Writer and director David Zucker says he may solely make Airplane! in the present day in the event that they removed all of the jokes.
Speaking to conservative platform PragerU in a video known as “Why can’t Hollywood take a joke anymore?”, Zucker defined how when he first began making films within the Nineteen Eighties “we could be as offensive as we liked.”
He continued: “We went where the laughs were. We never thought we were offending anybody but if we were offending people, we knew we were on the right track. As time went on, it got to be the ‘90s and the 2000s, it did change. We never worried about any of this stuff with The Naked Gun or the Scary Movie films.”
Zucker went on to say that he wrote a parody of James Bond and Mission Impossible, however a feminine government had reservations a couple of joke she believed was “pretty risqué”.
“It was a pretty mild joke about the lead female character, because she had come up through the police department, the FBI said she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest,” defined Zucker. “It was pure oatmeal, it was so mild. It wasn’t one of our funniest things but it was (seen as) too much. I thought jeez, if this was the criteria for it, we’re in big trouble.”
“They’re destroying comedy because 9 per cent of people don’t have a sense of humour,” he continued. “When we would do screenings of Airplane!, we would get asked if we could do Airplane! today. Sure, without the jokes.”
He then went on to say that “comedy is in trouble” however he believes it’s “going to come back.”
“There’s a pendulum, the pendulum will swing back. I would like to see comedy filmmakers do comedy without fear. We used to do whatever we wanted, then try it out on audiences (in theatres). If something was truly offensive, you’d get a giant sucking sound out of the audience and that’s not good. We don’t want to make a point, we don’t want to educate, we just want to make people laugh.”
Zucker’s final movie was 2013’s Scary Movie 5 which he wrote and produced after directing Scary Movie 3 and 4. He’s set to direct, write and produce the upcoming noir-spoof movie The Star Of Malta although the movie doesn’t at present have a launch date.
In different information, it’s been reported that Liam Neeson is about to lead a reboot of The Naked Gun.