This review was updated on September 21, 2024
The genre parody had existed before Airplane!. In the ’60s and ’70s, movies as diverse as Carry On Screaming!, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Blazing Saddles had lampooned specific genres, often very successfully. But Airplane! was the first to fully exploit the possibilities of the form, to take the by-then familiar framework of the airborne disaster movie and use it not so much as a source of humour, but simply as a skeleton on which to hang as many jokes as humanly possible.
Never before had any movie displayed such a single-minded dedication to scoring laughs, at the expense of absolutely everything else: eschewing the visual splendour of Holy Grail or the political nous of Blazing Saddles, here was a film whose only reason for existing was to deliver jokes, as many of them as possible, to pummel the audience into submission with sheer overwhelming comic firepower.
What’s most extraordinary, looking back, is that the vast majority of them are really good jokes – not always clever, not always tasteful, but for the most part really damn funny. From wordplay – ‘don’t call me Shirley’; ‘I’ve been nervous lots of times’; ‘Me John. Big tree!’ – to visual gags – the magic egg; the automatic pilot; Nun’s Life – to jokes that really oughtn’t to work but do (‘Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?’), gag-for-gag it’s almost certainly the funniest film ever made.
Which is an achievement that can’t be undervalued: even writer-director team Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker would struggle to repeat the formula, turning in a 1982 sequel that, despite some fine moments, can’t quite match the original’s hit rate. They would score another well-deserved hit in 1988 with The Naked Gun, but that would create problems of its own, its success sparking an entire wave of sub-par genre parodies – from Scary Movie (2000) and its sequels to The Hungover Games (2014) – which actually seem to go out of their way to be as aggressively unfunny as possible.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993); Team America: World Police (2004); Hot Fuzz (2007)