David Zucker: Hollywood Director Explains The 15 Rules of Comedy | How I Write
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Well, you've made some hilarious movies, Airplane, Naked Gun. And what I'm curious about is like when you're writing those movies and you're thinking about how do I make a good spoof movie? How do I make something funny? What are the mantras, the one-liners, the things that you find yourself repeating the most? Generally, you know, for directing, I tell actors, let the lines do the work. So I don't want anybody to try to be funny. The first meeting I ever had with, uh,

Priscilla Presley was that she's, well, you know, I'd love to be in the movie. I think the script is funny, but I don't know how to be funny. And I said, you don't have to be funny. You just have to do what you did in Dallas, essentially. And we saw her in Dallas. She never came and read for the part. I just thought, I want that person who did Dallas. And she got it and

I literally never had to direct her. I just... I was able to concentrate on all the other actors. And then how about in the process of actually writing the script out? Oh, well, in the process of writing script, we, you know, we have rules. You know, we basically... What we do is...

We take off on serious movies. So Airplane was a spoof on Zero Hour, which was a very serious 1957 movie with the exact same plot. And so we just take those scenes and reverse the audience's expectations. It's always a matter of surprise, which I learned in fifth grade from watching The Dick Van Dyke Show.

And there was an episode where when Dick Van Dyke was asked to speak at his son. What was his son? Richie? Yeah, his class and all the other dads were speaking about what they did. And Dick Van Dyke was in a quandary about what he would talk about. And so he talked about writing comedy. And it's the first time I ever heard anybody talk.

talking about it as somewhat of a science. And one of the things that he said is, comedy depends on surprise. You have to surprise the audience. Anyways, cut to 40 years later, I'm at a party at Kelsey Grammer's house in Malibu, and who should be there but Dick Van Dyke. Oh, great. So I...

Talked to Dick Van Dyke. I told him, you know, I've always liked, thought he was great. I liked his movies, the TV show. And in fact, a line from your show made me think about comedy. And I described that to him and he had no recollection of it.

So this was the line about surprise? Yeah, the line about surprise. Or the episode was about speaking to Richie's class. He didn't have any recollection. But I also, you know, he did hundreds of episodes of things. When you're thinking through surprise, what kind of surprises work and then what kind of surprises don't work? Break that down for me. Well, I mean, any surprise, if it's funny, works. If you just do a surprise...

That's not necessarily funny, but if you start with the surprise of two 11-year-olds or 9-year-olds talking like adults, and then one of them, when asked how she takes her coffee, says, I take it black like my men, well, that's a surprise. It was a surprise to Jimmy and me when we first heard it, and we heard it because our partner, Jim Abrams,

He would type, and we would all throw out ideas. But Jim would type, and often he would just type stuff in, not tell us about it, not pitch an idea. We'd just read it back, and so we cracked up. So what did you do? You'd just sit in a room, and you'd just make each other laugh the entire time? Yeah, well, we'd sit in a room, and really how we write is we watched the straight movies. You know, with Top Secret, we watched them online,

World War II spy movies. With The Naked Gun, we watched Clint Eastwood movies and James Bond movies and a few film noir movies. And so we got all of our ideas from those, and they were all done with serious actors. And so a serious actor would discover something in a drawer and say, bingo, bingo.

And then what our surprise was, was that it's a bingo card. So, you know, if you remember, you know, a lot of that passed for humor then. Yeah, that. Yeah. The beaver line cracked me up too. And nice beaver. Looks up. I just got it stuffed. Yeah. And the thing is, I will say it looks easy. It looks easy, but it's not. And there's a million things that can go wrong in comedy. So that's why we...

evolved these rules, which date from 1972 when we did our Kentucky Fried Theater show on Pico Boulevard in L.A. And so somebody actually leveled a criticism at us, said the show was great. Everybody has to tell us how great we are first.

And then he said, but there was one scene where you did a joke on a joke and that became our first rule. Tell me about that. Well, if you have one, one character usually has to be a straight man and the other, the funny guy. So, you know, and that's been true from Laurel and Hardy and,

And the Marx Brothers, although all the Marx Brothers were clowns, but they always had straight men around them to play their scenes off of. So if you had everybody trying to be funny, it's a joke on a joke. So we have, for instance, Peter Graves doing these very hilarious lines in Airplane, but if Bill Murray had been doing it or Jim Carrey had,

It wouldn't have been as funny. Right. And this is nothing to say against these guys. Brilliant comedians. Robin Williams, brilliant comedian. But we could we wouldn't know what to do with those guys in our movies. Well, joke on a joke. Isn't that does that the way I hear that is that you don't want to pile on jokes. So like you want to focus on one joke at a time. Is that right? Wrong. Or is my just completely missing the point there?

You're completely missing the point. Can we have somebody else come in? Yeah, exactly. Is there another interviewer? Is there another interviewer? Yeah, exactly. No, it's really... So I'll go back to Airplane. And we have Peter Graves in the foreground. And Leslie and Julie Haggerty are discussing the symptoms of what happens when you eat the fish. And Leslie is talking about...

these, you know, these horrible symptoms like, you know, uncontrollable flatulence or whatever happens. And Peter Graves is doing the funny stuff in the foreground. Right. So it doesn't matter if it's the, sometimes we do jokes in the foreground. Sometimes we do, sometimes it happens in the background.

And sometimes, a lot of times, we let the audience find the joke, which we find is, you know, that's... The audiences appreciate that. You know, they don't want to have everything pointed out. And that's a directing note more than a writing note. So... Tell me about the difference between those two. Well, Leslie Nielsen, again, in Airplane...

is working on, is attending to a sick woman and there's turbulence and he looks up to the cockpit. He said, what the hell's going on up there? And what the woman is, it's two legs in stirrups and he's got a speculum. So, and he never acknowledges it, which is another rule called acknowledgement. You don't, you don't acknowledge the joke and you don't, anything to be subtle. I mean,

It's weird for me to be talking about subtlety because I don't think we're really known for subtlety. But it is subtle and it is disciplined. And like I said, it looks easy and everybody thinks they can do it. Why don't you want to acknowledge the joke? Because it will make it half as funny. If Leslie was clowning around or saying something to the woman, instead he just completely ignores it. It's just the audience, we know the audience loves finding things funny.

for themselves. And it's the same with a reaction shot. Often, I don't want to cut to a reaction shot. I'd rather have a two-shot and have somebody say something crazy and, again, not acknowledge it, and the other person in the shot doing the take. But if Leslie said something or...

George Kennedy said something funny and you had to cut to the reaction. It's just like cuts it down 50%. Where did your pacing come from? Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The pacing came from we did our show together.

starting in Madison in 1971. We had a little 70-seat theater, and then we moved the show to L.A., and we did a live sketch show called Kentucky Fried Theater. And Jerry and Jim and I were not especially talented clown comedians, so we wrote material for ourselves that enabled us to just be straight and reacting to the situations. And while we were on stage...

We never wanted there to be silence. We just, we needed laughs all the time because it's, it's, this is not a rule, but it's, it's something we always talked about, you know, our, our flywheel theory, which means it's easier to keep an audience laughing than to have them stop and start them up again. And this is why when I see standup comedians, sometimes I'd say, why are they waiting till the last laugh has gone? Right.

They should... Get on with it. They should get on with it while the audience is still laughing. Well, it's funny. I'm only just realizing this now, but I feel like that's one of the reasons that your movies have stood up well. Like, I watched a documentary from the 70s the other day. Boring. Like, my brain just can't... It's just too slow. It's just too slow. But I think the pacing of Airplane... Even 50 years ago, it was too slow for us. And whatever pace existed then in movies. I mean...

You had the Marx Brothers, and it was a slower pace. And Blake Edwards, they were a slower pace. But, I mean, Peter Sellers was brilliant, and Blake Edwards was brilliant, but the pace of comedies was slower then. So we did something different because we wanted everything to be either a setup to a joke or a joke. And there's no reason to...

To have anything go on longer. When I write a script now, and I write with Pat Proft and Mike McManus, I see the page very visually. So if I see a speech with any more than six lines, my eye sees it as a quarter inch too long. And so I will work on cutting out words. Hmm.

Tell me this, when you're doing the movies versus Kentucky Fried Theater, how do you, do you do testing with audiences to make sure that you're still getting that consistent laugh? Absolutely. We tested everything with, starting with Kentucky Fried Movie, we took it out and we tested it. And we cut the movie to the laughs. And Airplane, absolutely. We probably previewed 100 minutes of

of Airplane, and then we cut it down to 80, I think. Yeah, it's short. Yeah, but that's all an audience can take in comedy. Plus, in 80 or 90 minutes, you can do three acts, and the only thing that's important is the story, and you can get it done in 90 minutes. There's no reason to go any longer than that.

Yeah, a lot of other comedies, they start as comedies and then they turn into a story that has some more depth. I'm like, no, I came here to see a comedy. Yours, I'm kind of laughing the whole way through. Well, not only that, but...

I think that not only the jokes are important, of course, but more important than the jokes is the story. I mean, you have to have a story. Yeah, but you don't want to be preaching or anything, but the story has to be a believable story between one or two humans that the audience is...

gets involved in, and has a rooting interest. So this would be like the love story in Airplane. Yeah, the love story. And people really didn't care that much if he landed the plane. I mean, they did. They ended up really caring. They were on the edge of their seats, even though it was a stupid comedy. But...

What they really cared about was the love story. And in The Naked Gun, people laughed. It was funny the whole time. Yeah, they wanted to make sure the queen wasn't assassinated or whatever the plot was, but they really only cared about that Leslie and Priscilla got together, the boy and girl got together at the end. Same with Two and a Half and Three. And, you know, we didn't have that clearly marked off in Top Secret.

And so, although Top Secret considered maybe the funniest movie, and it's got the best jokes and the cleverest jokes and everything, it's another rule. Merely clever isn't enough. You have to get the laugh. Anyways. Oh, tell me more about that. Okay, well, merely clever. A lot of people stop at, it's just clever. If we had audiences saying that in a preview for Naked Gun, Top Secret...

the airplane, the scary movies, we would have cut it out. We just, if people are going, oh, that's funny, you know, but they had, we had to hear the laugh. So that's, and that's the only thing is like Vince Lombardi said, saying, you know, winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. So I just made that up. It's like that for humor. Yeah. It's like that for humor. Yeah.

When you see comedy skits, movies, and you're just like, oh, they're completely missing the point. What are the core things that you just want to yell to the television? Well, I want to yell, who cares? Because usually it's because you don't... The filmmakers haven't involved me in the plot or the characters. So I'm just... I become a real stickler about that. And I learn by making mistakes and...

you know, when we did Top Secret, we didn't realize how important that was to build a character in the first act because the story's the thing that drives it. And

We didn't have that in top secret because, you know, so Val Kilmer starts out the first act and we didn't give him a problem to solve. And not just a hardware problem, but a problem, an inner psychological problem that he had to solve. Like Bob Hayes had an airplane. He had PTSD and was afraid of flying. It's very simple. Leslie Nielsen at the start of Naked Gun, by the time of Naked Gun, died.

We had learned how important that was. So we said, it doesn't matter that I beat up all these terrorists. You know, his girlfriend left him and he's, you know, it doesn't mean anything. And so that gave him a problem. He needed love. And then he meets Priscilla. And, you know, and then it became boy meets girl, gets girl, loses girl, gets girl.

What's funny is that a lot of these are ultimately just love stories. Yes. And they should be. Yeah. They should be. Why? Because that's the only thing the audience cares about. Yeah, they don't care about hardware. I mean, this is... I'm not making this up. This is stuff that I've learned, you know. And in basketball, we had a great story with Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They invented a game, but it wasn't clear...

what their problem was in the beginning. And it wasn't an inner psychological problem, but we had them being friends, and then they broke up. It was boy loses girl in the second act. And then Trey had to get the friendship back together, realize his mistake. But it wasn't enough, I think. It needed to be something more. And, you know, the hardware problem was...

You know, they started this game and the evil Robert Vaughn wanted to take it over and make it like all other, you know, bad commercial sports. Right. And so it's another lesson. But Top Secret and Basketball are now, I mean, just people love those movies. So I'll take it. Right. So is your...

writing the script, do you think, oh, I'm going to start with the story, the characters, the comedy, or is it just I'm going to mix them all together and I need to make sure that all three components are there? Well, you have to mix it all together, but you have to start with something. And of course, in Airplane, we had zero hours. So that was easy. We had that to start with. With The Naked Gun...

We had a bunch of movies that we wanted to put together. One of them was, it was about somebody was trying to attract, to try to track an assassin across many states. And then we also used

there was a movie called Telefon with Charles Bronson. And that was where somebody could mind control with a beeper. And we just stole that. Right. And, but we didn't steal the whole plot. So it was legal. And, and, and that's, that was a more difficult one to do. And for the movie that Pat and Mike and I just finished writing, it's a film noir comedy about,

name is called Star of Malta and we hope to be in pre-production soon.

And we hope to be casting soon. But there we used a movie called Detour. And Detour was a 1945 noir movie, which was great for two acts. And then suddenly it ends. You know, sometimes a movie ends and say, what? What happened? Where's the rest of the movie? In Detour, all I could think of was maybe they ran out of money and couldn't finish it. But we...

Pat and Mike and I watched about 20 noir movies. And we used dialogue, we used plot, we used scenes and put this thing together. And it turned out to be a great plot. But, you know, I always say, you know, no one hits a hole in one. It took us a year and a half to write it. And, you know, you just keep doing draft after draft until it's ready.

How do you think about script detail? Like when I look at scripts, there's some writers write so much and then other writers write less, but then you also do directing. So you probably don't need to write as much or do you like writing that out in the original script of visualizing the whole movie? Oh, yeah. No, I like to write it out perfectly because...

And I want to take a year and a half. That's why I'm not especially excited about doing TV where it's a grind and you have to, you know, hand in a script on Thursday and, you know, everything. We can really sit down and be careful in the writing. And so for all the movies I've done, I've always been very happy that every day that I showed up on the set, I had, you know, two or three great pages to do.

And, and I was always really confident and there's no improvising, you know, on one movie I did called an American Carol. It was, I wrote it with an old friend of mine, Louis Friedman from my high school, and he's a brilliantly funny and funny.

We kind of wrote it, and it was a little bit rushed. So each day on the set, we'd finish the shooting, and then we'd rehearse the next day's shooting. And we were just appalled at how bad it was. So we would write, we would stay in the trailer a few hours after wrap, and over bourbon, we would write the next day's

So, but we, I never started a day of shooting where I wasn't really confident that we had funny stuff to shoot. And tell me about that year and a half. How does that go? Of writing? Yeah. Oh, it's, it's fun. I mean, writing is fun. You do it in your office right now? Do it in my office right here. Yeah. And, and well, Mike comes here in person and Pat lives in Minneapolis and we have Pat on Zoom live.

Or Mike and I will write a draft and then send it to Pat, and he'll put his jokes into it. And Pat is just the best joke writer ever. What makes a good joke writer? I don't know. Pat just always had that ability to not only write jokes, but he could write Frank Drebin. He wrote Leslie Nielsen, so...

All those great lines that, you know, when Leslie died, they quoted all of his great lines. Like, you know, like a midget at a urinal, I had to stay on my toes. You know, and all those were Pat Proft lines. And I never wrote one of those things. But Pat could always, and also a lot of the slapstick stuff.

The block comedy scenes, Pat was great at. And Mike, of course, was more on my level, just writing and...

you know, less insane than Pat Proft. Yeah. One of the things I noticed as I was going through the movies is all these funny misunderstandings that I think are really core. So, you know, you have in Naked Gun, how about a rain check? Well, let's just stick to dinner. That's just, yeah. You know, and then... Those aren't stupid puns. I mean, those are great puns, but, you know, we mix them in with good jokes. Yeah. Well, you love those. I know, that's a joke. You love those or, you know,

Can you fly this plane and land it? Surely you can't. Surely you can't be serious. I am serious. And don't call me Shirley. Like there's all these, you just see them over and over and over. That line wasn't even from Zero Hour. It was from another airliner in trouble movie from the 50s called Crash Landing. And someone said, surely you can't be serious. And one of us, I, you know, we can't, it's the most famous line in Airplane, but none of us can remember who came up with it.

So, yeah, it's just, it's, but, but those things, I thought we, we, it was easy or saying when Bob says it's an entirely different kind of flying altogether. And they both say it's an entirely different kind of flying. Yeah. And so they, they, they, so those things we thought in, in puns. Yeah. That's what, that's how we, how we think. Well, the other thing that stood out is there's, there's all these,

I don't want to call them tropes, but that's the only word that comes to mind. You'll have to forgive me. But there's these things that happen over and over again. So one of them is the guy who keeps coming to the cockpit and wishes them luck. And then the third time, it becomes really funny. It's like, dude, we are... That's where the joke is. This is disaster. And then the same thing is...

The car that just keeps slamming into stuff in Naked Gun. In Naked Gun. It's just over and over and over again. Right. Yeah. So, you know, that's what we call it. You know, I mean, it's not ours, but a running gag is when you can repeat it. And I think sometimes in Airplane, we probably overdid it. And so Jerry and Jim and I did an edit of Airplane. We did a director's cut.

Interestingly enough, it's the only director's cut in human history, film history, that was shorter than the original. So we went and edited it out. These running gags can be annoying if you do them too much. Right. Yeah, and sometimes off-screen crashes are usually never funny.

And Bob, Bob Hayes says, you better leave, sweetheart. You might get hurt in here. So she leaves and you hear a crash. I don't know. It just never, never really worked that well. It may have gotten a smile, but it didn't get a laugh. Is there such thing as too many jokes? No, there is too many jokes if you don't have a story to, to hang it on. So if you don't have a good story in the third act, the jokes start, start to get tiresome. Hmm.

And so and that that happens. I mean, you up front has to be the audience's interest in the plot. And as much in flying down the plane as in the boy and girl getting back together. And as much as protecting the queen in at the baseball game in as as, you know, Leslie and Priscilla, you know, being being together at the end.

We needed that. And that's the only thing the audience cares about. If you just end with, he flew a plane down, and then the audience leaves, no matter how many jokes you do, the movie wouldn't have been successful. How'd you go about getting better at your craft? Was it just we're going to make stuff and see if people laugh, or was it more deliberate than that? Well, getting better at our craft, you know, we got better by...

doing a lot, doing a lot of movies. And also by when we, uh, by failing too, we got better. And, but when we failed, we didn't blame it on other people. So, uh, we, we never blamed it on the studio. Hmm.

All of our flops. Well, I usually say I never had any flops, only cult classics. But we never blamed this stuff. If something didn't perform, we never blamed it on anybody else. I always, you know, I always, what did I do? What did I do wrong? And there was always a reason. And I always figured it out. And it was usually me. So, but that's how you learn.

You know, my dad once told me, I never learned a lesson that didn't cost me money. So, you know, and that is true. Yeah. So you just, that's how you learn stuff. Hopefully I'll teach my kids all these lessons before they make any mistakes in life. Yeah. I want to get back to the rules. I want to get back to the rules. Unrelated background. Unrelated. Well, we made a mistake in Airplane.

Which the joke turned out to be not a laugh. It may be funny if you're high, but, you know, Stack and Bridges are arguing about something, and in the background, a spear hits the wall and a watermelon falls. It's not related to anything. But related background is in Airplane, as I spoke about earlier,

Peter Graves being in the foreground and Leslie and Julie in the background. And so it was very related. But it's two separate things. We want the audience to ostensibly focus on one thing, but the joke is happening in the background. And there was one of the early movies...

Which Jerry and Jim and I became aware of was Harold and Maude. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. No. But it was Ruth Gordon had a romance with Bud Cort. And so she was... And Bud Cort wanted to kill himself. So Ruth Gordon was at some... Maybe a therapist's house or something. And...

I haven't seen the movie in 70 years, but this actually happened in the movie. So she was talking to this therapist woman, and in the background you see Bud Cort walking

set up, stand in the background and light himself on fire. And he's in flames and they keep talking and it's hysterical. And so that, I think that taught us, oh, background. It's funnier if you don't put it up front. You know, the OJ at the end of Naked Gun, going down the, when Leslie pats him on the back, he goes on the steps. I mean, that was funny on its own, but it's funnier when,

That we threw it away by putting it in the background because Priscilla says to Leslie, Frank, everyone should have a friend like you. So that's definitely related. She said something that actually helped the joke, but we're telling the audience ostensibly you should be looking at Leslie and Priscilla. OJ going in the background is that's if you if you like that, watch that.

So and it's just it totally it it raises the joke by 50 percent. And the same thing is, as I was speaking about before, if you have to cut to a reaction, there was something in Scary Movie 5 where you didn't write that one, right? I did. You did three, four or five.

I wrote three, four, and five. I may have not gotten writing credit for three and four, but it was Pat Proft and Craig Mason. Okay. And I was fine just directing it. But I also, of course, I contributed stuff like, you know, the horse shitting in the foreground in Scary Movie 3, which was from our stage show. Uh-huh. And I tried to get that in the script, and Bob Weinstein kept saying, no, you can't do that. You know, it was like...

No other studio executive would try to tell us which jokes to do, except that Paramount originally did have us write down a list of 15 jokes that couldn't happen. But, you know, that was scary, but they didn't try to do that. When was that? That was for Airplane. Okay, got it. So the eight weeks. I think before they allowed us to direct...

They were they just, you know, they were they were scared and I don't blame them. And and Weinstein actually was actually a really brilliant guy and a good picture maker. But he had strong opinions and sometimes he made us do stuff that we hated and it got big laughs. So, you know, go figure. How has the kind of prohibited joke changed over the course of your career?

Well, we never figure anything's prohibited. As long as if it gets a laugh, it's fine. And the line changes of what you can do from year to year. Like, I don't know if, you know, by 1980, people wouldn't have thought you can't do the black dudes, the translations. And then sure enough...

40 years later, everybody was, you know, they wanted to re-release the movie for the 40th anniversary, but the frightened, you know, executives at Paramount were too, you know, afraid to release it because of the black dudes. Why would they think that that was in any way offensive? But some people are so PC and...

with their heads so far up their asses that they don't understand humor. And I wrote an article about that in Commentary magazine that was reprinted in the New York Post on how...

PC is ruining comedy. And I lay out all that stuff. And I just came to the conclusion there's 9% of the population who doesn't have a sense of humor. And they're ruining it for the rest of us. They're ruining it for everybody else. The people who do have a sense of humor. But sometimes we've gone too far and we test it out and it doesn't get a laugh. If there's a huge sucking sound, you don't want clever or...

and not funny in your movie. Just, you know, you have to, we need to have laughs. Well, the thing is, people are so relieved by the person who's willing to go there. I think they are. No, it's great. And so we did a lot of things that people were thinking because what we thought stuff, it was true and it was honest. And so like when, while we were riding Airplane,

This was in 1979. And we went to see Shaft, which is one of these outrageously exploitative black, you know, exploitation movies. So and we loved it. And we left the theater saying, oh, that's so great. But then we didn't a lot of stuff. We couldn't understand what they were saying.

And then the joke was, oh, they should have put subtitles. And we laughed. And then we said, why don't we put that in? We have two black guys on an airplane doing that. And it was great. And then we put stupid white guy subtitles. Like, the guy says, she. And we put golly. So it's as much making fun of white people as it is black people. And all audiences enjoyed it. And it's like only...

that nine percent that that don't get it yeah i have this image of you working on these scripts you're just pulling from here pulling it from here and you're just stuffing everything into the script you're trying to see all these different inspirations and that that's kind of how it comes together oh yeah we got stuff from real life and from movies yeah mostly from mostly from movies i'm always thinking of stuff that we got from real life i i think

An example, I think in Naked Gun 3, 33 and a Third, we had Leslie in a supermarket and that's me in a supermarket.

He's trying to get the plastic bag open. He can't do that. He's in the wrong line. He's feeling the melons. Well, I didn't do that, but, you know, that's... And we used the same woman in that scene, in the melon scene in the supermarket in three as we did in one when Leslie is on the ledge outside the building and he's groping the lady. Same actress, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The foreshadowing in that scene is hilarious because you very clearly see that the first statue has a penis. Yeah. And you're like, something's going to happen. Something's going to happen. And then nothing happens at the beginning. And you're like, I was like, dude, you missed an opportunity. Yeah. And then, of course, it just completely unravels. Yeah. And that's, you know, it's one of those block comedy scenes where we keep building and building.

And building it. Another one I love is in Basketball when Matt and Trey go to visit the kid in the hospital. Uh-huh. And they think he's dead and they're pounding on him and Trey is walking with the bedpans. It just keeps building. And then the other, my other favorite scene of, you know, when you're talking about a block comedy scene, writing that is in...

In Scary Movie 3, when they're at the funeral and they think that she's dead. And so Anthony Anderson just goes crazy, you know, trying to pound this dead person's chest. And we kept building in that. In fact, I don't think much of that was in the script. And I did improvise a lot of that on the set. Hmm.

And Weinstein, I think, called Craig Mazin and said, what's going on? I'm hearing reports that you're going over overtime or something. And

Maiden said, don't worry, Zucker's getting good stuff. Well, there's something that you do, I guess, in a lot of these movies where there's people who are either close to dead or very sick, something goes wrong. Like in Airplane, when the bed kind of collapses and she's like a V, you know, like this. That's naked gun. But in Airplane, the little girl has an IV. She's on her way to get a heart transplant. And the guitarist...

knocks the IV out and she's... Yeah, I think we've done a lot of that. But it always works. There's something about death and sickness. Death and sickness. I don't know why it's really funny when you bring that together. Yeah. I don't know why because it's the opposite of what you expect. You know, we just... You know, a lot of stuff we do is irreverent. You know, like... And we kind of learned from Mad Magazine, which... And the Marx Brothers were kind of known as irreverent Woody Allen. Hmm.

Mel Brooks didn't care who we offended. And we always thought, well, look, they're doing it. We were always inspired by the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. Mel Brooks to a certain extent. But Mel Brooks used comedians. So we didn't want to do it in that style. And Woody Allen, he was the comic in it. Everybody else was straight comedy.

But Woody Allen knew not to do a joke on a joke. So he was the comedian in the whole thing. You were talking about comedy blocking. What does that mean? Well, the blocking is how you set up a master. So you set up a master in a rehearsal and the actors will say their lines and, you know, follow the slug lines in the script to, you know, move here and there. And...

And then the director, I mean, I have to make sure it works for the comedy and that it doesn't slow anything down. And I have to get enough coverage, so there's always something to cut to. And I have to be able to cut out any joke. I can't be stuck. So is it in a scene, you don't want to, like a Jenga block, you don't want to...

Not be able to pull a joke out. We yes, exactly. I mean we just so and that's that That is what that involves in. So if somebody just shot us to you know talking and a Couple of my jokes didn't work. I mean, you don't you that otherwise you'd have a jump cut But if you if you can cut to your single or my single, you know, we can keep it going and the whole thing depends on pace and

And if you miss on a joke, the audience loses trust. So we just have to make sure every joke lands.

So I told Leslie once, I will never make you do anything that isn't funny. And that is not to say we wouldn't shoot anything. We shot plenty of stuff on Leslie where it wasn't funny, but it was never released. And I told that to Bob Costas when we did basketball. I said, I won't put you in anything that's not funny, but

He isn't a movie person. He's not a movie actor. But he happened to have one of the funniest jokes in the movie where he says to Al Michaels, you're excited. Feel these nipples. And so it's hilarious. So we put it in the trailer. And he calls me and says, how could you have put that in the trailer?

So anyways, yeah. What makes for a good trailer? Oh, just you put the funniest jokes in the movie. And in Naked Gun, we put in OJ going over the... You know, we gave away the ending. And it doesn't matter. Either nobody remembers the trailer or it's still funny. If you laugh at a joke in the trailer...

you will laugh or enough people in the audience will laugh at the joke within the movie. Yeah, it's so funny about your work. There's like the art of slapstick, and I just don't associate those words together ever. Oh, well, I guess anything done well can be considered art. Although I don't really like to use the A word because it's like... I'm an artist. Sounds pretentious. I'm an artist. You're an artist. But...

You know, if it's done well, I suppose people could call it art. But, you know, when we're doing shit hitting the fan, it's tough for Pauline Kael to say that's art.

But actually, Woody Allen actually saw Airplane for the first time with Pauline Kael, and she hated it. And evidently, Woody kept saying, no, no, this is great. This is funny. And she said, but there's not a comedian in the whole thing. So some people just don't get it. She may have been in one of the 9%. I don't know. I don't think she's still alive. So I can badmouth her completely. Say whatever you want. Yeah, get away with it.

Woody, I still have to be kind to. No, I like Woody Allen. Axe grinding. What's wrong with that? Axe grinding is when you're trying to make a social or political point. And if you're trying to do a message and it overwhelms the movie. It's like classic modern Hollywood. Yeah. And you violate that at your peril unless you're so funny you can overcome it.

I did a whole movie of it. And so, you know, our 15th rule is there are no rules. So, you know, I did a movie called An American Carol. I don't know if you ever heard of it. I've heard of it. I haven't seen it. Okay. But it's actually very funny. I saw it a few months ago. Okay. And I hadn't seen it in 15 years or whatever. But it is funny. And I wrote it.

It's making fun of the left. And I wrote it with, of course, my friend from high school, Louis Friedman, who's somewhat to the left of Castro. But he loves making movies. He loves making movies with me. And so we wrote this thing together. And he's the one we wrote every night over bourbon. And we just had a ball doing it. And it's actually interesting to hear the comment. You know, we did the commentary track.

for the, the DVD materials. And I mean, I can't remember what we said, but you know, it is, it is ax grinding, but, and it doesn't tell both points of view. It just, it just makes fun. It makes fun of Michael Moore and the central characters, Michael Moore in a, it's a wonderful life situation where he wants to ban the fourth of Jai and he learns to love America. So this is, and that was the premise. And, uh,

Clever premise, but... And it had a lot of great slapstick in it. Mm-hmm. And I was surprised when I saw it. And it was really out there. David Alan Greer was in it playing a slave. You know, anyways, it's... When do celebrity pop... Celebrity cameos work well? Like, why did you choose Kareem? I know you went for Pete Rose. Yeah, we chose Kareem because there was a practice of studios...

in a lot of movies, to cast sports stars because they were very economical. So if they put O.J. in Capricorn One, where it was supposedly a fake moon landing, but there's O.J. Couldn't really act, but he was very famous, and he looked great on screen. He could say the lines, but I always thought it's crazy

That's Kareem. I mean, you're the little boy with the emperor's new clothes saying the emperor has no clothes. So that's what we did in Airplane. You know, we stuck the guy in there. He can't act. And Kareem was very nice. He totally, you know, I think he liked the script, knew what we were doing. And also Kareem was very happy to do those, to play that part because he had kind of been pegged as this

dour, serious guy, no sense of humor. And here he was poking fun at himself. And he was really accused of that stuff, of not trying and not running up and down court. And he gets a chance to answer. Anyways, people loved it.

And it made a couple of points because we were making fun. What we were saying in Airplane is movies are bad. You know, movies are stupid. And we're making something more stupid than the movies even that you're seeing and taking seriously. Yeah. So that's what we were doing. And then we did the same thing in Naked Gun and then in my scary movie 3, 4, and 5. But the Wayans did it in their scary movie 1 and 2.

I'm such an outsider, but people always say, ah, Hollywood's dead. It's a fraction of what it once was. They're just stuck making sequels. Do you think that's true? Yes. I mean, they are stuck. And I'm finding it, you know, very difficult to get a movie made, but I always have. And, you know...

I have no doubt that I'll make Star of Malta and what would have been Naked Gun 4, but the script was rejected by Paramount. We've retitled it Counterintelligence, spelled with one L and a J. And we're going to make those somehow. We'll get independent financing because the studios are only doing, you know, big stars, remakes,

sequels, franchises, and Tom Cruise movies. And I love Tom Cruise movies. I just, I think he's great. He's the most underrated actor, star in Hollywood history. Anyways, don't get me started on Tom Cruise. He's amazing. He does the best movies. Anyways, but his movies are also very expensive and that's what Hollywood is doing. And so...

You know, the studios are down to, I don't know, each four or five movies a year, if that. I don't know. What's the thinking behind that? What's the rationale here? I think that fewer people are going to the theaters and...

The money is more in streaming. You know, I actually, this is above my pay grade, so I don't really know the reasons, but I do know that the result of it is there's not much creativity. There's just people copying. So that's what, you know, the Naked Gun 4 will be. Do you feel it when you talk to other people in the industry that people are frustrated or do you feel like there's a general complacency? I don't talk to anybody in the industry. I have no friends.

So I just, I don't even go west of the 405 or east of the 405. So I pretty much stay here and I write with Pat and Mike and I see my brother and a bunch of our Milwaukee friends. We watch the Packer games on Sundays during the season and

But I don't go to Hollywood parties. I just generally, I mean, I don't think I'm sought after to be at these parties. That's why I didn't take any drugs in the 80s.

It just went straight through. Nothing, just, yeah. Huh. So, because we were very nerdy. We were all about the work. Yeah. We actually wanted to do the work. We didn't want to do all the other stuff. You never cared about the scene. We didn't care about the scene. And, you know, we didn't care. And obviously...

Now I don't, I'm not that concerned about being liked. You know, my, a lot of my views are not in line with the mainstream of Hollywood, but, or even my relatives. So, but I think, but people somehow still like me. So a lot of people say, what happened to you? You know, so, but I just have my own way going about things and it's not,

I don't want to do either what I've done before or what everybody else is doing. That's not, you know, so...

That's what a real artist would say. That's what a real artist, real artist doesn't care, David. Do you sense that I'm an important artist? Yeah, exactly. Finally. We're here with an important artist, everybody. That's right. In Los Angeles. Even if I have to remind everyone. An artist who doesn't care. I know, yeah. I don't care. But I do care about the course. Yes. You care about the course. Care about the course. Mastercrash.com. Yes. Mastercrash.com. And breaking the frame.

Yeah, breaking the frame, you know, it's just like there is a certain suspension of disbelief, as they say in movies. And you have to believe that what's happening is really happening and not just a movie. So when you break the frame, you're reminding the audience that it's, oh, it's just a movie. And I think that Mel Brooks does a lot. But when Mel Brooks does it, I think it works. And

Don't forget the 15th rule is there are no rules. I don't recall Woody Allen ever breaking the frame. He really... He doesn't ever look at the audience. Groucho did it. During one of his... One scene, Harpo and Chico start to play piano and harp and...

uh, Groucho walks up to the camera and says, I'm, I'm, I have to stay here. I'm stuck here, but there's no reason why you folks can't go in out in the lobby and have a smoke to this whole thing blows over. And so Groucho, so Harpo and Chico go and they play and the Marx brothers would do these, you know, they suspend everything for five minutes. We won't suspend anything for 10 seconds without a setup or a joke. But, uh,

But we've also, we've done it also in Naked Gun. There's a great, there's a, what I think was a great joke when we start out with a stupid pun, when Leslie says to the waiter, give me the strongest thing you got. And the waiter brings in a muscle. And, and...

And so Leslie goes, no, no, just give me a black Russian. So what are you thinking? The audience is thinking it's going to be a black Russian. But instead, the waiter starts to go and looks at the camera at the audience and goes, not going to do that. Yeah. So, and it's great. The audience, we totally break the frame. And there was another time in Top Secret, if you remember in Top Secret, where

Val Kilmer says, I'm not the first guy who fell in love with the daughter of a kidnapped scientist and recites the entire plot. And the plot is pretty stupid. And Lucy Gutteridge, who plays Hillary...

I know it all sounds like some bad movie. And we knew that the audience would start laughing and hooting and booing or whatever, you know, because it was a stupid movie. So we actually had Val and Lucy look at the camera, totally breaking the frame, just looking out and going, oh, you know, as if they heard the laughs. Right. And it worked. It worked great. And it worked even 30 years later,

40 years later when we showed Top Secret at Sketch Fest in San Francisco, full house, 800 people in the audience. And it worked exactly as it worked when Top Secret was released. So I love that joke. And I love...

playing around with that, and then, again, giving the audience credit for being there and meeting us halfway. And then we're always one step ahead of them. We know what they're going to do. And they like that even more, that they caused the characters to acknowledge them. So that's one of my favorite jokes. How about trivia? What's wrong with trivia? Oh, yeah. Trivia, again, you go back to the Marx Brothers movies

did some jokes where it was about some Canadian quadruplets, and they made reference to it. And I'm sure in 1934, it was a big laugh, but it's trivia now. Nobody gets it. And so in Airplane, we did... I never have a cup of Jim's... Jim never has a cup of coffee at home.

of my coffee. And that was a reference to an ad that played in the 1960s. Yeah, that went over my head. Yeah, but somehow it's still funny. I don't know why people still laugh, but that's trivia. And so we don't, it's tough to do, you know, if you do things that are contemporary references, I mean, we should be, and I don't want to tell anybody else what to do, but

When I make a movie, I want to make it to last 50 years. I think because the airplane, most of it is not trivia. You know, we do one joke about a singer named Anita Bryant. Nobody knows who the hell that was. So it's trivia. Mm-hmm.

So as you were working on that movie, that was your goal? No, we didn't know. We didn't know too much during Airplane. We thought, if it got a laugh now... It was good. Yeah, we just wanted to get... You know, our goal was not to make a comedy that would eventually be considered one of the greatest and all that stuff, but we just wanted to be able to do another movie. We wanted the movie to be a hit. So whatever got a laugh in 1980, that was good enough for us. We put it in.

What's a straw dummy? A straw dummy is, this is probably a bad example because it worked. And it wasn't one of our movies, but in Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller plays a guy named Fokker. So that's, it's not a, it's not, they made up their own story.

straight thing to make fun of. You can always make a funny name, but I'm not looking down on them. They obviously worked, and then they made a whole movie title out of it, Meet the Fockers, but it's

Yeah, they made up a funny name. It's the same thing in Austin Powers. There's Fook You and Fook Me. Yeah, that thing. And so in their style, obviously it works. Because Mike Myers does...

He is spoofing. Austin Powers is a spoof. And whatever he was doing, it worked. So he either didn't know any of our rules or didn't care, and it was fine. He shouldn't have. He does his own style, as I said, the Weyans do. So then what's the purpose of the rules as you're writing? Oh, so we want to avoid mistakes sometimes.

that we made before, you know, both on stage and in the movies. And when something bombs and we have to cut it out, you know, we want to avoid shooting that again and just taking the time on set. So in subsequent writing movies, we would just say, oh, that's, you know, we can't do that. It's a joke and a joke. Or it's, you know, we would laugh at something because we would always write in a collaborative room and get...

instant reactions for what we wrote. Or we would just say, oh, that's funny, but it's trivia. It won't be funny in a year. So we use the rules mainly as what not to do. And axe grinding, we'll think of a funny joke about Trump or something, but it won't be funny. And besides...

That kind of stuff is almost a straw dummy. And it used to be, you don't remember this, but in the 70s, what was big in sketch comedy was Nixon jokes. And just like in SNL, you know, Trump jokes. Sometimes it's funny, but we never want to do that because it was a kind of a combination of straw dummy and axe grinding. So you can see how we combine the rules and

We just set a bunch of standards that we just don't want to break. And we still make mistakes. But I think this saves a lot of time. Well, I think it's cool the balance that you have between the freedom of, hey, it's going to be me and some friends. We're in a room. We're just kind of making each other laugh, seeing what's going on, watching movies. But then also that's very right brain intuitive. And then you have this sort of very –

logical, these rules, like, no, we're not going to do that. And the way that those two kind of operate in tension. Right. And Jim Abrams would always say that what differentiated a lot of our comedy was the discipline. It was discipline. It looks crazy. I mean, Top Secret just looks so zany and crazy. And Airplane, it's just all over the place. And the naked guns and the scary movies.

But it's got, there is a discipline to it. And the discipline is because of the rules. It's because there is some things we won't do and we operate within this framework. What's the discipline mean? Like the consistency of joke quality or what? It's just, it's that, you know, we approach it as a science. I mean, it's weird that it's both...

You know, we're all sitting in the room and... Well, remember, you're an artist. You're an artist. I'm an artist. That's right. So it's not a science then. I don't know what I'm talking about. But it's, you know, our approach is that, you know, within... You know, we have to have fun. We have to have a sense of humor. It's obviously anarchy in the writer's room, but I think the rules help us. And, you know...

I started out with Jerry and Jim, and then since really 1988, I've written with Pat Proft and later with Mike McManus. And we always just accepted the rules. They knew the rules just by osmosis. Tell me about the question. Can you live with it? Oh, yeah. Can you live with it? It's, you know, a joke has to happen, and then...

it's over and you can't, if you hang on, it won't be funny anymore. And the example I usually give is in Naked Gun, Leslie and George Kennedy are doing a stakeout. And while they're waiting endless hours, they're eating pistachio nuts. And they're talking. And then as they talk, we see their lips are all pink from the pistachio nuts.

And so when they, when Leslie, the scene ends and he goes into Ricardo's apartment, it's cleaned up. He's just, it's done. And when Leslie crashes through the skylight of Robert Goulet, who the bad guy is in Naked Gun 2 1⁄2, his lair is,

He's a mess, all scratched and his hair and everything. And he just goes like that and he's fine. We can't keep him like that. And you can't live with a joke. A joke can't stay after it's a joke. You just can't. If you enter a party dressed up as a woman as a gag or an event, and that's very funny, but...

Can you live with it? Right. If you have a clever license plate saying, hi to you, how long is that going to be funny? A funny license plate violates can you live with it. Tell me about the rule. That didn't happen. Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorite rules. That's one of your favorites? It's all the way at number 11. Actually, I don't care. But Paramount...

gave us those notes once or threatened to give us a note. They wanted us to write down 15 things that were unrealistic, and it included...

where Lloyd Bridges says, they have to come in, or they can't come in, they're on instruments. And we cut up to the cockpit, and they're all playing saxophone and flutes and instruments. And it's a dumb pun, but... And then when we go back up to the cockpit, it's all gone. They're not...

The instruments aren't there, nothing, and it goes away. It's not there anymore. Yeah, it's the pacing. And so, yeah, every rule probably has a bit of other rules in it, but you don't have to necessarily...

keep anything going if you do a joke. And if you trap yourself into showing up at an event, you're dressed up in a funny costume, then can you live with it? That's kind of what goes in that. You're not big on the CGI, big technical effects. You're just like, keep it simple, huh? So technical pizzazz is big car crashes and

You know, big special effects. It's just, it's not funny. And, you know, there was a movie called Spies Like Us. Really funny movie, but they had all this, all these car crashes, or not car crashes, but a lot of big special effects. And it's not funny. And I think it interfered with the pace of the movie. And Blues Brothers had a lot of big car crashes. And I think it...

I think it interfered a little bit with the pace. Because it wasn't... I don't know if it was meant to be funny, but...

Just car crashes and all this big special effects aren't necessarily funny. One of the things that I noticed that is kind of funny is like a little rough around the edges. You know, I talked about the car sort of crashing into the trash can or someone's tie being like a little maladjusted, like a serious moment. You can sometimes just kind of take something and make it off by a little bit. And all of a sudden it looks sloppy is the word that comes to mind. But it's something like that.

Those are really cheap to film, so it's the opposite of technical pizzazz. You know, we just... Those are really easy gags. Or, you know, a slapstick gag like Leslie driving up and hitting a post on a dock and the guy fishing from the dock is... The stuntman is thrown into the water. And those aren't big... Those aren't big expenses. And you'll see that in most of the scenes...

In Airplane and Naked Gun, they're just really done. The control tower is simple. The police squad office is very simple. Just the sets are really simple. And in the trailer for Naked Gun 4, I mean, that looks like they spent a million dollars on that scene. And it's like, I'm going, oh my God, that's technical pizzazz. So, you know, right off the bat. And...

And so, and I think for a spoof, you don't want to see a lot of money being spent on this stuff. Neither did we do any, you know, ostentatious expense in Scary Movie 3 or 4. And I don't think the Wayans did in the original Scary Movie. I mean, they did that for 10 cents. And they did so well with, you know, they weren't seduced by special effects. They knew they...

They needed to do jokes and they just concentrated on the jokes. So the audience in a comedy doesn't care about big special effects or big expenditures.

They want that in a Tom Cruise movie. You want to see Mission Impossible. You have big explosions hanging from a plane or whatever Tom Cruise does. They want to see that. Other movies, certainly comedies, don't need that. You don't need to be elaborate. And that's really technical pizzazz. I'm glad you brought it up. It's a really important rule, I think. Why...

Is it so helpful when you're writing comedies to do it in groups? I know in comedy, well, you get that instant reaction because it's just, you know, comedy, you depend on an audience. And in our theater show, in Kentucky Fried Theater, we just got an instant reaction. We knew right away. And so when you're writing a movie, you don't have that audience. You can't test it out in the audience. But

Jerry and Jim and I and Pat and Mike trust each other so much that if we said, if we tried a joke and we got a laugh from them, I mean, I love it when Pat Proft laughs at one of my jokes. That's great. Or, or Louis Friedman. It's like, that's great. I must be,

I must have made something funny. So that's the reaction you get in the room and you can't get that. I can't get that alone and just, you know, writing by myself. I always like doing a kind of reverse engineering and asking, okay, what has made this writer, what has allowed them to be unique in one way? And the thing that really sticks out is Kentucky Fried Theater. From the early days, getting live reactions, trusting that, being in person and being like,

I now have a sense for the cadence and pacing, and I can really see how you brought that into your movies. Yeah, and that's what made the pace. The pace was all from that. And we also used it as a very independent laboratory to experiment and see what we could get away with. And it was apart from the mainstream...

comics who were at the comedy store. All these stand-ups were playing the clubs, and that was great for them. And that's where we discovered Pat Proft. And we thought he was the funniest comic at the comedy store. And when one of our guys quit, and we only had a week

to work in a new actor, we asked Prof to be in it, and he said, okay, sure, I could be in for a couple of weeks. Well, you know, he stayed for, you know, 40 years. Not in the show, but, you know, writing with us. Yeah. And we just, and I don't know if anybody else would have been that perfect for us, but I think, I know we sense that

In Pat's routines at the Comedy Store, Pat's from Minnesota, so he comes from that same kind of, he drinks the same water that we drank out of in Wisconsin. And it's very, very much, very related.

I like that scene in basketball where you just go, oh, these teams are moving like the Jazz from New Orleans to Utah. What are the Oilers doing in Nashville? Right. Yeah. And it's crazy. And we did point out some of those things that I object to. And then it's kind of wishful thinking. But now this company wants to do a...

a TV series based on basketball where there's real teams and it's a game show reality show. So yeah, we might be doing that. That sounds fun. Yeah. It sounds like a lot of fun. All right. Final question. How can people take your course?

Well, if anybody wants to take the course or just is interested in- I want to take the course. Yeah. I want to learn how to be funny. Right. And you could learn to be funny. I got game. I got game. Are we talking like LeBron potential? Are we talking like, you know, could be like a D-League scrub? There's some definite material there, I think, that could be developed. That's good. Yes. Yes.

But you need to take the course, I think. Otherwise, you're just raw, you know, raw talent. Should I use the T word in describing this man? But, you know, you can go to mastercrash.com, but it's informal. I mean, you know, and we...

It's fun. I don't take it too seriously or myself seriously. So we won't put people to sleep. People, I think, will enjoy just even if they don't want to learn how to do this. It's a fun course to watch.

Won't be boring. You'll have some fun and probably learn something. That's good. Yeah. What more could you ask or want out of life? Out of all of life. I don't know. Look at that. A deep way to finish the episode. Cut. Cut.