> Many of them take aim at people's sex or race, but not in a challenging way.

Interesting, I wouldn't summarise it that way at all.

If I had to characterise it so succinctly I'd say many of them play on language, and I think it's as funny now as when I first saw it (probably early 2000s).

"How soon can we land?"

"I can't tell."

"You can tell me, I'm a doctor."

As you said in another comment I suppose, it's a lot of 'dad jokes', but I don't know why you think it hasn't aged well.

Slapstick, highly visual comedy, and 'dad jokes' is hardly a massive on-screen genre; I might agree it hasn't done well over time if there was more of it, modern stuff, more developed somehow. But it's still so unlike most comedy films to me that I think it'll always make me laugh.

I've seen it a few times over the years. So many classic jokes. Last time, on Australian TV, before it started, there was a voice-over and onscreen warning "Recommended for Mature Audiences". That was (unintentionally) funnier to me than anything in the movie!

You sound like the kind of person who insists there is no stopping in the red zone.

You sound like the kind of person who thinks everything is black and white.

I love comedy. I like some of the jokes in Airplane. I think most of the jokes are dated and the movie hasn't aged well.

I'll agree that some of the jokes are dated - you can't smoke on airplanes anymore, but the idea that most of the jokes are dated?

Shirley you can't be serious? The word play and visual comedy in the movie is classic. The Roger/Clarance/Ouver take-off sequence, Leslie Neilsens deadpan "Dinner was the chicken or the fish? - yes I remember, I had the lasagne", the guy waiting in the taxi, "everything is ok" as the pilots are dragged down the corridor, Stiker being stationed outside of Drambuie. Hell I think Airplane has the first dramatic double-sunglassed removal.

There is so much clean, zany humour in that movie - the idea that you can claim classic, surrealist comedy is dated makes me question whether you believe that statement at all.

One that always gets me and is timeless, when the flight attendant hits everybody with the guitar when bringing it forward.

You ask someone else upthread when they last saw the movie. No offense but when was the last time you saw it? Very few jokes haven't aged well unless you just stopped liking puns and dad jokes, which would be a You thing, not a movie thing.

A small portion of the jokes make less sense out of their time, but you’re perhaps too hung up on the movie having “aged well.” People age a lot more than movies do. There were middle aged people just like yourself unimpressed by the constant idiocy of Airplane’s humor four decades ago, also nonplussed by how funny others found the film.

Don’t give us that red zone shit again.

Oh really - we both know perfectly well what this is about.

Surely you can’t be serious?

I think he is. But he isn’t called Shirley.

That's not important right now.

> The jokes are pedestrian.

That's the joke.

I love a good stupid joke, and these may have been funny at the time, but as I mentioned, they haven't really aged well. A lot of them are topical. Nowadays most of these jokes would feel lazy (because they are).

They feel lazy because everyone else has been copying them for the past 40 years. Another commenter was talking about “dad” jokes - where do you think “dad” learnt that type of humour?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28916271 ;)

The classic "Seinfeld isn't funny" effect

I don't think they are lazy. It's a lot of funny, original, creative and clever writing and delivery, it's very different from anything else, so I can't call that lazy. And I find it funny even without nostalgia since I wasn't born at the time. All of the humour being so unexpected is what does for me and much of it is hard to catch or understand during your first try, which also makes it intellectual challenge to try and understand everything.

I don't even think they are "stupid" jokes.

The actors are good. Their delivery and timing is good, and that saves some of the jokes. You can deliver a lazy joke well and get a laugh, it doesn't mean it isn't lazy.

When was the first time you watched this movie? Was it as an adult? Recently? If you watched it when you were young, and you're not young anymore, that's nostalgia. It has nothing to do with when the movie was produced.

I watched it recently with my SO and saw it when I was young and they had not seen it before. We both laughed our heads off.

And we both recognize humor at the expense of the other, but that simply isn't what 90% of the humor in Airplane! is. Compared to what came later in the 80s and 90s it was quite self-aware.

I may have seen it as a child, but I watched it recently and I don't think I had enough recollection of it to have any nostalgia at all.

AS others have said, they seem lazy as they've been copied ad nauseam in the 40 years since the movie. I believe that Airplane! was the first zany comedy containing these ridiculous types of jokes. Many movies have followed and tried to copy the humour but have failed. Will there be discussions in 30 years about Scary Movie and its sequels? I doubt it.

Not true. Go on Youtube and look at the number of people (a lot of them younger) that still enjoy the movie thoroughly. There are a few scenes that no longer hit as well as they did 30 years ago, but the majority still works.

>Many of them take aim at people's sex or race, but not in a challenging way.

I don't think you have to be too challenging funny.

This scene still makes me smile a decade later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9lYVwNEf48

I have to disagree, sure some jokes are about sex and race but its not the majority by far. And some of those jokes are actually good. Even when it came out, some jokes fell flat.

What about the architecture? The alternative world drawn? The originality of the whole product?

You look at the pebbles and have not spotted the cathedral. You overworked the left analytic hemisphere and left the right synthetic one bumping for attention, you "I will only do pecs at the gym because legs are for losers" pedestrian you, comma slash jay.

The architecture is pure genius, the jokes serve it.

Make the case for those. This is very pretty pose but it doesn't really say anything except that you think these elements exist without any real criticism to back it.

Airplane! is still funny to me but I've never looked at it as anything more than a well delivered (almost) 90 "anything for a laugh" reel.

In fact, the world building part where they establish the backstory is the weakest part for me as structurally it serves as a pause from the non-stop schtick for most of the present day sections, but the differences are very prolonged jokes that don't survive a first watch in my opinion.

The genius isn't so much the architecture it's the delivery and the speed. You don't get time to fully think through everything that happens and the actors play it straight for the most part. There is comedy atop a functional parody and as soon as the gag is done it moves on to the next progression.

In general I like Zucker and his movies but I think here both he and you misunderstand why his movies worked then and which elements worked. The scene with the kids and the lame "like my coffee" joke is not a good scene not because of the joke's adherence to puritán values, but because the entire joke is "look these young kids are saying things adults should." They can't deliver the lines with the same commitment to the short term deviation from reality and it falls flat.

The joke Zucker references in the article about sucking dick again falls flat for me not because of inappropriateness but because it's a lousy joke for someone not in the room or having that relationship dynamic, it's a weak joke without much substance besides the shock of "[Dad] said suck cock".

It's not about right vs left here, it's about understanding what's funny and why stuff is funny. The discussion earlier on this thread about the German dub is a perfect example where the idea of the funny is what makes it work, even if there is no such thing as jive in German; the core logic of the joke is understoodand that's why the dub worked. Comedy has a logic to it and if it's understandable immediately, it's funny because we get how they got to that point. Even early 2000's random humor had a logic to it, albeit a little out there, but there's a reason that it worked for some flash vids and not others.

Comedy is all of the brain, and arguably even more logical part as you have to get the joke to laugh at it. I think we all know a time when someone got the joke way later because they just didn't process it or couldn't process it.

I just noticed: that joke you called «inappropriate ... lousy joke for someone not in the room or having that relationship dynamic, ... a weak joke without much substance besides the shock» is actually a bathos. These suggestions of addiction, peer pressure, insecurity, doubt, urgency - they are all pathos, the mother stressed. At some point, the father intervened with a "proposal" that put all of that in proportion, and deflated the pathos into bathos. Sympathetic system, parasympathetic system. To suggest that you can laugh about it and live it healthily - also because, since you have the wits required to laugh, you can also use them to avoid pitfalls and come back home without male pregnancy and not addicted to heroin. Take seriously the things that should be taken seriously, respecting a healthy limit. As suggested by the bathos. Which "teaches" you to "breath".

I'd say there's more to it than what you saw.

(I apologize for the stub, unfortunately "I have to run".)

Why should it be «Comedy»? Maybe it can be just a big construct using jokes. (The intention of the creator does not matter.) Maybe just the "simple" development of absurd over deadpan - which is not "comedic" - defines a core for that cathedral.

Because you called the comedy bits pebbles ;).

> They can't deliver the lines with the same commitment to the short term deviation from reality and it falls flat.

Looking at some YT reaction videos of that movie, that line always get people laugh ting. It gets some of the best laughs of the movie in fact.

You're putting way too much thought into this movie. It's a movie of dad jokes with good delivery and timing. I can appreciate that, but it's not a work of genius.

What one would call "dad jokes" are a small part of the endless array of gags in the movie. From sniffing glue, to the queue to hit the anxious woman, the swordfighting when panic breaks out, speaking jive, blowing the automated pilot, the turkish prison bit - it's a relentless sequence of all possible types of humor.

Comedy doesn't get enough respect because "it's just laughs", but this shit is hard. To pack so many accomplished jokes in such a short movie is genius - particularly in 1974.

Again (really, again): it's not "thought", it's "eyes" (analysis vs synthesis). On this side. On your side: you are just not seeing it.

You should respect comedy more, it's way harder to do than drama.

I first watched the film in the early 2000s. I was politically a lot more right-wing then than I am now and enjoyed edgy humor to the point I even frequented 4chan. Not one of the jokes landed for me.

I now call myself a socialist, have an interest in social justice causes and intersectional feminism and am as leftist as I can get. I still can't laugh about any of the jokes.

I think the biggest factor is that the movie plays off tropes of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood movies and this creates a massive cultural disconnect since I have barely watched any of those and the few I did I deliberately watched as an adult.

For similar reasons most of Mel Brooks' movies also never did it for me. I grew up in the 1990s and at the time prime time television happily recycled movies only a few years old rather than digging through the archives.