Airplane!

The really great thing about Airplane! is that the jokes undercut your expectations so deftly, right down to the sour air traffic controller called Stack. When it's suggested that he turns on the landing lights on the runway, he snaps back: "That's just what they're expecting us to do." Read full review

The distinguishing feature of what many people consider to be the funniest movie ever made is the sheer number of gags. Read full review

The spoof that launched a thousand parodies – this is the one that's 100% funny. Read full review

At a time when throwaway gags seem like a luxury in any film, Airplane! has jokes—hilarious jokes—to spare. It's also clever and confident and furiously energetic, and it has the two most sadly neglected selling points any movie could want right now: it's brief (only eighty-eight minutes), and it looks inexpensive (it cost about three million dollars) without looking cheap. Airplane! is more than a pleasant surprise, in the midst of this dim movie season. As a remedy for the bloated self-importance of too many other current efforts, it's just what the doctor ordered. Read full review

The humor is an ingenious concoction of satire, spoof, burlesque, slapstick, raunchy dialogue and low-comedy sight gags. The jokes are directed at sex, politics, religion and almost everything else. The level of humor is not always consistent, but the filmmakers have thrown almost everything in with a shotgun approach and the routines work more often than not. Read full review

Airplane! is a splendidly tacky, totally tasteless, completely insignificant flight, a gooney bird of a movie that looks as if it could never get off the ground and then surprises and delights with its free-spirited aerobatics. Read full review

Airplane! is what they used to call a laff-riot. Made by team which turned out Kentucky Fried Movie, this spoof of disaster features beats any other film for sheer number of comic gags. Read full review

The onslaught of one-liners and sight gags in AIRPLANE! is so relentless that even the most dour viewer is ultimately won over--or exhausted. Read full review

The hits outnumber the misses well enough in Airplane!, especially in the first half, when the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (writer-directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) are layering jokes in the foreground and background. There are parodies of popular favorites like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever, wacky stock footage on back-screen projection, slapstick violence against various religious solicitors, and plenty of silly wordplay. Read full review

If you get half of the jokes flung your way, and laugh at half of those you’re still in much better shape than the very best episode of Three’s Company. If you truly study this movie and love it all, you probably haven’t done much with your life, but at least you’re smiling. Read full review

A sometimes silly, occasionally hilarious, and often sophomoric spoof of airline disaster films in which a passenger tries to land a disabled plane. Some of the jokes are tasteless, but there is a general air of good cheer as the script laughs most of all at the already laughable "Airport" movie series. [11 July 1980, p.3-8]

It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny. And the reason it's funny is frequently because it's sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc. Example: Airplane Captain (Peter Graves): Surely you can't be serious. Doctor (Leslie Nielsen): I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. This sort of humor went out with Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, and knock-knock jokes. That's why it's so funny. Read full review

There are also plenty of background sight gags that often go unnoticed on a first viewing. Read full review

The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience. Read full review

The film is funny in a way few of these toothless exercises are. The gags aren't exactly clever, but there are a lot of them, and the cutting finds a fast, effective tempo. Joe Biroc's witty cinematography gives the picture an authentically flat, artificial Universal look, and Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack are around for added iconographical persuasiveness. Read full review

It should be disastrous. But psycho ground controllers (Stack and Bridges), laff-a-second pace, and bludgeoning innuendo make this the acceptable face of the locker-room satire. Read full review

The movie isn't skillful enough to back up its satiric presumptions. Though it obviously aims to be sassy and uninhibited, Airplane! never approaches the comic heights achieved unwittingly by "Airport '75" and the peerless "Concorde -- Airport 1979." [3 July 1980, p.C11]

Airplane loses its buoyancy. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, who share both writing and directorial credits, become so desperate for laughs that the jokes descend to a much cruder level. And Airplane does an abrupt nosedive, turning a hopelessly flat movie, sparked only by the occasional appearances of Lloyd Bridges as an easily rattled air traffic controller whose nerves are such he depends on booze and pills to keep himself going on the job. Read full review