Spoof King David Zucker Dishes on Creating Comedy Classics Like ‘Airplane!’ and ‘The Naked Gun’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Plus, learn why he really thinks of the 'Naked Gun' reboot
David Zucker’s name has long been synonymous with spoofs. Along with his brother, Jerry Zucker, and their friend, Jim Abrahams, the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker trio (often known as ZAZ) wrote and directed comedy hits like Airplane!, Top Secret!, Ruthless People and The Naked Gun.
After revolutionizing the spoof genre with ZAZ in the ’80s, David Zucker expanded his horizons to work with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone on BASEketball and directed two installments in the Scary Movie franchise after the Wayans Brothers stepped away from it, as well as directing original comedies like My Boss’s Daughter and An American Carol.
Currently, Zucker is hard at work on two cinematic projects, The Star of Malta, a spoof of film noir, and Counter Intelijence, a film repurposing the unused screenplay he and his longtime writing partner Pat Proft originally wrote for the Naked Gun reboot (he had no involvement with the film that was released earlier this year, starring Liam Neeson in the role originated by Leslie Nielsen). On top of all that, he also recently launched MasterCrash: A Crash Course in Spoof Comedy, an online class breaking down the 15 rules ZAZ used to create their comedy classics.
Zucker spoke to Woman’s World about his comedic rules to live by, finding unlikely inspiration in mid-century dramas, the joy of collaboration and more.
From writer and director to teacher
“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style—and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently,” David Zucker says. “People started copying it, like [producer] Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.” The filmmaker sought to show people that “there’s a certain method to the madness,” noting, “We had our 15 rules, and I’m teaching them in the hopes that if anybody tries to do a movie like this again, they’ll do it right.”
Zucker’s rules originated in the ’70s, before he and his creative collaborators had even made any films. “We came up with our first rule back when we were previewing our first stage show in L.A.,” he recalls. “Jim Abrahams had a friend who came to see the show. He loved it, but he said, ‘You know, in that one sketch in the first act, you guys were doing a joke on a joke.’ We said, ‘What’s a joke on a joke?’ and he explained that you need to have one person be the straight man while the other person is doing the jokes. The person who was supposed to be the straight man was also trying to be funny, so that didn’t work, and that became our first rule. From there, we came up with 14 more rules, including the last one, which is, ‘There are no rules.’”
Zucker’s movies are packed with sight gags and wordplay, and while their funny and fast-paced nature feels seamless, he emphatically says, “In spoof comedy, it can look like we’re just throwing stuff up against the wall to see what sticks, but we’re not. There’s thought behind it.”
How ’50s film and TV became an unlikely source of inspiration
ZAZ’s work has inspired countless comedy films and shaped many a fan’s sense of humor, and Zucker cites Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen as some of their earliest influences. “We never wanted to have too much worship and think we couldn’t do that stuff,” Zucker says. “We were very headstrong about what we were doing, who we were and how skillful we were. We never thought that we wouldn’t be successful at it. We also had Kentucky Fried Theater, which was our live show, and we knew we were making people laugh, so the show became a kind of laboratory for us.”
“Our other big influence, which was just as important as the comedians, was straight serious movies, like melodramas,” Zucker adds. “We thought they were funny, and we started redubbing some of those old movies. We thought serious movies and serious actors were funnier than comedians like Jerry Lewis. That’s another rule that we have: ‘We don’t have funny characters in our movies.’ Everybody’s straight.”
This philosophy, of course, is what led ZAZ to work with Leslie Nielsen, who was a prolific actor in ’50s TV and B-movies before starring in Airplane! and Police Squad!, the short-lived show that led to the Naked Gun franchise. “They tried to replace Leslie Nielsen in the new Naked Gun, and you can’t replace him. No one else can do that,” Zucker says, pointing out his knack for bringing gravitas to even the silliest dialogue.
“There was a television show called M Squad that ran in the late ’50s and we later used that as the model for Police Squad!, which then became The Naked Gun,” Zucker says of his mid-century influences. “The 1957 movie Zero Hour! was another inspiration. The star, Sterling Hayden, was an uber-serious actor, and he became the model for Robert Stack’s character in Airplane!” Stack, another ’50s leading man, was “in our minds from the first time we wrote the script, which was five years before the movie actually got financed.”
Zucker’s current project, The Star of Malta, also draws from the past. The script is set in 1949 and he plans to shoot in black-and-white, saying, “It’s based on the 1945 movie Detour, which is in the public domain now. We had to add a whole third act, so we did a lot of work on plot structure and character—which is the most important thing in comedy, not the jokes, surprisingly.”
The collaboration that changed the face of comedy
Looking back at his work with his younger brother, Jerry Zucker, and their friend, Jim Abrahams (who sadly died at age 80 in 2024), David Zucker says, “We had a very good collaboration because we were friends from high school, and our families were friends. Our fathers were business partners in a real estate company called Abrahams and Zucker Real Estate. Our mothers were also close friends and our sisters were college roommates.”
“Jerry, Jim and I shared the same sensibility and sense of humor since high school,” Zucker continues. “Our school had a lot of funny people, but they went off to college and found jobs after, and we were the ones that stuck with comedy. We taught ourselves and learned from our mistakes. We would always write in the same room together while watching movies like Zero Hour! or TV shows like The Untouchables [starring Robert Stack]”—and in the process, they forged their unique sensibility.
As for what kept their comic bond so strong, Zucker says, “We didn’t explicitly set out to do this, and we never claimed individual credit for any of the gags or ideas. What happened was one for all, all for one. We just wanted our movies to succeed, and as a result, we didn’t remember who thought of what, even for huge jokes like ‘Surely you can’t be serious,’ ‘I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley,’ from Airplane!”
“We remained friends till the end, and my brother and I are still close,” he continues. “Jim passed away a year ago, but I still always have him in mind when I come up with jokes. It’s like, ‘What would Jim say?’” “At Q&As, I’ve joked, ‘It was a completely equal partnership. We’d write together and Jim would type, Jerry would make coffee and I’d think of all the ideas,’ but it really was equal, and we each contributed something unique. It’s an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts,” he says.
Navigating change in Hollywood
In recent years, there’s been much talk about how Hollywood has shifted away from crowd-pleasing comedies, and Zucker is taking the independent route for his upcoming projects. “You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz. Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style,” he points out.
“Everybody’s in it for the money now, and that feels like the only reason why they wanted to do a new Naked Gun,” Zucker continues, but 50 years into his career, he remains dedicated to comedy as an art form. “Comedy changes, and I wouldn’t do the same thing anymore,” he says, sharing that his Naked Gun reboot would be closer to a spoof of Mission Impossible and James Bond than the cop movies it originally parodied.
“I think there’s an audience out there for any good story. You have to start with a good story and good characters. You need people who your audience is going to actually be invested in and care about,” Zucker says. “The kind of gag I love most is when nobody’s trying to be funny. They’re just acting.” It’s this particular approach that made Airplane! “funny 45 years ago, funny today and funny 45 years from now,” and Zucker’s movies will always make us laugh out loud.
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