Counting Every Single Joke in The Movie "Airplane!" (1980)
I've always thought that Airplane! is the funniest movie ever made, so I wanted to back up my subjective opinion with some data. To the best of my ability, I counted exactly 271 jokes. That makes for an average of 3.079 jokes per minute for the entirety of the movie. https://preview.redd.it/zmvc1linumed1.jpg?width=2835&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d6081823261e23ffbf0e1b84210291beb13694b While counting, I also categorised the types of jokes: visual gags, sound effect gags, dialogue, and also took notice of things like the different comedy principles they use such as heightening, rule of thirds, running gags and subverting the expectations. Here is a link to the google doc. (disregard spelling mistakes, I can barely type my name right) Here is the TLDR: Visual Gags
Running Gags Heightening Dialogue The dialogue is short, snappy, witty and effective. Subverting the expectations One of the biggest strengths of this movie is that everyone plays it straight. Leslie Nielsen was considered a serious drama actor at the time. The main actress is supposed to be this classic old Hollywood, modest love interest, but she is constantly proven to be quite the dirty mind. Overall, the pacing of this movie is relentless. Even if you didn't like a gag you don't have to wait long to get another one. It's a parody of "Zero Hour!" (1957) but you don't have to see the original to get all the jokes. I made an in-depth video about all of this in which I go into a lot more detail and expand on things like layers in comedy, so if that tickles your fancy you can check it out here submitted by /u/tonivesdream |
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