David Zucker said execs are pandering to the 'nine percent of the people who don't have a sense of humour'
The director of the 1980 film
Airplane! has put the boot into Hollywood for "destroying comedy" by making it too woke.
David Zucker told PragerU that film executives were now too afraid to upset a fraction of the population who "don't have a sense of humour."
The director's comments come just months after Monty Python icon John Cleese
also called out Hollywood for neutering creativity by being too PC.
Zucker, who's films also include the
Naked Gun series and a pair of
Scary Movie films, said Hollywood was so sensitives that
Airplane! could only be made today if all the jokes were canned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQmHfMgqUFg
Airplane! is rife with decidedly non-PC humour, including a scene where two black characters are given subtitles as they speak "jive" to each other and another where multiple character assault a distressed passenger.
Zucker told PragerU that he and his writers didn't worry about offending people when working on their comedy classics and just went "where the laughs were". "We would be an offensive as we liked," he explained.
However, the 75-year-old admitted he eventually felt forced to change his way: "We never thought that we were offending anyone, but if we were offending people, we knew we were on the right track.
"As time went on, it got to be the nineties and the two-thousands and it did change. We never worried about any of this stuff with the
'Naked Gun' or
'Scary Movie' films."
Zucker also recalled working on a spy satire comedy and being dumbfounded when a Hollywood exec told him a joke, that he thought was "pure oatmeal", went too far.
"My current writing partner and I wrote a parody of
James Bond and
Mission: Impossible.' Zucker recalled.
"One female executive said, 'This joke is getting pretty risqué'. It was a mild joke about the lead female character, because she had come up through the police department and FBI, she said she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07pPmCfKi3U
"It was pure oatmeal, so mild," Zucker said, before adding, "Not one of our funniest things, but this was too much. I thought, 'If this was the criteria for it, we're in big trouble'."
Zucker concluded that Hollywood was killing comedy by pandering to a minority audience, about "nine percent of the people who don't have a sense of humour".
He said
Airplane! could never be made today: "When we do screenings of
'Airplane!' we get the question if we could do 'Airplane!' today. The first thing I could think of is sure, just without the jokes."
In July, Cleese told Fox News that he does not believe comedians have the freedom to be funny anymore.
The 82-year-old funnyman said: "A lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, 'Can I get away with it? I don't think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that."
"You see what I mean? And that's the death of creativity."
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