David Zucker wrote some of the funniest movies in Hollywood history: Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Scary Movie 3. He may be the world’s top spoof comedy writer, and he shared all his tricks in our interview.
Highlights below:
Let the lines do the work: Zucker doesn’t want actors to try to be funny on top of the dialogue itself. Trying to be funny kills the humor, so he tells them to speak plainly.
Spoofs work best when actors play it like they don't know they're in a comedy.
Keep the audience laughing. It's easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up all over again. That’s why his movies have joke-after-joke-after joke.
Zucker got started doing live in-person comedy sketches, which taught him how to gauge an audience's feedback to see if a joke is funny. Unlike most directors, he does the same thing with movies, which gives him a better sense for what is / isn’t funny.
Doing these live performances taught Zucker that being clever isn't enough. You have to actually get people to laugh. If they aren't laughing, it ain't funny. Simple as that. Doesn't matter how smart you are.
Unlike most kinds of writing, it’s way easier to write comedy in a group because you can gauge other people's reactions so much faster.
By the time a topic is being referenced at major film awards or late night TV shows, it’s past its prime. Talk about something else.
Don’t blame others for failure. When something doesn’t work, look in the mirror and ask: "What did I do wrong?"
Don’t break the frame by reminding the audience that they’re watching a movie (with some exceptions).
Your first draft will be too long. It’s true for writing and it’s true for film.
Avoid jokes that depend on trivia, where you reference something so specific that only a few people will get it.
Cut on the laugh, not after it. The moment you hit peak funny, move on.
Jokes aren’t enough… Even comedies need a story the audience actually cares about.
Don’t acknowledge your jokes. Doing so kills the laugh.
The last rule is that there are no rules. It is sometimes wise to break every one of these rules.
Transcript
David Perell:
Well, you've made some hilarious movies: Airplane, Naked Gun. What I'm curious about is when you're writing those movies, how do I make a good spoof movie? How do I make something funny? What are the mantras, the one-liners, the things that you find yourself repeating the most?
David Zucker:
Generally, for directing, I tell actors, "Let the lines do the work." So I don't want anybody to try to be funny. The first meeting I ever had with Priscilla Presley was that she said, "I'd love to be in the movie. I think the script is funny, but I don't know how to be funny."
I said, "You don't have to be funny. You just have to do what you did in Dallas, essentially." We saw her in Dallas. She never came and read for the part. I just thought, "I want that person who did Dallas." She got it, and I literally never had to direct her. I was able to concentrate on all the other actors.
David Perell:
And then how about in the process of actually writing the script out?
David Zucker:
In the process of writing the script, we have rules. Basically, we take off on serious movies.
Airplane was a spoof on Zero Hour, which was a very serious 1957 movie with the exact same plot. We just take those scenes and reverse the audience's expectations. It's always a matter of surprise, which I learned in fifth grade from watching the Dick Van Dyke Show.
There was an episode where Dick Van Dyke was asked to speak at his son Richie's class, and all the other dads were speaking about what they did. Dick Van Dyke was in a quandary about what he would talk about, so he talked about writing comedy.
It was the first time I ever heard anybody talking about it as somewhat of a science, and one of the things that he said is, "Comedy depends on surprise. You have to surprise the audience."
Anyways, cut to 40 years later. I'm at a party at Kelsey Grammer's house in Malibu, and who should be there but Dick Van Dyke. So I talked to Dick Van Dyke. I told him, "I've always liked thought he was great. I liked his movies, the TV show, and, in fact, one line from your show made me do comedy." I described that to him, and he had no recollection of it.
David Perell:
So this was a line about surprise?
David Zucker:
Yeah, the line about surprise, or the episode was about speaking to Richie's class. He didn't have any recollection, but he did hundreds of episodes of things.
David Perell:
So when you're thinking through surprise, what kind of surprises work? And then what kind of surprises don't work? Break that down for me.
David Zucker:
Any surprise, if it's funny, works. If you just do a surprise, that's not necessarily funny.
If you start with the surprise of two 11-year-olds, 9-year-olds, talking like adults, and then one of them, when asked how she takes her coffee, says, "I take it black like my men," that's a surprise. It was a surprise to Jerry and me when we first heard it.
We heard it because our partner, Jim Abrahams, he would type, and we would all throw out ideas, but Jim would type. Often he would just type stuff in, not tell us about it, not pitch an idea, just we just read it back, and so we cracked up.
David Perell:
So you just sit in a room and you just make each other laugh the entire time?
David Zucker:
Yeah, we sit in a room, and really how we write is we watch the straight movies. With Top Secret, we watched World War II spy movies.
With the Naked Gun, we watched Clint Eastwood movies and James Bond movies and a few film noir movies. So we got all of our ideas from those, and they were all done with serious actors.
A serious actor would discover something in a drawer and say, "Bingo!" Then our surprise was that it's a bingo card.
David Perell:
Yeah, that but the beaver line cracked me up, too.
David Zucker:
Nice beaver, looks up.
David Perell:
I just got it stuffed.
David Zucker:
I will say it looks easy, but it's not, and there's a million things that can go wrong in comedy. So that's why we evolved these rules, which date from 1972 when we did our Kentucky Pride theater show on Pico Boulevard in LA.
Somebody actually leveled a criticism at us, said, "The show is great. Everybody has to tell us how great we are first." Then he said, "But there was one scene where you did a joke on a joke," and that became our first rule.
[05:31] The Joke on a Joke Rule
David Perell:
Tell me about that.
David Zucker:
Well, one character usually has to be a straight man and the other the funny guy. That's been true from Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, although all the Marx Brothers were clowns, but they always had straight men around them to play their scenes off of. So if you had everybody trying to be funny, it's a joke on a joke.
For instance, Peter Graves is doing these very hilarious lines in Airplane, but if Bill Murray had been doing it or Jim Carrey, it wouldn't have been as funny. This is nothing to say against these guys; brilliant comedians. Robin Williams is a brilliant comedian, but we wouldn't know what to do with those guys in our movies.
David Perell:
Is it that you don't want to pile on jokes, so you want to focus on one joke at a time? Is that right, wrong, or am I just completely missing the point?
David Zucker:
You're completely missing the point.
David Perell:
Is there another interviewer?
David Zucker:
Is there another interviewer?
David Perell:
Yeah, exactly.
David Zucker:
No, so I'll go back to Airplane. We have Peter Graves in the foreground, and Leslie and Julie Haggerty are discussing the symptoms of what happens when you eat the fish. Leslie is talking about these horrible symptoms, like uncontrollable flatulence or whatever happens, and Peter Graves is doing the funny stuff in the foreground.
It doesn't matter if it's sometimes we do jokes in the foreground, sometimes it happens in the background, and a lot of times we let the audience find the joke, which we find audiences appreciate. They don't want to have everything pointed out. That's a directing note more than a writing note.
[07:44] Directing vs. Writing Comedy
David Perell:
Tell me about the difference between those two.
David Zucker:
Well, Leslie Nielsen, again, in Airplane, is attending to a sick woman, and there's turbulence. He looks up to the cockpit and says, "What the hell's going on up there?" The woman has two legs in stirrups, and he's got a speculum.
He never acknowledges it, which is another rule called acknowledgement: you don't acknowledge the joke, and you don't do anything to be subtle. It's weird for me to be talking about subtlety because I don't think we're really known for subtlety, but it is subtle, and it is disciplined. Like I said, it looks easy, and everybody thinks they can do it.
David Perell:
Why don't you want to acknowledge the joke?
David Zucker:
Because it will make it half as funny if Leslie was clowning around or saying something to the woman. Instead, he just completely ignores it.
We know the audience loves finding things for themselves. It's the same with a reaction shot. Often I don't want to cut to a reaction shot. I'd rather have a two-shot and have somebody say something crazy and again, not acknowledge it, and the other person in the shot doing the take. But if Leslie or George Kennedy said something funny and you had to cut to the reaction, it cuts it down 50%.
David Perell:
Where did your pacing come from? Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
David Zucker:
The pacing came from our show. We started in Madison in 1971. We had a little 70-seat theater, and then we moved the show to LA and did a live sketch show called Kentucky Fried Theater.
Jerry, Jim, and I were not especially talented clown comedians, so we wrote material for ourselves that enabled us to just be straight and react to the situations. While we were on stage, we never wanted there to be silence. We needed laughs all the time. This is not a rule, but it's something we always talked about: our flywheel theory, which means it's easier to keep an audience laughing than to have them stop and start them up again.
This is why when I see stand-up comedians, I sometimes say, "Why are they waiting until the last laugh has gone? They should get on with it while the audience is still laughing."
David Perell:
It's funny. I'm only just realizing this now, but I feel like that's one of the reasons that your movies have stood up well.
I watched a documentary from the 70s the other day. It was boring. My brain just can't. It's too slow. I think the pacing of Airplane...
David Zucker:
Even 50 years ago, it was too slow for us at whatever pace existed then in movies. You had the Marx Brothers, and it was a slower pace. Blake Edwards was also a slower pace. Peter Sellers was brilliant, and Blake Edwards was brilliant, but the pace of comedies was slower then.
So we did something different because we wanted everything to be either a setup to a joke or a joke. There's no reason to have anything go on longer. When I write a script now with Pat Proft and Mike McManus, I see the page very visually. If I see a speech with any more than six lines, my eye sees it as a quarter-inch too long, so I will work on cutting out words.
David Perell:
Tell me this: When you're doing the movies versus Kentucky Fried Theater, do you do testing with audiences to make sure that you're still getting that consistent laugh?
David Zucker:
Absolutely. We tested everything, starting with Kentucky Fried Movie. We took it out and tested it, and we cut the movie to the laughs. Airplane, absolutely. We probably previewed 100 minutes of Airplane, and then we cut it down to 80, I think.
David Perell:
Yeah, it's short.
David Zucker:
Yes, but that's all an audience can take in comedy. Plus, in 80 or 90 minutes, you can do three acts. The only thing that's important is the story, and you can get it done in 90 minutes. There's no reason to go any longer than that.
David Perell:
A lot of other comedies start as comedies, and then they turn into a story that has some more depth. I'm like, "No, I came here to see a comedy. Yours, I'm laughing the whole way through."
[12:47] Casting Straight Actors in Comedy
David Zucker:
Not only are the jokes important, of course, but more important than the jokes is the story. You have to have a story.
You don't want to be preaching or anything, but the story has to be a believable story between one or two humans that the audience gets involved in and has a rooting interest.
David Perell:
So this would be like the love story on Airplane?
David Zucker:
Yes, the love story. People really didn't care that much if he landed the plane, though they ended up really caring. They were on the edge of their seats, even though it was a stupid comedy. But what they really cared about was the love story.
In the Naked Gun, people laughed. It was funny the whole time. They wanted to make sure the Queen wasn't assassinated or whatever the plot was, but they really only cared about that. Leslie and Priscilla got together, the boy and girl got together at the end. Same with Two and a Half and Three.
We didn't have that clearly marked off in Top Secret, so although Top Secret is considered maybe the funniest movie and has the best jokes and the cleverest jokes, it's another rule: merely clever isn't enough. You have to get the laugh anyway.
David Perell:
Oh, tell me more about that.
David Zucker:
Okay, well, merely clever is where a lot of people stop. It's just clever. If we had audiences saying that in a preview for Naked Gun, Top Secret, Airplane, the scary movies, we would have cut it out.
If people were going, "Oh, that's funny," but they had. We had to hear the laugh. So that's the only thing. It's like Vince Lombardi said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing."
David Perell:
It's like that for humor.
David Zucker:
Yeah, it's like that for humor.
David Perell:
When you see comedy skits, movies, and you're just like, "Ugh, they're completely missing the point." What are the core things that you just want to yell to the television?
David Zucker:
Well, I want to yell, "Who cares?" Because usually it's because you don't. The filmmakers haven't involved me in the plot or the characters. I become a real stickler about that, and I learned by making mistakes.
When we did Top Secret, we didn't realize how important it was to build a character in the first act because the story's the thing that drives it. We didn't have that in Top Secret. So Val Kilmer starts out the first act, and we didn't give him a problem to solve. Not just a hardware problem, but a problem, an inner psychological problem that he had to solve.
Like Bob Hayes had an airplane; he had PTSD and was afraid of flying. It's very simple. Leslie Nielsen at the start of Naked Gun. By the time of Naked Gun, we had learned how important that was. So we said, "It doesn't matter that I beat up all these terrorists; his girlfriend left him, and it doesn't mean anything." That gave him a problem. He needed love. Then he meets Priscilla, and it became boy meets girl, gets girl, loses girl, gets girl.
David Perell:
What's funny is that a lot of these are ultimately just love stories.
David Zucker:
Is that they should be.
David Perell:
Yeah, they should be. Why?
David Zucker:
Because that's the only thing the audience cares about. They don't care about hardware. This is stuff that I've learned.
In basketball, we had a great story with Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They invented a game, but it wasn't clear what their problem was in the beginning. It wasn't an inner psychological problem, but we had them being friends.
David Perell:
Then.
David Zucker:
They broke up. It was boy loses girl in the second act. Then Trey had to get the friendship back together, realize his mistake.
It wasn't enough, I think it needed to be something more. The hardware problem was that they started this game, and the evil Robert Vaughn wanted to take it over and make it like all other bad commercial sports.
It's another lesson. Top Secret and basketball are just. People love those movies, so I'll take it.
David Perell:
So as you're writing the script, do you think, "Oh, I'm gonna start with the story, the characters, the comedy," or is it just, "I'm gonna mix them all together, and I need to make sure that all three components are there?"
[17:52] Writing Process and Collaboration
David Zucker:
Well, you have to mix it all together, but you have to start with something. And of course, in Airplane, we had zero hours, so that was easy. We had that to start with.
With The Naked Gun, we had a bunch of movies that we wanted to put together. One of them was about somebody trying to track an assassin across many states.
Then we also used a movie called Telephon with Charles Bronson. That was where somebody could mind control with a beeper, and we just stole that. But we didn't steal the whole plot, so it was legal.
That was a more difficult one to do. For the movie that Pat and Mike and I just finished writing, it's a film noir comedy called Star of Malta. We hope to be in pre-production soon, and we hope to be casting soon. There we used a movie called Detour.
Detour was a 1945 noir movie, which was great for two acts, and then suddenly it ends. Sometimes a movie ends and you say, "What? What happened? Where's the rest of the movie?" In Detour, all I could think of was maybe they ran out of money and they couldn't finish it.
Pat, Mike, and I watched about 20 noir movies, and we used dialogue, plot, and scenes and put this thing together. It turned out to be a great plot. I always say no one hits a hole in one. It took us a year and a half to write it, and you just keep doing draft after draft until it's ready.
David Perell:
How do you think about script detail? When I look at scripts, some writers write so much, and then other writers write less. But then you also do directing, so you probably don't need to write as much. Or do you like writing that out in the original script of visualizing the whole movie?
David Zucker:
I like to write it out perfectly because I want to take a year and a half. That's why I'm not especially excited about doing TV, where it's a grind and you have to hand in a script on Thursday. We can really sit down and be careful in the writing.
For all the movies I've done, I've always been very happy that every day that I showed up on the set, I had two or three great pages to do. I was always really confident, and there's no improvising.
On one movie I did called An American Carol, I wrote it with an old friend of mine, Louis Friedman, from my high school. He's brilliantly funny. We kind of wrote it, and it was a little bit rushed. Each day on the set, we'd finish the shooting, and then we'd rehearse the next day's shooting. We were just appalled at how bad it was.
We would stay in the trailer a few hours after wrap, and over bourbon, we would write the next day's pages. I never started a day of shooting where I wasn't really confident that we had funny stuff to shoot.
David Perell:
Tell me about that year and a half.
David Zucker:
How does that go of writing?
David Perell:
Yeah.
David Zucker:
It's fun. Writing is fun.
David Perell:
You do it in your office right now.
David Zucker:
I do it in my office right here.
David Perell:
Yeah.
David Zucker:
Mike comes here in person, and Pat lives in Minneapolis. We have Pat on Zoom.
Mike and I will write a draft and then send it to Pat, and he'll put his jokes into it. Pat is just the best joke writer ever.
David Perell:
What makes a good joke writer?
David Zucker:
Pat just always had that ability to not only write jokes, but he could write Frank Drebin. He wrote Leslie Nielsen. So all those great lines that when Leslie died, they quoted all of his great lines, like a midget at a urinal.
I had to stay on my toes, and all those were Pat Proft lines. I never wrote one of those things, but Pat could always do it.
Also a lot of the slapstick stuff, the block comedy scenes, Pat was great at. And Mike, of course, was more on my level, just writing and less insane than Pat Proft.
David Perell:
One of the things I noticed as I was going through the movies is all these funny misunderstandings that I think are really core. So you have in Naked Gun, how about a rain check? Well, let's just stick to dinner.
[23:19] Airplane's Development and Success
David Zucker:
Those are stupid puns. I mean, those are great puns, but we mix them in with good jokes.
David Perell:
Well, you love those.
David Zucker:
I know that's a joke.
David Perell:
You love those. Or can you fly this plane and land it? Surely you can't, surely you can't be serious. I am serious. And don't call me Shirley. There's all these; you just see them over and over and over.
David Zucker:
That line wasn't even from Zero Hour. It was from another airliner in trouble movie from the 50s called Crash Landing. Someone said, surely you can't be serious. And one of us, we can't; it's the most famous line in Airplane, but none of us can remember who came up with it.
Those things, I thought, were easy, or saying when Bob says it's an entirely different kind of flying altogether, and they both say, it's an entirely different kind of flying.
So those things we thought in puns; that's how we think.
David Perell:
The other thing that stood out is there's all these, I don't want to call them tropes, but that's the only word that comes to mind. You'll have to forgive me, but there's these things that happen over and over again.
So one of them is the guy who keeps coming to the cockpit and wishes them luck. Then the third time it becomes really funny; that's where the joke is. This is disaster. Then the same thing is the car that just keeps slamming into stuff.
David Zucker:
In Naked Gun.
David Perell:
It's just over and over and over again.
David Zucker:
Right. That's what we call a running gag is when you can repeat it.
I think sometimes in Airplane we probably overdid it. Jerry and Jim and I did an edit of Airplane; we did a director's cut. Interestingly enough, it's the only director's cut in film history that was shorter than the original. We went and edited out these running gags because they can be annoying if you do them too much.
David Perell:
Right.
David Zucker:
Sometimes off-screen crashes are usually never funny. Bob Hayes says, you better leave, sweetheart; you might get hurt in here. So she leaves, and you hear a crash.
I don't know; it just never really worked that well. It may have gotten a smile, but it didn't get a laugh.
David Perell:
Is there such thing as too many jokes?
David Zucker:
Yes, there are too many jokes if you don't have a story to hang it on. If you don't have a good story in the third act, the jokes start to get tiresome.
Upfront has to be the audience's interest in the plot. It should be as much in flying down the plane as in the boy and girl getting back together. We needed Leslie and Priscilla to be together at the end; that's the only thing the audience cares about.
If you just end with him flying a plane down, the audience leaves. No matter how many jokes you do, the movie wouldn't have been successful.
David Perell:
How did you go about getting better at your craft? Was it just we're going to make stuff and see if people laugh, or was it more deliberate than that?
David Zucker:
Well, getting better at our craft, we got better by doing a lot, doing a lot of movies, and also by failing too. We got better, but when we failed, we didn't blame it on other people. We never blamed it on the studio.
All of our flops—well, I usually say I never had any flops, only cult classics. But we never blamed this stuff. If something didn't perform, we never blamed it on anybody else. I always ask, "What did I do wrong?" And there was always a reason, and I always figured it out, and it was usually me. But that's how you learn. My dad once told me, "I never learned a lesson that didn't cost me money." And that is true. So that's how you learn stuff. Hopefully, I'll teach my kids all these lessons before they make any mistakes in life.
[28:10] Working with Studio Executives
David Perell:
Yeah, I want to get back to the rules. I want to get back to the rules.
David Zucker:
Yes.
David Perell:
Unrelated background.
David Zucker:
Well, we made a mistake in *Airplane*, which the joke turned out to be not a laugh. It may be funny if you're high, but Stack and Bridges are arguing about something, and in the back, in the background, a spear hits the wall, and a watermelon falls. It's not related to anything.
But related background is in *Airplane*, as I spoke about Peter Graves being in the foreground and Leslie and Julie in the background. It was very related, but it's two separate things. We want the audience to ostensibly focus on one thing, but the joke is happening in the background.
One of the early movies that Jerry and Jim and I became aware of was *Harold and Maude*. Ruth Gordon had a romance with Bud Cort. Bud Cort wanted to kill himself, so Ruth Gordon was at a therapist's house or something—I haven't seen the movie in 70 years—but this actually happened in the movie. She was talking to this therapist woman, and in the background, you see Bud Cort stand and light himself on fire. He's in flames, and they keep talking, and it's hysterical.
That taught us, "Oh, background. It's funnier if you don't put it up front." You know, OJ at the end of *Naked Gun* going down the when Leslie pats him on the back, he goes on the steps. I mean, that was funny on its own, but it's funnier that we threw it away by putting it in the background because Priscilla says to Leslie Frank, "Everyone should have a friend like you." That's definitely related. She said something that actually helped the joke, but we're telling the audience, ostensibly, you should be looking at Leslie and Priscilla. OJ going in the background is—if you like that, watch that. It raises the joke by 50%. The same thing is, as I was speaking about before, if you have to cut to a reaction, there was something in *Scary Movie 5*.
David Perell:
You didn't write that one, right?
David Zucker:
I did.
David Perell:
You did 3, 4, 5?
David Zucker:
I wrote 3, 4, and 5. I may have not gotten writing credit for 3 and 4, but it was Pat Proft and Craig Mason.
David Perell:
Okay.
David Zucker:
I was fine just directing it, but I also contributed stuff, like the horse shitting in the foreground in Scary Movie 3, which was from our stage show. I tried to get that in the script, but Bob Weinstein kept saying, no, you can't do that. No other studio executive would try to tell us which jokes to do, except that Paramount originally had us write down a list of 15 jokes that couldn't happen. That was scary.
They didn't try to do that.
David Perell:
When was that?
David Zucker:
That was for Airplane.
David Perell:
Okay, got it.
David Zucker:
Before they allowed us to direct, they were scared, and I don't blame them. Weinstein is actually a really brilliant guy and a good picture maker, but he had strong opinions, and sometimes he made us do stuff that we hated, and it got big laughs.
So go figure.
David Perell:
How has the kind of prohibited joke changed over the course of your career?
David Zucker:
We never figure anything's prohibited as long as it gets a laugh. The line of what you can do changes from year to year. By 1980, people wouldn't have thought you could do the black dudes, the translations. Forty years later, everyone wanted to rerelease the movie for the 40th anniversary, but the frightened executives at Paramount were too afraid to release it because of the black dudes. Why would they think that was in any way offensive?
Some people are so PC and with their heads so far up their asses that they don't understand humor. I wrote an article about that in Commentary magazine that was reprinted in the New York Post on how PC is ruining comedy. I lay out all that stuff, and I just came to the conclusion that 9% of the population doesn't have a sense of humor.
David Perell:
And they're ruining it for the rest of us.
David Zucker:
They're ruining it for everybody else, the people who do have a sense of humor. Sometimes we've gone too far, and we test it out, and it doesn't get a laugh if there's a huge sucking sound. You don't want clever or not funny in your movie. We need to have laughs.
David Perell:
Well, the thing is, people are so relieved by the person who's willing to go there.
David Zucker:
I think they are. It's great. We did a lot of things that people were thinking because what we thought was true and honest.
While we were riding Airplane in 1979, we went to see Shaft, which is one of these outrageously exploitative blaxploitation movies. We loved it. We left the theater saying, "Oh, that's so great, but we didn't understand what they were saying." And then the joke was, "Oh, they should have put subtitles." We laughed, and then we said, "Why don't we put that in? We have two black guys on Airplane doing that."
It was great. Then we put stupid white guy subtitles, like the guy says "she," and we put "golly." So it's as much making fun of white people as it is black people, and all audiences enjoyed it. It's only that 9% that don't get it.
David Perell:
I have this image of you working on these scripts, and you're just pulling from here, pulling it from here. You're just stuffing everything into the script. You're trying to see all these different inspirations, and that's how it comes together.
David Zucker:
Oh yeah. We got stuff from real life and from movies. Mostly from movies. I'm always thinking of stuff that we got from real life.
I think an example is in Naked Gun 3, 33 and a third, we had Leslie in a supermarket. That's me in a supermarket. He's trying to get that plastic bag open, can't do that. He's in the wrong line.
He's feeling the melons. I didn't do that. But we used the same woman in that melon scene in the supermarket in three as we did in one when Leslie is on the ledge outside the building and he's groping the lady. Same actress.
David Perell:
Yeah. The foreshadowing in that scene is hilarious because you very clearly see that the first statue has a penis, and you're like, something's gonna happen.
David Zucker:
Something's gonna happen.
David Perell:
And then nothing happens at the beginning, and you're like, dude, you missed an opportunity. And then, of course, it completely unravels.
David Zucker:
Yeah. It's one of those block comedy scenes where we keep building and building. Another one I love is in basketball when Matt and Trey go to visit the kid in the hospital, and they think he's dead, and they're pounding on him, and Trey is walking with the bedpans. It just keeps building.
My other favorite scene when you're talking about a block comedy scene writing that is in Scary Movie 3 when they're at the funeral and they think that she's dead. Anthony Anderson just goes crazy trying to pound this dead person's chest. We kept building in that.
In fact, I don't think much of that was in the script, and I did improvise a lot of that on the set. Weinstein called Craig Mason and said, "What's going on? I'm hearing reports that you're going over overtime." Mason said, "Don't worry. Zucker's getting good stuff."
David Perell:
Well, there's something that you do in a lot of these movies where there's people who are either close to dead or very sick, something goes wrong. Like in Airplane when the bed kind of collapses and she's like a V.
David Zucker:
That's Naked Gun. But in Airplane, the little girl has an IV. She's on her way to get a heart transplant, and the guitar knocks the IV out.
I think we've done a lot of that.
David Perell:
Death and sickness. I don't know why it's really funny when you bring that together.
David Zucker:
I don't know why. It's just the opposite of what you expect. A lot of stuff we do is irreverent.
We kind of learned from Mad magazine. The Marx Brothers were known as irreverent. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks didn't care who he offended. We always thought, "Look, they're doing it." We were always inspired by the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, Mel Brooks to a certain extent.
Mel Brooks used comedians, so we didn't want to do it in that style. Woody Allen, he was the comic. Everybody else was straight, but Woody Allen knew not to do a joke on a joke. He was the comedian in the whole thing.
David Perell:
You're talking about comedy blocking. What does that mean?
David Zucker:
The blocking is how you set up a master. You set up a master in a rehearsal, and the actors will say their lines and follow the slug lines in the script to move here and there. I have to make sure it works for the comedy and that it doesn't slow anything down.
I have to get enough coverage, so there's always something to cut to, and I have to be able to cut out any joke. I can't be stuck.
David Perell:
So in a scene, you don't want to, like a Jenga block, not be able to pull a joke out?
David Zucker:
Yeah, exactly.
David Zucker:
Yes, exactly.
If somebody just shot us two, you know, talking, and a couple of my jokes didn't work, you'd otherwise have a jump cut. But if you can cut to your single or my single, we can keep it going. The whole thing depends on pace. If you miss on a joke, the audience loses trust, so we just have to make sure every joke lands.
I told Leslie once, "I will never make you do anything that isn't funny." That is not to say we wouldn't shoot anything. We shot plenty of stuff on Leslie where it wasn't funny, but it was never released.
I told that to Bob Costas when we did Basketball. I said, "I won't put you in anything that's not funny." He isn't a movie person, he's not a movie actor, but he happened to have one of the funniest jokes in the movie where he says to Al Michaels, "You're excited, feel these nipples." It's hilarious, and so we put it in the trailer.
He calls me and says, "How could you have put that in the trailer?"
So anyways, yeah.
David Perell:
What makes for a good trailer?
David Zucker:
Oh, you just put the funniest jokes in the movie. In Naked Gun, we put in O.J. going over the; we gave away the ending, and it doesn't matter. Either nobody remembers the trailer, or it's still funny. If you laugh at a joke in the trailer, you will laugh, or enough people in the audience will laugh at the joke within the movie.
David Perell:
Yeah, it's so funny about your work. There's the art of slapstick, and I just don't associate those words together ever.
David Zucker:
I guess anything done well can be considered art, although I don't really like to use the A-word because it sounds pretentious. I'm an artist, you're an artist. If it's done well, I suppose people could call it art, but when we're doing shit hitting the fan, it's tough for Pauline Kael to say that's art.
Woody Allen actually saw Airplane for the first time with Pauline Kael, and she hated it. Evidently, Woody kept saying, "No, no, this is great. This is funny."
She said, "But there's not a comedian in the whole thing." Some people just don't get it. She may have been in one of the 9%.
I don't think she's still alive, so I can badmouth her completely. Say whatever you like; get away with it. I still have to be kind to Woody. No, I like Woody Allen.
David Perell:
Axe grinding. What's wrong with that?
David Zucker:
Axe grinding is when you're trying to make a social or political point, and if you're trying to do a message and it overwhelms the movie, it's like classic modern Hollywood. You violate that at your peril unless you're so funny you can overcome it.
I did a whole movie of it. Our 15th rule is there are no rules. I did a movie called An American Carol.
David Perell:
I haven't seen it.
David Zucker:
Okay, it's actually very funny. I saw it a few months ago, and I hadn't seen it in 15 years or whatever, but it is funny.
I wrote it. It's making fun of the left, and I wrote it with my friend from high school, Louis Friedman, who's somewhat to the left of Castro. But he loves making movies. He loves making movies with me. So we wrote this thing together, and he's the one we wrote Every Night Over Bourbon with. We just had a ball doing it.
It's interesting to hear the comment. We did the commentary track for the DVD materials, and I can't remember what we said, but it is axe grinding. It doesn't tell both points of view. It just makes fun of Michael Moore.
The central character is Michael Moore in an It's a Wonderful Life situation, where he wants to ban the Fourth of July, and he learns to love America. That was the premise, a clever premise, and it had a lot of great slapstick in it. I was surprised when I saw it, and it was really out there. David Perell Alan Grier was in it playing a slave.
David Perell:
Anyways, when do celebrity cameos work?
David Zucker:
Well...
David Perell:
Why did you choose Kareem? I know you went for Pete Rose.
David Zucker:
We chose Kareem because there was a practice of studios in a lot of movies to cast sports stars because they were very economical. So if they put OJ in Capricorn One, where it was a fake, supposedly a fake moon landing, there's OJ. He couldn't really act, but he was very famous, and he looked great on screen, and he could say the lines.
But I always thought, that's Kareem. You're the little boy with the emperor's new clothes saying the emperor has no clothes. That's what we did in Airplane. We stuck the guy in there. He can't act.
Kareem was very nice. I think he liked the script, knew what we were doing, and also Kareem was very happy to play that part because he had been pegged as this dour, serious guy with no sense of humor. Here he was poking fun at himself, and he was really accused of not trying.
David Perell:
Right.
David Zucker:
He gets a chance to answer. People loved it, and it made a couple of points because we were making fun.
What we were saying in Airplane is movies are bad. Movies are stupid. So we're making something more stupid than the movies, even that you're seeing and taking seriously.
David Perell:
Yeah.
David Zucker:
That's what we were doing, and then we did the same thing in Naked Gun, and then in my Scary Movie 3, 4, and 5. But the Wayans did it in Scary Movie one and two.
David Perell:
I'm such an outsider, but people always say Hollywood's dead. It's a fraction of what it once was. They're just stuck making sequels. Do you think that's true?
David Zucker:
Yes, they are stuck, and I'm finding it very difficult to get a movie made, but I always have. I have no doubt that I'll make Star Malta and what would have been Naked Gun 4, but the script was rejected by Paramount. We've retitled it Counterintelligence, spelled with 1L and a J, and we're going to make those somehow.
We'll get independent financing because the studios are only doing big stars, remakes, sequels, franchises, and Tom Cruise movies. I love Tom Cruise movies. I think he's great. He's the most underrated actor star in Hollywood history. Don't get me started on Tom Cruise. He's amazing. He does the best movies.
But his movies are also very expensive, and that's what Hollywood is doing. The studios are down to, I don't know, four or five movies a year, if that. I don't know.
David Perell:
What's the thinking behind that? What's the rationale here?
David Zucker:
I think that fewer people are going to the theaters, and the money is more in streaming. This is above my pay grade, so I don't really know the reasons, but I do know that the result of it is there's not much creativity. There's just people copying, so that's what The Naked Gun 4 will be.
David Perell:
Do you feel it when you talk to other people in the industry that people are frustrated, or do you feel like there's a general complacency?
David Zucker:
I don't talk to anybody in the industry. I have no friends.
I don't even go west of the 405 or east of the 405. So I pretty much stay here, and I write with Pat and Mike.
I see my brother and a bunch of our Milwaukee friends. We watch the Packer games on Sundays during the season, but I don't go to Hollywood parties. I don't think I'm sought after to be at these parties.
That's why I didn't take any drugs in the 80s. I went straight through. Nothing.
We were very nerdy. We were all about the work. We wanted to do the work. We didn't want to do all the other stuff.
David Perell:
You never cared about the scene.
David Zucker:
We didn't care about the scene. Obviously now, I'm not that concerned about being liked. A lot of my views are not in line with the mainstream of Hollywood, or even my relatives, but people somehow still like me.
A lot of people say, what happened to you? I just have my own way of going about things, and I don't want to do either what I've done before or what everybody else is doing. That's what a real artist would say.
David Perell:
That's what a real artist. Real artist doesn't care, David Perell.
David Zucker:
You sense that I'm an important artist.
David Perell:
Exactly. Finally, we're here with an important artist, everybody.
David Zucker:
That's right.
David Perell:
In Los Angeles.
David Zucker:
Even if I have to remind everyone.
David Perell:
An artist who doesn't care.
David Zucker:
I know. I don't care, but I do care about the course.
David Perell:
Yes, you care about the course. Care about the course.
David Zucker:
Mastercrash. Yes.
David Perell:
Mastercrash.com and breaking the frame.
David Zucker:
Yeah, breaking the frame. It's just like there is a certain suspension of disbelief, as they say in movies, and you have to believe that what's happening is really happening and not just a movie. So when you break the frame, you're reminding the audience that it's, oh, it's just a movie.
I think that Mel Brooks does a lot, and when Mel Brooks does it, I think it works. Don't forget the 15th rule: there are no rules.
I don't recall Woody Allen ever breaking the frame. He doesn't ever look at the audience. Groucho did it during one of his one scene. Harpo and Chico start to play piano and harp, and Groucho walks up to the camera and says, I have to stay here. I'm stuck here, but there's no reason why you folks can't go out in the lobby and have a smoke till this whole thing blows over. So Harpo and Chico go on, and they play. The Marx Brothers would do these. They suspend everything for five minutes.
We won't suspend anything for 10 seconds without a setup or a joke, but we've done it. Also, in Naked Gun, there's a great what I think was a great joke when we start out with a stupid pun when Leslie says to the waiter, give me the strongest thing you got. The waiter brings in a muscle guy. Leslie goes, no, no, just give me a Black Russian. So what are you thinking? The audience is thinking it's going to be a Black Russian, but instead the waiter starts to go and looks at the camera, at the audience and goes, not going to do that.
It's great. We totally break the frame. There was another time in Top Secret. Val Kilmer says, I'm not the first guy who fell in love with the daughter of a kidnapped scientist and recites the entire plot. The plot is pretty stupid. Lucy Gutteridge, who plays Hillary, says, I know it all sounds like some bad movie. We knew that the audience would start laughing and hooting and booting or whatever because it was a stupid movie. So we actually had Val and Lucy look at the camera, totally breaking the frame, just looking out and going, oh, as if they heard the laugh. It worked great.
It worked even 30 years later, 40 years later, when we showed Top Secret at Sketchfest in San Francisco, full house, 800 people in the audience. It worked exactly as it worked when Top Secret was released. So I love that joke, and I love playing around with that and then again, giving the audience credit for being there and meeting us halfway. We're one step ahead of them. We know what they're going to do, and they like that even more that they caused the characters to acknowledge them. That's one of my favorite jokes.
David Perell:
How about trivia? What's wrong with trivia?
David Zucker:
Oh yeah, trivia again. The Marx Brothers did some jokes where it was about some Canadian quadruplets, and they made reference to it. I'm sure in 1934 it was a big laugh, but it's trivia now. Nobody gets it.
In Airplane, we did, I never have a cup of Jim's Jim never has a cup of coffee at home of my coffee. That was a reference to an ad that played in the 1960s.
David Perell:
Yeah, that went over my head.
David Zucker:
Yeah, but somehow it's still funny. I don't know why people still laugh, but that's trivia.
So we don't. It's tough to do if you do things that are contemporary references. I mean, we should be, and I don't want to tell anybody else what to do, but when I make a movie, I want to make it to last 50 years.
Airplane, most of it is not trivia. We do one joke about a singer named Anita Bryant. Nobody knows who the hell that was, so it's trivia.
David Perell:
So as you were working on that movie, that was your goal?
David Zucker:
No, we didn't know too much during Airplane. We thought if it got a laugh now, it was good.
Our goal was not to make a comedy that would eventually be considered one of the greatest, but we just wanted to be able to do another movie. We wanted the movie to be a hit. So whatever got a laugh in 1980, that was good enough for us. We put it in.
David Perell:
What's a straw dummy?
David Zucker:
A straw dummy is... This is probably a bad example, because it worked, and it wasn't one of our movies, but in Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller plays a guy named Focker. So that's not a spoof. They made up their own straight thing to make fun of.
You can always make a funny name, but I'm not looking down on them. They obviously worked, and then they made a whole movie title out of it, Meet the Fockers. They made up a funny name.
David Perell:
It's the same thing in Austin Powers. There's Fook You and Fook Me.
David Zucker:
Yeah, that thing. So in their style, obviously it works, because Mike Myers is spoofing. Austin Powers is a spoof, and whatever he was doing worked.
He either didn't know any of our rules or didn't care, and it was fine. He shouldn't have. He does his own style, as I said, the Wayans do.
David Perell:
So then what's the purpose of the rules as you're writing?
David Zucker:
We want to avoid mistakes that we made before, both on stage and in the movies. When something bombs and we have to cut it out, we want to avoid shooting that again and just taking the time on set. So in subsequent writing movies, we would just say, "Oh, that's... we can't do that. That's a joke and a joke."
We would laugh at something because we would always write in a collaborative room and get instant reactions for what we wrote. Or we would just say, "Oh, that's funny, but it's trivia. It won't be funny in a year."
We use the rules mainly as what not to do and axe grinding. We'll think of a funny joke about Trump or something, but it won't be funny.
Besides, that kind of stuff is almost a straw dummy. It used to be—you don't remember this—but in the '70s, what was big in sketch comedy was Nixon jokes, just like in SNL, Trump jokes. Sometimes it's funny, but we never wanted to do that because it was a kind of combination of straw dummy and axe riding.
So you can see how we combine the rules, and we just set a bunch of standards that we just don't want to break. We still make mistakes, but I think this saves a lot of time.
David Perell:
Well, I think it's cool, the balance that you have between the freedom of, hey, it's going to be me and some friends. We're in a room. We're just making each other laugh, seeing what's going on, watching movies. That's very right-brain intuitive.
Then you have this sort of very logical, these rules, like, no, we're not going to do that, and the way that those two kind of operate in tension.
David Zucker:
Right. Jim Abrahams would always say that what differentiated a lot of our comedy was the discipline. It was discipline.
It looks crazy. I mean, Top Secret just looks so zany and crazy, and Airplane is just all over the place, and The Naked Guns and the Scary Movies. But there is a discipline to it. The discipline is because of the rules, because there's some things we won't do, and we operate within this framework.
David Perell:
What's the discipline mean? Like the consistency of joke quality or what?
David Zucker:
It's just that we approach it as a science. It's weird that it's both. We're all sitting in the room and—
David Perell:
Remember, you're an artist.
David Zucker:
I'm an artist. That's right. So it's not a science then. I don't know what I'm talking about.
Our approach is that we have to have fun. We have to have a sense of humor. It's obviously anarchy in the writer's room, but I think the rules help us.
I started out with Jerry and Jim, and then since really 1988, I've written with Pat Proft and then later with Mike McManus. We always just accepted the rules. They knew the rules just by osmosis.
David Perell:
Tell me about the question, can you live with it?
David Zucker:
Oh, yeah. Can you live with it? A joke has to happen, and then it's over. You can't hang on; it won't be funny anymore.
The example I usually give is in Naked Gun, Leslie and George Kennedy are doing a stakeout. While they're waiting endless hours, they're eating pistachio nuts and talking. As they talk, we see their lips are all pink from the pistachio nuts. So when Leslie, the scene ends, and he goes into Ricardo's apartment, it's cleaned up. It's done.
When Leslie crashes through the skylight of Robert Goulet, who the bad guy is in Naked Gun two and a half, his lair, he's a mess, all scratched in his hair and everything. He just goes like that, and he's fine. We can't keep him like that.
You can't live with a joke. A joke can't stay after it's a joke. If you enter a party dressed up as a woman as a gag or an event, that's very funny, but can you live with it? If you have a clever license plate saying "hi to you," how long is that going to be funny? A funny license plate violates, "Can you live with it?"
David Perell:
Tell me about the rule that didn't happen.
David Zucker:
Oh, yeah, that's one of my favorite rules.
David Perell:
That's one of your favorites.
David Zucker:
It's number 11, actually.
Paramount gave us those notes once or threatened to give us a note. They wanted us to write down 15 things that couldn't happen, that were unrealistic. It included where Lloyd Bridges says they have to come in, or they can't come in, they're on instruments. We cut up to the cockpit, and they're all playing saxophone and flutes and instruments. It's a dumb pun.
When we go back up to the cockpit, it's all gone. The instruments aren't there. Nothing. It goes away; it's not there anymore.
David Perell:
Yeah, it's the pacing.
David Zucker:
Yeah, every rule probably has a bit of other rules in it, but you don't have to necessarily keep anything going. If you do a joke, and if you trap yourself into showing up at an event, you're dressed up in a funny costume, then can you live with it? That's kind of what goes in that.
David Perell:
You're not big on the CGI, big technical effects. You're just like, keep it simple, huh?
David Zucker:
Technical pizzazz is, you know, big car crashes and big special effects. It's just not funny.
There was a movie called "Spies Like Us," a really funny movie, but it had all these car crashes, or not car crashes, but a lot of big special effects, and it's not funny. I think it interfered with the pace of the movie.
"Blues Brothers" had a lot of big car crashes, and I think it interfered a little bit with the pace because it wasn't, I don't know if it was meant to be funny, but just car crashes and all these big special effects aren't necessarily funny.
David Perell:
One of the things that I noticed that is kind of funny is like, a little rough around the edges. I talked about the car sort of crashing into the trash can or someone's tie being a little maladjusted in a serious moment. You can sometimes just kind of take something and make it off by a little bit, and all of a sudden it looks sloppy.
Sloppy is the word that comes to mind, but it's something like that.
David Zucker:
Those are really cheap to film, so it's the opposite of technical pizzazz. Those are really easy gags or a slapstick gag, like Leslie driving up and hitting a post on a dock, and the guy fishing from the dock, the stuntman, is thrown into the water. Those aren't big expenses.
You'll see that in most of the scenes in "Airplane" and "Naked Gun," they're just really done simply. The control tower is simple. The police squad office is very simple. Just the sets are really simple.
In the trailer for "Naked Gun 4," that looks like they spent a million dollars on that scene. I'm going, "Oh, my God, that's technical pizzazz, right off the bat."
I think for a spoof, you don't want to see a lot of money being spent on this stuff. Neither did we do any ostentatious expense in "Scary Movie 3 or 4," and I don't think the Wayans did in the original "Scary Movie." They did that for 10 cents.
They did so well with it. They weren't seduced by special effects. They knew they needed to do jokes, and they just concentrated on the jokes.
The audience in a comedy doesn't care about big special effects or big expenditures. They want that in a Tom Cruise movie. You want to see "Mission Impossible," big explosions, hanging from a plane, or whatever Tom Cruise does. Other movies, certainly comedies, don't need that. You don't need to be elaborate, and that's really technical pizzazz.
I'm glad you brought it up. It's a really important rule, I think.
David Perell:
Why is it so helpful when you're writing comedies to do it in groups?
David Zucker:
In comedy, you get that instant reaction because it's comedy. You depend on an audience.
In our theater show in Kentucky Fried Theater, we just got an instant reaction. We knew right away.
When you're writing a movie, you don't have that audience. You can't test it out in the audience, but Jerry and Jim and I and Pat and Mike trust each other so much that if we tried a joke and we got a laugh from them. I mean, I love it when Pat Proft laughs at one of my jokes. That's great, or Louis Friedman.
It's like, that's great. I must have made something funny. So that's the reaction you get in the room, and you can't get that alone. Writing by myself, I always...
David Perell:
I like doing kind of reverse engineering and asking, "Okay, what has made this writer unique in one way?" The thing that really sticks out is Kentucky Fried Theater from the early days, getting live reactions, trusting that, being in person, and being like, "I now have a sense for the cadence and pacing."
I can really see how you brought that into your movies now.
David Zucker:
And that's what made the pace. The pace was all from that. And we also used it as a very independent laboratory to experiment and see what we could get away with.
It was apart from the mainstream comics who were at the Comedy Store. They were all these standups were playing the clubs, and that was great for them. That's where we discovered Pat Proft.
We thought he was the funniest comic at the Comedy Store. When one of our guys quit and we only had a week to work in a new actor, we asked Proft to be in it. He said, "Okay, sure, I could be in for a couple of weeks." Well, he stayed for 40 years, not in the show, but writing with us.
Wow. I don't know if anybody else would have been that perfect for us. I know we sensed that in Pat's routines at the Comedy Store. Pat's from Minnesota, so he comes from that same kind of he drinks the same water that we drank out of in Wisconsin. It's very much related.
David Perell:
I like that scene in basketball where you just go, "Oh, all these teams are moving, like the Jazz from New Orleans to Utah. What are the Oilers doing in Nashville?"
David Zucker:
Right, and it's crazy. We pointed out some of those things that I object to, and then it's kind of wishful thinking.
But now this company wants to do a TV series based on basketball where there's real teams, and it's a game show, reality show. We might be doing that.
David Perell:
That sounds fun.
David Zucker:
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun.
David Perell:
All right, final question. How can people take your course?
David Zucker:
Well, if anybody wants to take the course or is just interested.
David Perell:
I want to take the course.
David Zucker:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I want to learn how to be funny.
David Zucker:
Right, and you could learn to be funny.
David Perell:
I got game. Are we talking like LeBron potential? Could be like a D-League scrub.
David Zucker:
There's some definite material there that could be developed.
David Perell:
That's good.
David Zucker:
Yes, but you need to take the course, I think. Otherwise, you're just raw talent. Should I use the T word in describing this man?
You can go to mastercrash.com, but it's informal and it's fun. I don't take it too seriously or myself seriously, so we won't put people to sleep. People will enjoy just watching it, even if they don't want to learn how to do this. It's just a fun course to watch.
David Perell:
Won't be boring. You'll have some fun, and you'll probably learn something. That's good.
David Zucker:
Yeah. What more could you ask or want out of life?
David Perell:
Out of all of life?
David Zucker:
I don't know.
David Perell:
Look at that. A deep way to finish the episode.
David Zucker:
Cut, cut.
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