#10 of 28 in the 20th century series

When I was ten years old, my family got a VCR and started going to video rental outlets such as the Wherehouse:

You may notice that front and center in that rotating display of Betamax tapes is Airplane!.  That’s not just happenstance.  Airplane! was always on prominent display at the video stores when I was a kid.  It was also heavily featured on the cable movie channels⁠—long before I started watching those, I recognized the “airplane in a knot” logo from the little glossy schedules we’d get in the mail each month.  I gathered that this movie, while still pretty recent, was considered an instant comedy landmark.  When I got a little older and finally saw it for myself, it soon became clear why: I’d never encountered this level of comedic density before.  There’s some kind of joke every few seconds for an hour and a half, ranging from very broad to surprisingly subtle.  And the filmmakers didn’t hesitate to dispense with any sort of narrative logic in the service of a gag.  “They could be miles off course.”  “That’s impossible⁠—they’re on instruments!”  Cut to the flight crew playing clarinets and trumpets.  That was a huge laugh when I was thirteen.

The problem with trying to figure out whether Airplane! would still be funny to me now that I’m not thirteen is that it’s inseparable from the question of whether it would still be funny to me on, what, the twentieth viewing?  I hadn’t seen it in 20+ years, and in fact I may have only watched it from start to finish a couple of times back in the day, but I’d seen 45-minute chunks of it on cable so many times that even after all this time I knew most of the movie by heart.  There’s also the question of how much any diminution of the laugh quotient was due to my being older vs. the fact that the whole culture’s sense of what’s funny has changed between 1980 and 2020.  So I was mainly interested in whether Ellie (who didn’t watch Airplane! back in the ’80s because of not being alive then) would find it funny at all.  As I recall, the only thing she really laughed at was the bit in the disco when the guy gets knifed in the back but still tries to keep dancing.  Otherwise, not so much.  She said that she was distracted by the question of whether she’d be laughing for the “right reason”⁠—i.e., was that just random, or was it a reference to something from the ’70s that she didn’t recognize by virtue of being even less born in the ’70s than in the ’80s?  The thing is, that’s not just an artifact of watching the movie forty years later.  Back in the ’70s, there was a string of movies about air travel disasters called the Airport series, and contemporaneous reviews of Airplane! billed it as a parody of those.  In fact, it turns out that Airplane! borrows its story and structure, pretty much scene for scene, from an even earlier movie, 1957’s Zero Hour!.  As a kid, I had no idea.  And I don’t think I was alone on that score.  I doubt that too many teenagers renting Airplane! in the early ’80s were familiar with Zero Hour!, and those who caught it on cable in the late ’80s probably hadn’t heard of Airport either.  And we who thought that the plot of Airplane! was just a wacky story that came out of nowhere were the ones who secured the movie its reputation, not the middle-aged generation who might have caught the parallels to the source material.

That said, most people of any age watching in the ’80s would have caught most of the references: the Yuban commercial (“Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home!”), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s goggles, gas station attendants, etc.  That has raised a question in some recent retrospectives on the film: what happens when those references recede from our cultural memory and people think that things like the coffee voiceover are just random?  The obvious answer is that the movie becomes less funny, but it seems like the Youth of Today™ finds ketchup randomness funnier than traditional humor.  I’ve taught a lesson sequence on humor in Shakespeare the past couple of years, and as an opening move I ask the students to write down the funniest thing they can think of, whether that be from a stand-up routine, a TV show, a movie, real life, anything.  The initial idea was to highlight some of the common structural features of comedy: subverted expectations, the rule of three, punching up and punching down, that sort of thing.  But to my surprise, very little of what they’ve volunteered has been structured comedy.  They turn in things like, “One time my mother coughed, but it came out weird and sounded really funny.”  And in the subsequent discussions, many of them have said flat out that they really only laugh at things if the very lack of a reason behind the joke is the joke.  That is, the fact that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s character is suddenly wearing goggles would be funny to them, until they learned that it was his trademark back in his NBA days, at which point the joke would be ruined by becoming a reference to something rather than to nothing.  (I was about to say that Airplane! is not a very reference-heavy movie in any case, and that the jokes I laughed at this time around were little interstitial ones that should be timeless, such as when the pilot is summoned over the airport intercom to the white courtesy phone, walks over to the bank of phones, picks up the red one, and immediately hears the operator say, “No, the white phone.”  But it occurs to me that zoomers and maybe even some millennials would not know what an airport courtesy phone is!  So, maybe not so timeless.) 

(By the way, $2 when that Wherehouse ad was filmed is $5.50 today.  Pricey!)

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