HUMORLESS FEW TAKE THE FUN OUT OF LIFE
The creator of the comic movie classic ‘Airplane!’ was asked if the airplane disaster spoof could be made today.
“It could,” David Zucker replied. “Just without the jokes.”
The 1980 parody, written and directed by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, is consistently listed among the Top Five comedy movies ever.
The film was widely acclaimed by movie critics, with the review-aggregate website ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ giving it a 97-percent approval rating.
The comedy’s popularity can be measured in big bucks — it cost $3.5 million to make and brought in more than $170 million at the box office.
NOW IT MAY BE GROUNDED
But now Paramount is considering shelving the film over scenes that would be slammed as ‘racially insenstive’ in today’s cancel-culture, politically correct climate.
One scene, for example, in which two black characters speak entirely in a jive dialect so unintelligible that it has to be subtitled.
One of the guys — the characters are simply credited as First Jive Dude and Second Jive Dude — gets a stomach ache. The stewardess can’t understand what he is saying. Barbara Billingsley, who played the very white June Clever in the 1950s family classic ‘Leave It To Beaver,’ stands up and talks to the black dudes in fluent jive.
“You couldn’t do that scene today,” said Zucker.
The movie is chockablock with scenes that could be seen as offensive to the grinches of the liberal cancel culture.
Humorless party-poopers who take everything literally are “tearing our country apart,” Zucker added. “We are losing our ability to laugh at ourselves and our world.”
But, he asks, “Why cater to the minority who are outraged when most people still seem to have a desire to laugh?”
It would appear that comedy is dead, Zucker added. “But that’s not true. Comedy is not dead. It’s scared. And when something is scared, it goes into hiding.”
—Adapted from Commentary
And protect us from the evil Peter Pan and Dumbo!!