s a lot for an 87-minute movie.

We tend to recollect the movie as a lighthearted romp. The writer-directors took a premise straight from serious 1950s melodrama — the movie’s plot about an airplane in flight whose crew is incapacitated is derived from an actual 1957 picture, Zero Hour!, partially written by future Airport author Arthur Hailey and starring Dana Andrews as Ted Stryker, that latter name being retained for the parody — and ruthlessly sent it up with straight-faced malaprops, fourth-wall breaking gags, and a relentless barrage of terrible puns and sometimes grossly literal sight gags. (When one character, late in the movie, says “The shit’s gonna hit the fan,” you can guess what you see next.) It doesn’t come off as a vehicle for offense even as it begins pushing the envelope early on.

Outside the airport, for instance, two competing announcers, male and female, are giving contradictory information concerning the “red zone” and the “white zone;” this degenerates into a personal argument in which the male voice says, “you should have gone ahead and had that abortion.” If you’re a person who believes one ought not make light of abortion under any circumstances, this is going to rub you the wrong way. But what makes it funny, if you do find it funny, is the incongruity of the topic coming up in this context.

The same goes, in theory, for the running joke involving the airplane’s captain, Clarence Oveur. He’s played by Peter Graves, once the lead actor on the TV series Mission Impossible. Graves was known for his stentorian voice and his stiff —some would say stilted— line readings. Casting him in a comedy at all is part of the joke.

There’s been a lot of talk about how certain cast members, veterans of film melodramas and straitlaced TV fare including Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen, didn’t know they were acting in a comedy. This strains credulity — Robert Stack was a really intelligent guy, so there’s no way he thought whipping off one pair of sunglasses to reveal another pair of sunglasses behind them wasn’t some kind of joke.

But these actors were expected to, and did, deliver their ridiculous lines with absolute poker faces. So when young Joey is ushered into the cockpit and Graves’ character immediately starts in with “You ever seen a grown man naked? Joey? You ever hang around the gymnasium?” the laughter it triggers is not because pedophilia is funny — it’s not — but because this character actor is saying these words with unabashed, bland, stentorian sincerity. And the “I can’t believe this” effect is heightened not just by the fact that no one in the cockpit reacts (save stewardess Randy, who wants to get Joey out of there as quickly as possible) but that Oveur/Graves keeps at it, reaching an apex or nadir with “Do you like gladiator movies?”

This ostensibly distasteful stuff is woven in with my favorite gag in the movie, wherein little Joey (the redoubtable Rossie Harris) recognizes copilot Roger Murdock for the performer who’s playing him: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the hoops superstar then still with the Lakers. “I think you’re the greatest…” Joey tells him, before outlining the way Joey’s dad thinks Jabbar is unmotivated. The response is the best comedic acting by a professional athlete in any Zucker-steered comedy ever.

If you’re willing to provide a little legroom for context, much of the Airplane! stuff still works some irreverent magic. The business with the two African-American passengers (Norman Alexander Gibbs and Al White) who speak in a patois designated “jive” can be processed as either offensively inverted minstrelsy or a broad burlesque in which all the participants are fully in on the joke; obviously it plays better if seen as the latter. And there’s supporting evidence for that interpretation: in an interview, Gibbs and White talk about how they wrote their “jive” dialogue themselves, and then coached Leave It To Beaver mom Barbara Billingsley in it. The male-gaze leering stuff, on the other hand — Joey checking out the derriere of an adult woman in the aisle, jiggling jello on the plate of a woman in a t-shirt with no bra, the naked torso of Russ Meyer star Kitten Natividad passing the camera during a shot of passenger panic — is what it is.

As for the non-edgy humor, well. The punchline (following a very laborious setup) “Give me Ham on five, hold the Mayo” is not offensive, but merely unforgivable. Relative to these parlous times, the best advice I can give concerning Airplane! is this: laugh now, worry about it later. But not too much later.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Airplane!