Review of Airplane! (1980) by David C — 22 Nov 2014

"Airplane!" finds success with broad comedy. It would have been easy to make it a parody of something particular, like the disaster movies that were popular at the box office throughout the 1970s, and it does draw on those.

But it also grabs from a much larger bag of contemporary references: the movie opens with the "Jaws" theme, progresses to a "Saturday Night Fever" parody, and casts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar specifically to make jokes about his basketball career.

Abdul-Jabbar's comedic timing is a little on the slow side, but it makes no difference because the joke is that he's playing himself playing someone else. "Airplane!" is still funny because of the kind of comedy it uses.

When it goes for topical humor, it goes so big-the biggest blockbusters, the biggest athletes, the biggest politicians-that almost everyone is in on the jokes without explanation, even decades later. A few lines might send younger viewers to Wikipedia, but those lines are the exception rather than the rule.

Mostly the movie eschews referential comedy in favor of basic puns and gags. As with all comedy bits, some work (the send-ups of epic movie speeches are all well-delivered), some get old (the gay jokes haven't aged great), and a lot just depends on taste (from what I understand, some people don't like puns!) Nothing pleases all of the people all of the time, but with wordplay, surrealism, and slapstick in its arsenal, "Airplane!" probably pleases all of the people some of the time.

For a broad comedy that's the idea.