David Zucker said execs are pandering to the “9% of the people who don’t have a sense of humour”.
The director of the 1980 film Airplane! has put the boot into Hollywood, claiming it is “destroying comedy” by making it too woke.
David Zucker told PragerU that film executives were now too afraid to upset a small portion of the population who “don’t have a sense of humour.”
Zucker, who also worked on the Naked Gun series and a pair of Scary Movie films, said Hollywood was so sensitive that Airplane! could only be made today if all the jokes were canned.
Clip via PragerU
Airplane! is full of decidedly non-PC humour, including a scene where two black characters are given subtitles as they speak “jive” to each other and another where multiple characters assault a distressed passenger.
Zucker told PragerU that he and his writers did not worry about offending people when working on their comedy classics and just went “where the laughs were”.
“We could be as offensive as we liked,” he explained.
However, the 75-year-old admitted he eventually felt forced to change his way: “We never thought that 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 and it did change. We never worried about any of this stuff with the Naked Guns or even the Scary Movies.”
Zucker also recalled working on a spy satire comedy and being dumbfounded when a Hollywood exec told him a joke – that he thought was “pure oatmeal” – went too far.
“My current writing partner, Pat Proft, and I wrote a parody on James Bond and Mission: Impossible,” Zucker recalled.
“One female executive said: ‘Well, this joke is getting pretty risqué here’.
“It was just a very mild joke about the lead female character because she had come up through the police department and through the FBI.
“She said she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.
Clip via Rotten Tomatoes
“It was pure oatmeal, so mild,” Zucker said, before adding, “Not one of our funniest things, but this was like too much and I thought: ‘Gee if this was the criteria for it, we’re in big trouble’.”
Zucker concluded that Hollywood was destroying comedy by pandering to “9% of the people who don’t have a sense of humour”.
He also said Airplane! could never be made today.
“When we do screenings of Airplane!, we get the question: ‘Could you do Airplane! today?” Zucker said.
“The first thing I could think of was sure, just without the jokes.”
The director’s comments come just months after Monty Python’s John Cleese also called out Hollywood for neutering creativity by being too PC.
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