The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
1988
David Zucker
This is a sequel. Sorry, the blog post is a sequel, not the movie. The movie itself has three sequels. The third sequel came out a couple months ago. Pam saw it in theaters, I didn't, only partially because I wanted to see the original first, and until now, I've Never Seen It®. When I say this is a sequel, I mean that this blog post is sort of a sequel to the blog post for Airplane!. I saw that movie five and a half years ago, and have seen 252 other movies and written 252 other blog posts for this column during the time in between. Which is a long time.
Long enough to not even remember that Airplane! also starred Leslie Nielsen. I only remembered when I reread the Airplane! blog post (damn, remember how much I used to write for Never Seen It?!), and I thought it was funny that I lamented at the time that The Naked Gun was not on the list. Well, here we are. Another ZAZ comedy (Jim Abrahams and brothers David Zucker and Jerry Zucker). The premise remains the same: stuff as many jokes into this thing as possible.
I forget how I ended up there after watching The Naked Gun, but I found the "15 Rules of Comedy" as laid out by the ZAZ comedy team. Check them out for yourself. I'm not saying I agree with all of them—like maybe "no meta shit" is one that I flaunt all the time, and it makes me laugh, so fuck it. But, as I said during Airplane!'s discussion, I'm not professing to be the king of comedy, and acknowledge that I am not learned in the art and can really only say what's funny and what's not funny based on personal opinion, which isn't worth shit. I'm really only bringing up the rules because they were instructional on how The Naked Gun constructed its jokes.
The "No Joke on a Joke" rule was especially revealing, and I don't think I've ever really thought about it all that deeply before, but it totally makes sense. Basically, it's saying that you only need one joke at a time, and don't need to make a joke "funnier" by "saying it in a funny way." If it's a good joke, it'll stand on its own. Leslie Nielsen, before making Airplane! at least, was known as a dramatic actor. And he doesn't really change that acting style when acting in a comedy. He's playing The Naked Gun like it's a drama. But because the jokes get through the cracks of that drama, they are funnier. If Leslie Nielsen had tried to be goofy, it would've weakened the joke.
I'm thinking too about Young Frankenstein, and Frank saying that "comedy is a release of pathos." And I'm thinking about Dr. Strangelove, and how the one actor legitimately didn't know that it was a comedy that he was acting in. Isn't it strange and fascinating how laughter can spring more readily from sadness and cruelty and drama than it can from silliness? If I described The Naked Gun's plot as "a police officer attempts to find justice for his partner's attempted slaying, while juggling his responsibilities to protect visiting royalty, and discerning the loyalties of his new romantic interest," then that could easily be a drama. That could be The French Connection 2, right? I don't know why I'm stuck on this point, but it intrigues me. It feels like magic.
Now, there has to be a plot there too, or else there wouldn't be a movie. It would be a series of sketches if it weren't for the plot. I'll cop to feeling like maybe the plot, as necessary as it is, still weighed the jokes down a little bit. Sometimes, they were able to pull off jokes simultaneous to attending to the plot, e.g. when the villain was giving exposition but the hero was doing slapstick with a fish in the background. Other times, like a sort of strained romance subplot, didn't quite manage to wring jokes as often as I would've liked. Maybe it would've been easier to swallow if they had made one single joke about "I love you, Jane, even though I've known you for 72 hours," but I know, I know, NO META JOKES.
Not sure if I've answered the big question yet. Is The Naked Gun funny?!?! The answer is, of course, yes. I didn't laugh at every joke. Maybe there was a 50/50 success rate (and even then, it was funny maybe 10% of the time). Even at that rate, though, there were still a lot of funny jokes. Most of them resulted in me thinking "that's pretty funny" instead of actually laughing out loud. Like, it was more a matter of appreciating the comedy instead of laughing. I probably laughed out loud four or five times, and I wouldn't be able to explain why those jokes were funny and others were only funny in theory.
It could be that I'm not in a space in my life where I'm seeking out movies that exist as joke machines instead of meaningful as a story or as a work of art. If I want to laugh, I'll just rewatch the Tables sketch from I Think You Should Leave on YouTube. Maybe that's why I felt the need to stay home and not spend $40 on seeing The Naked Gun (2025) in theaters—that's not really what I need from film right now.
There were so many articles about the new movie that centered around the question of "what ever happened to the spoof movie genre?" My theory? People eventually realized that a movie can spoof but ALSO be meaningful in some other way. The Naked Gun (1988) doesn't do that. It's not meaningful in any sense beyond its jokes. That's by design, of course, and whatever it intends to do, it does it very well. I'm just picturing a movie that has a moving story and also features Leslie Nielsen mumbling "whoops!" on a hot mic while he accidentally pisses on the floor.
There were so many articles about the new movie that centered around the question of "what ever happened to the spoof movie genre?" My theory? People eventually realized that a movie can spoof but ALSO be meaningful in some other way. The Naked Gun (1988) doesn't do that. It's not meaningful in any sense beyond its jokes. That's by design, of course, and whatever it intends to do, it does it very well. I'm just picturing a movie that has a moving story and also features Leslie Nielsen mumbling "whoops!" on a hot mic while he accidentally pisses on the floor.
Like I did with Airplane!, I am more than willing to meet this comedy in its own space, and I appreciated it, and laughed for sure. I'm not a wet blanket! I appreciate humor! I like to laugh! I'm just saying that I don't think this type of comedy is ever going to be my favorite type of comedy. Surely the new Naked Gun is the same way? Probably, and don't call me Shirley.
Shit, wrong movie.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: A quick detour through West Philadelphia with The Watermelon Woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment