David Zucker is an absolute legend of the comedy genre. He’s the comic maestro behind “Naked Gun” “Airplane!” “Top Secret!” and “Scary Movie.” The man has delivered the classics.
Could these movies get made in today’s climate? Well, let’s take “Airplane!” as an example, that comedy classic features gags on “jive” talk, slapping women silly and a young girl saying she likes her coffee black, just like her men. Probably not. Our society has lost its sense of humor.
In a recent interview, Zucker has sounded the alarm on the dire state of the comedy genre today and how it compares to when he made all those famous movies back in the ‘80s:
“We could be as offensive as we liked,” Zucker said. “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. As time went on, it got to be the ’90s and the 2000s and it did change… We never worried about any of this stuff with the ‘Naked Gun’ or ‘Scary Movie’ films.”
Something changed in recent years for Zucker. He gives the example of a studio note he received concerning a joke dealing with a female spy who needed a breast reduction to fit into her Kevlar vest. Then, after that incident, Zucker claims it got much worse in terms of what could and couldn’t be said. To the point where he wasn’t sure if it was worth it to work within the barriers studios kept installing in front of him.
“They’re destroying comedy because of 9 percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humor,” he said. He added that “AIrplane!” could be made today, “just without the jokes.” “Comedy is in trouble, of course, but I think it’s going to come back. There’s a pendulum, and the pendulum will swing back,” he said. “I’d like to see comedy filmmakers do comedies without fear.”
Is comedy in danger?
Can you name any American comedies in the last five years that actually made you laugh? I wholeheartedly can’t find more than a handful. Our culture has turned too self-serious, petrified to take risks and make people laugh. Off the top of my head, here are seven exceptions:
The Disaster Artist, Game Night, Dolemite is My Name, Longshot, Palm Springs and Bad Trip.
Comedians like to push and push and push until that very fine line of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable is somewhat squeezed to its very limit. As George Carlin once said, “It’s a comedian’s duty to find the line and deliberately cross over it.” That, to me at least, is what some of the very best comedy can do.
The truth is, in comedy, there really shouldn’t a firm line as to what's funny and what's in poor taste, but in our fevered social media reality everyone now loves to immediately point out when they they think that line has been crossed. "Tropic Thunder" and “Blazing Saddles” would have Twitter and the media up in a frenzy if released today. The universally positive reviews turned into abhorrently negative ones from scared and shrieking critics afraid to be called racist.