Out of all the films I've done so far, no film promises to be more challenging to review than this classic Zucker Bros. comedy. How do you even analyze a film like Airplane!? After tackling five complex and serious dramas (and an adventure film), somehow this one winds up being the hardest to talk about. This is a film which is so ridiculous and so un-serious there's practically no way to talk about it seriously. Sure, you could look at it from the Freudian psychoanalysis angle and reduce it to a story about incompetent paternal authority figures, but to do so would be a gross misinterpretation of what this film is trying to be. This film is a comedy, no more, no less. And in order to analyze it with proper respect to the work in question, one must approach it as a comedy. They say that if you have to explain a joke, then it's not a good joke... and in a way, that's what makes comedy so hard to analyze. How can you explain why a joke is... well, funny? E.B. White is noted as saying, "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."But I think that at least on some level, Airplane! can teach us something about where humor comes from, and how to tell a good joke.
Now first off, I want to say this right off the bat: Airplane! is a stupid movie. It has nothing serious about it, and yet it's still magnificent in its own way, leading culture critic Mike Doherty of Maclean's magazine to call it "the smartest stupid movie ever made".1 That is to say, the humor may be dumb, but there's some method to the madness, and this is especially apparent in the way that the gags are organized and presented. Airplane! is a film with jokes to spare, but it's not just the quantity of the jokes delivered, but how they're delivered, and how often. One of the first things that you notice when you start watching the film is the lightning pace of the film's humor. Yes, filmmakers like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen might get me to laugh out loud like no one else can, but not a single one of their films can stand up to this one in terms of how absolutely cluttered Airplane! is, regardless of which is funnier. It's just one darned thing after another, done with the kind of zaniness that can really only be matched by stuff like Hot Fuzz and maybe Monty Python. The gags here are so fast and frequent that writer Adam Smith of Empire magazine actually decided to pick a random scene, time the jokes, and come up with a "joke per hour" measurement based on the ratio. Here's the scene he chose:
A man in a captain's uniform walks to a news rack marked with "fiction, non-fiction, whacking material" (5.14);he picks up a magazine titled Modern Sperm (5.15); a tannoy announces "Captain Clarence Oveur (5.20) white courtesy phone"; he picks up the red courtesy phone and a voice says "no, the white phone" (5.30); he picks it up and the tannoy continues to page him, "I've got it!" he yells (5.35); at the other end is a Dr. Brody at the Mayo clinic with a live heart for transplant beating in a petri dish (5.50); we cut away, and when we cut back the heart keeps bouncing into shot (6.05); the operator interrupts saying there's an urgent call from a Mr. Hamm. "All right," Captain Oveur orders, "give me Hamm on five, hold the Mayo." (6.14.).2
Now, Smith counted maybe about 8 gags in this one-minute scene, but I counted about 9, so I'm chalking down the final number of jokes per hour as 540, which, factoring in the movie's 90 minute runtime, gives us about 810 jokes in one movie, which we can round down to 600 or 700 just in case this happened to be a particularly joke-heavy scene.
Now that we've talked about the quantity of the jokes though, it's time to move on to the next important factor in determining the strength of the film's humor: that being, of course, the quality or nature of the jokes. The film incorporates a wide variety of different jokes, jumping back and forth between different styles of humor. This encompasses everything from puns to clever wordplay to slapstick to straight-up absurdism. The result of this is that even if you find some of the jokes in the film to be disagreeable to your tastes, there's something here for pretty much everyone. And this is something which, in the wrong hands, would be incredibly difficult balance to maintain... but Airplane! somehow manages it, and it does this through keeping a consistent tone. Many of the jokes will probably make you want to slap yourself in the face because they're so unbelievably dense. But this is all part of the movie's atmosphere of parody. The characters all exist within this heavily satirical reality which is constructed to be so ridiculous that you can't possibly take anyone or anything with the slightest bit of sincerity. Whether or not the plane crashes doesn't matter, because either way, it'll be a wild ride. And what makes this parody work so well is that none of the actors ever wink at the audience in any kind of awareness of the comedy-- everyone plays out their roles in fully absorbed melodrama, underscored perfectly by a hilariously generic Hollywood soundtrack... a decision beautifully echoed in successful modern parody films like Team America: World Police. The film is defined by campiness-- things are so dramatically exaggerated, playing so perfectly off of the expectations that other movies have implanted into us, that the pathos whips back around and achieves comedy in the form of bathos.
Which brings us to the next point: humor in its relationship to expectations. I don't believe that you ever could reduce all comedy into one distinct rule for what makes a joke funny or unfunny, but I believe that if I was forced to, the simplest solution would be for me to develop a rule of irony: that is, build up the audience's expectations one way, and then surprise them with something else. Perhaps one of the most classic yet banal examples of humor is the old gag of having someone slip on a banana peel-- the joke is so old it's arguably ceased to be funny. But if we show someone who's about to slip on a banana peel and then have them fall down a manhole, that's funny. This idea of subverting expectations can be done not only through slapstick, but also through wordplay and dialogue-- in fact, it's this idea which forms the entire basis for Victor Raskin's "script-based theory of verbal humor": to produce the humor of a verbal joke (with a traditional set-up of build-up and punchline), the buildup must be compatible with two different semantic scripts, so while the audience expects the end of the joke to fall in line with a more obvious semantic script, the punchline instead reveals the ending of the joke to contain an alternative but less likely script.3 Okay, so what does all that mean, though? Basically, a joke can have two meanings. When we're told the beginning of a joke, a situation is presented where there are two possible ways of interpreting a word or phrase... we don't immediately notice this, so we assume the obvious meaning. However, the punch line to the joke illustrates a second possible meaning that we did not expect, therefore surprising us and generating humor. When Ted reminisces about the time in the past where his "drinking problem" began, we automatically assume alcoholism, only for the film's visual comedy to present an alternative interpretation of the phrase. Of course, now I'm starting to become guilty of what E.B. White warned against: as with a frog, I'm dissecting it and probably killing the joke. But fortunately, since Airplane! is a film which is just absolutely brimming with jokes, there's plenty of other examples of subverted expectations to choose from. As the New York Times wrote upon the film's initial release, "No one in the large and talented cast of Airplane! does anything he or she might be expected to do... and that attitude extends to all aspects of the film."4 So perhaps the best thing to do to illustrate my point here is not to tell you what I mean, but to show you: for example, take the scene where Ted describes a bar where there were fights every night. We initially see a pair of rough, hairy arms fighting, and we expect them to be the arms of two grizzled sailors, but when the camera pans out, we find that the two violent bar patrons are actually Girl Scouts, whom one would not typically expect to be violent.
But what Airplane! shows us is that humor isn't just about subverting expectations: it's also about subverting social norms. Because if there's one thing that comes out loud and clear about Airplane! straight from the get-go, it's that this is a politically incorrect movie, even for its own day, and much more so in ours. The film is rated PG, and yet three minutes into the movie we've already got an abortion joke, and that's nothing compared to the drug usage, sly sexual references, and the straight-up two seconds of nudity that the Zucker Bros. sneak into the rest of the movie. But, in a way, it's Airplane!'s straight-up rebelliousness that makes its jokes pack such a strong punch. Allowing our sensibilities to be challenged strengthens our own views of societies, because in many ways, transgression and humor go hand in hand, which is why those who say that God is a comedian should think very hard about exactly what they mean by that. In fact, some theorists believe that humor evolved for this very reason. Our brain naturally searches for patterns, and so as we gradually begin to acquaint ourselves with the world around us, we naturally begin to develop hard-coded assumptions about the way things work. But the patterns and assumptions that we develop aren't always correct. Humor, from a scientific standpoint, is the brain's way of rewarding us for finding exceptions to the common pattern and for correcting our own typical perspective on the world around us-- in other words, our expectations; hence humor rewards us when we mentally process a situation which subverts those expectations in a safe context where there is no present harm or danger to our own well-being.
So what is the secret formula to a good joke? No one can know for sure, and while you can pin down some sort of outline for many of the jokes used in this film, and try to organize and classify everything, there are some moments that really can't be placed into any specific category. I can't come up with one hard and fast idea to explain all comedy, but neither can anyone, and until someone does, I think that this basic foundation can suffice for now: this foundation being that humor is about breaking rules. In a life where we're constantly put under so much pressure, sometimes it's good to throw off those chains and relieve a little tension. And that's the key to why Airplane! is so enjoyable... because sometimes, it's good to see a few rules being broken.
Sources:
1Doherty, Mike. "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley". Maclean's 127.46 (2014): 71. Print.
2Smith, Adam. "Empire Essay: Airplane! Review". Empire. Empire, 1 Jan 2000. Web. Retrieved 18 Jun 2016.
3Raskin, Victor. "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor". Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. n.p. (1979): 332. Print.
4Maslin, Janet. "Airplane!" Rev. of Airplane!, dir. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker. New York Times 2 July 1980. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment