Re:David Zucker reflects on "Airplane!" in 2021
by hnbad on Tuesday October 19, 2021 @05:02AM
(#28916187)
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.
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.