It’s almost hard to believe that at one point Leslie Nielsen was thought of as a serious actor who was an odd choice to play a comic role like the deadpan doctor in the disaster movie spoof “Airplane!”
But casting the unflappable Nielsen to deliver lines like “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” in response to the completely reasonable phrase, “Surely you can’t be serious,” was part of the brilliance of Jim Abrahams, who died Tuesday at the age of 80. Along with David and Jerry Zucker, his pals from his youth in Wisconsin, Abrahams was a pioneer of some of the most beloved, gleefully over-the-top comedies in cinema history.
The Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies took their extreme silliness extremely seriously. Their actors, like Nielsen, were as committed to the bit as they were. With a few exceptions — like the kidnapping comedy “Ruthless People” (1986) — the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker mode was parody, taking genres that audiences loved and deliciously skewering them. But their humor was so undeniable that even if you didn’t know what they were making fun of you could lose your breath laughing.
When my parents sat me down at a young age to watch “Airplane!,” I had never seen any of the flicks it was riffing on, like “Airport” (1970) or “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), the latter of which also featured Nielsen. Instead, I was captivated by the sheer absurdity and sometimes perplexing strangeness. The quotable lines are legion, but the bizarrely funny images are also why “Airplane!” lingers so large in the cultural memory.
For me, it’s the eggs. During the flight where nothing can seem to go right, Nielsen’s Dr. Rumack attends to a woman who is feeling ill. With ominous music in the background he starts gently, but firmly extracting a series of eggs from her mouth. After the third one comes out, he cracks it against the side of a cup. A little bird flies out. The tension that exists in the scene is real and almost frightening, the woman’s face contorting like something out of a horror film, but the end result is just so ridiculous.
Of course, if you do know the material that Abrahams was spoofing, there is an added joy to watching his work. Without the Zucker brothers, Abrahams directed “Hot Shots!” (1991) and “Hot Shots! Part Deux” (1993), both starring Charlie Sheen and both taking on gonzo masculine action movies like “Top Gun” (1986) and the entries in the Rambo franchise.
Midway through “Part Deux,” Sheen’s hardened former Navy pilot Topper is floating down a river in Iraq and journaling, with a voice-over that sounds an awful lot like the one delivered by the character played by Sheen’s father, Martin, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” That’s giggle-worthy enough, but soon enough Abrahams cuts to another boat where Martin, as his “Apocalypse Now” soldier Benjamin L. Willard, is also in monologue.
Not content to let that be the joke, as the vessels pass each other, the father and son stand up, point at one another, and shout, “I loved you in ‘Wall Street,’” breaking the fourth wall but adding another layer of reference, this one to the 1987 Oliver Stone drama in which they both starred.
The reason the moment is so funny is because it requires a level of intensity from the Sheens, who have to play everything, down to the compliment, with straight faces. But that is the joy of this brand of comedy.
Reflecting on the infamous “Shirley” line from “Airplane!” in an interview with Vulture in 2016, Abrahams said, “I like to think, even today, when you hear in the news somebody say ‘surely’ this, or ‘surely’ that, I like to think that there’s a whole bunch of people around the world who hear that and kinda chuckle to themselves because they remember the line and they know they don’t have to take that seriously.” And yet the beauty of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker punchlines is that their characters don’t know they are making them. Nielsen played both Dr. Rumack and his “Naked Gun” cop Frank Drebin with the gravitas of someone vying for an Oscar. (Just watch Frank try to bribe a source and end up taking the bribes himself.)
Abrahams and his cohort got everyone from Nielsen to Priscilla Presley, his co-star in the “Naked Gun” movies, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, an “Airplane!” standout, to submit to their wackiness. Audiences just had to sit back and laugh.
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