It Was One of Our Most Beloved and Successful Genres. Who Killed It?

Surely it's been a moment since you last checked in on Airplane! , the progenitor of the relentless film genre known as the spoof comedy. I know I was surprised, on a recent rewatch, to be reminded of how unusually patient it is in building its fictional world before turning on its fire hose of jokes. Yes, it starts with a Jaws homage , as an airliner's tail fin weaves in and out of the clouds. But the next several minutes are all about establishing the chaotic energy of the airport , the cast of lucky passengers unaware of the imminent disaster awaiting them, and the personalities of our protagonists, Ted Striker and Elaine Dickinson. Oh, and then an errant ground crew member sends a passenger plane crashing through a giant glass window.

It's easy to forget, 45 years later, how Airplane! hit the cultural consciousness in the same way. It knocked down comedic conventions as well as box office records, going on to become one of the five highest-grossing films of 1980. While it didn't quite invent the spoof-comedy category, it set up decades' worth of movies that existed to make fun of popular films and all their well-worn tropes—the crime-drama parodies of the Naked Gun series of the late '80s and early '90s, the Scary Movie franchise that sliced up horror films of the late '90s and early 2000s.

And then something happened: nothing. The spoofs went poof, as the few remaining satirical comedies got relegated to streaming platforms and true movie parodies disappeared from theaters altogether for nearly a decade. Of the 106 spoofs listed on Box Office Mojo, none are more recent than 2016 .

But like a femme fatale who strides into a detective satire to be gratuitously ogled by the gumshoe hero, maybe the spoof genre still has legs . On Friday, Paramount will release The Naked Gun , the first new entry in the cop-comedy series in more than 30 years, one that hopes to succeed the deadpan style of Leslie Nielsen with Liam Neeson as his hard-boiled but equally inept son, Frank Drebin Jr. September will see the release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues , the long-awaited follow-up to the 1984 mockumentary about a hapless heavy-metal band that isn't quite in on the joke. Next year will see a reboot of Scary Movie , with the Wayanses returning as writers. And spoof master Mel Brooks is moving forward at plaid speed with a 38-years-later sequel to Spaceballs , his everything-and-the-vacuum-cleaner parody of the Star Wars blockbusters.

It's been long enough since a spoof hit theaters that the zoomers who see Naked Gun will likely have no idea what to make of its joke-a-minute rhythms and unconventional story logic. But these films continue to loom large in the minds of contemporary comedians who want to see the genre endure. Akiva Schaffer, the Lonely Island troupe member and Saturday Night Live alumnus who directed the new Naked Gun film, told me that movies like Spaceballs and Top Secret! influenced him “the most anything can influence anybody. It's hard to put the words to it, honestly. How would you even put a number on it when it was so much?”

Yet he isn't expecting that his Naked Gun movie will kick off another cycle in the ebb and flow of spoof comedies and show the resilience of a genre that's always ready to eviscerate the latest trends in mainstream moviegoing. “Forget that comedies overall haven't really been a presence in theaters,” Schaffer said. “The spoof movie specifically is the one that died out well before comedies died out.”

When I asked David Zucker, one-third of the venerated Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker creative team behind Airplane! and the original Naked Gun films, if the spoof category was on the verge of a comeback, he just laughed at me (and not in the good way).

So who killed him? Zucker fingered Hollywood and its timid, numbers-obsessed executives as the culprits. “If they're the pilots of an airliner, they're not looking out the window,” he told me. “They're just reading instruments when they should see that there's a mountain in front of them.”

Before Airplane! , there were, of course, antecedents like Our Man Flint , which lampooned the James Bond films; Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein ; and Monty Python's Holy Grail and Life of Brian . But Zucker told me that he and his partners Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker were more influenced by the run-amok satirical spirits of the Marx Brothers, Mad magazine, and early Woody Allen when they took the stone-faced 1957 thriller Zero Hour! —about an airline crew brought down by bad fish, and the haunted war veteran who saves them—and rewrote it as a comedy.

Zucker told me he and his collaborators were lucky to have the support of studio bosses like Michael Eisner (then the president of Paramount Pictures), who allowed them to make Airplane! , plus their flop TV series Police Squad! , whose demanding onslaught of verbal and visual gags worked better when the show was upcycled to become the Naked Gun movies. (As Zucker recalls another executive telling him at the time, “ Police Squad! didn’t work because you had to watch it.”)

But just as crucially, the ZAZ trio learned about comedic discipline. Despite the group's reputation for nonstop joke-telling, Zucker said, “it's not just 'Anything goes.' It's not just 'Throw shit up against the wall and see what sticks.' ” The collaborators' collective sensitivity, which they eventually codified into a set of 15 rules , emphasized unexpected doctrines, like being truthful to the source material of the satire and never letting its characters wink at their own reality—hence all that careful effort to establish the setting and tone at the start of Airplane!

Zucker said they also knew when to walk away from a joke, as with the Naked Gun trilogy, which they closed out with 1994's Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult . “We did three of those until it wasn't fresh anymore,” he said.

Brooks, too, was winding down in this era with goofier and less pointed parodies like Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It . But a new generation of filmmakers stepped in to fill the void, like Keenen Ivory Wayans, whose 1988 Blaxploitation satire I'm Gonna Git You Sucka paved the way for his sketch series In Living Color ; the all-encompassing 1996 lampoon (pause for a deep breath) Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood , from his brothers Shawn and Marlon; and the Scary Movie series, which the three Wayanses launched together in 2000.

Other young comedy prospects were being nurtured on the catalog of spoofs they were watching less often in theaters than on cable TV and home video, often at friends' slumber parties. “Those movies change your personality at a moment when you're searching for your identity,” said Schaffer, who would channel this in dozens of SNL digital shorts and movies like his 2016 rockumentary sendup, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping .

“There's some people who watch and go, 'Hey, funny,' and move on with their lives,” Schaffer said. “And I'm like, 'No, no, no, I can't move on from that. I just saw an entire world that cemented how I feel about how life is silly, and why can't we have fun?' ”

As if to prove that too much of a good thing was possible, a glut of Movie movies followed: Not Another Teen Movie (2001), Date Movie (2006), Epic Movie (2007), Superhero Movie (2008), and Disaster Movie (2008), all of which riffed on viral pop-culture moments as much as the genres they were named for.

Though these films—many of them written and directed by the team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer—were bacterially persistent and largely forgettable, they were also commercially successful, until Friedberg and Seltzer's The Starving Games (which parodied The Hunger Games ) and Superfast! (ditto for The Fast and the Furious ) flopped in quick succession.

In the long-running debate over who killed the spoof movie, Friedberg and Seltzer are usually the prime suspects . While movies like Airplane! , Naked Gun , and Young Frankenstein were critically acclaimed and have since been canonized , no Friedberg and Seltzer movie ever scored higher than 7 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and both critics and audiences have regularly voted their films among the worst of all time . In a 2008 article headlined “Meet the Charlatans,” Slate's Josh Levin called Meet the Spartans “ the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a 'movie' and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film ,” predicting that the pair would soon gain infamy. By 2013, Nathan Rabin, writing for the AV Club, called them “ the most reviled duo this side of Leopold and Loeb .”

But if Friedberg and Seltzer were “comic terrorists” who were “degrading the art of film and the art of comedy in one fell swoop,” they didn’t act alone. In fact, Rabin's criticism of Friedberg and Seltzer came from a review of 2011's Not Another Not Another Movie , by a whole separate set of parodists.

In the past, Zucker has been harsh about Friedberg and Seltzer. In 2009 he told the Guardian, “ They don't spoof scenes from other movies so much as repeat them .” But he told me he had no lingering ill will for any of these ZAZ wannabes: “I don't want to bash those guys too much, because at least they weren't trying to do Naked Gun ,” he said. But by Not Another Not Another Movie , no one wanted to be associated any longer with spoof movies —not even the makers of spoof movies .

In the meantime, the spoof-comedy talent pool wasn't being replenished. Had you asked him in 2005 who was likely to make the next Airplane! or Blazing Saddles , Schaffer said, “we all could have named that group: It's Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson. It's Judd Apatow, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen.” But comedy styles changed. When those stars were on the rise, Apatow's more naturalistic, more improv-based style of comedy was ascendant. Twenty years later, those same people are making movies and TV shows for streaming and have moved on to more-prestigious projects. “Ben Stiller would give us a Tropic Thunder every once in a while, and he doesn't do that anymore,” Schaffer said. “He gives us Severance .”

Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, the screenwriting duo who wrote the new Naked Gun film with Schaffer, said that if any spoof-type comedy was happening on theatrical movie screens these days, it was sneaking in, Trojan horse–style, with other genres: the horror films of Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger or the Marvel movies of Taika Waititi (all filmmakers, by the way, who built their foundations in sketch and spoof comedy). A movie like last year's superhero blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine , Gregor said, “is closer to The Naked Gun than it is to Batman , in a wonderful way.”

To get established in the spoof-comedy film category, Mand and Gregor had to smuggle themselves in too—via an action-packed (and well-received) reboot of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers , also directed by Schaffer, that was released on Disney+ in 2022.

Though everyone may have fond memories of spoof comedies from years past, the studios have largely lost commercial interest in them. “The business model seems to have shifted towards big-budget movies made for $150 to $200 million,” Gregor told me, “which means they have to make $500 million.” And no spoof movie has ever made that.

The improbable fact that the current Naked Gun got made “begins and ends with Liam Neeson wanting to do this,” Mand said. “He's done over 100 films. He has earned all this goodwill as this dramatic actor and now, in the last 15 or 20 years, as this vigilante action. The fact that he wanted to do it shapes the whole thing.”

Zucker (who directed Scary Movie 3 and 4 and was a writer and producer on 5 ), said he sees the ZAZ influence in fewer and fewer places these days—in movies like Mike Myers' Austin Powers series, which ended in 2002, and on TV shows like South Park and Impractical Jokers . The comedians he said he admires are people who “don’t try to copy what we do. They do original ideas.”