Jim Abrahams, one of the brilliant minds behind such smash hit comedies as Airplane! and Naked Gun has died. He was 80.
The writer and director, who along with brothers Jerry and David Zucker invented a whole new style of comedy with a constant stream of quips, sight gags, and jokes that barraged viewers with hilarity, Variety reported.
Abrahams and his cohorts first tried out their comedic style in the 1977 film Kentucky Fried Movie, but it wasn’t until the 1980 sneak hit Airplane! that their style really made a major impact on filmmaking as Abrahams and the Zuckers packed hundreds of jokes and parodies into their films wowing audiences everywhere.
The writing and directing team had stumbled across a 1957 film entitled Zero Hour, in which former pilot Ted Striker (Dana Andrews) had to overcome his fear of flying and land a plane that had an incapacitated crew. The Zuckers and Abrahams saw it as a perfect vehicle for parody and that film, Airplane!, was born.
The aviation-centered spoof of fan-favorite disaster films, including Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno, was a smash hit in 1980 and spawned a still growing series of spoof films such as Top Secret, Hot Shots, the Scream series of spoof horror films, and even films like the Austin Powers series.
“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,” film reviewer Ron Pennington wrote.
“The direction is as wild and wooly as the script, but the team of Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker has a good eye for visual jocularity, and they set the sight gags up for maximum effect,” he added.
Another brilliant move Abrahams and the Zuckers made was to cast otherwise serious, dramatic actors in many of the roles, instead of known comic actors. The juxtaposition of serious actors amid all the parody and humor only added to the effect for audiences.
“The biggest struggle was to cast straight actors as opposed to comedians,” Abrahams said of the process of bringing on serious actors. “At first, Paramount was resistant to that idea. They didn’t quite understand why we wanted to do something like that. There was something very endearing about those four actors spoofing themselves in the movie. In essence, they had had full careers, and they were kind of having a laugh at their own expense.”
Abrahams next took his comedic sensibilities to TV and created the short-lived but cult favorite TV series, Police Squad starring one-time TV heavy actor Leslie Nielsen as the inept Det. Frank Drebin. While the TV series lasted only six episodes, it spawned a feature film in 1988 entitled, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! That film spawned two more feature films, released in 1991, 1994, and is set to birth an upcoming reboot scheduled for 2025. The reboot will star Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr.
Abrahams was born on May 10, 1944, in Shorewood, Wisconsin, to a lawyer father and a mother who was an educational researcher. He met the Zuckers in his home town where all three grew up together and where they all attended Shorewood High School and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Their first foray into entertainment came in 1971 when they founded the Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, where they tried their hand at improvisational comedy. They eventually developed the prototype for their comedic style that they called “comedy judo” for its lightning-fast delivery.
Abrahams noted that they specifically avoided the sort of political comedy that was popular at the time, saying, “There were a bunch of groups in that era who were making political jokes, and there were lots of easy, obvious targets. But that was just never our instinct. Our instinct was always to watch a movie and say, ‘Isn’t’ that silly?”
Moving their Kentucky Fried Theater concept to Los Angeles in 1972, the trio met director John Landis who urged them to try their comedy chops on film, an exhortation that spurred them to make Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, which Landis directed.
Still, after their first few notable films, Abraham had to admit that they didn’t really have a handle on making films. “We were funny guys who really didn’t understand, had no clue, about movie structure,” he once said of many of their failures.
Despite several failures, the team had another hit with Hot Shots! a spoof of Tom Cruise’s fighter pilot film and later Hot Shots! Part Deux, a spoof of tough-guy, Rambo-styled films.
Off screen, Abrahams was also active in efforts to help people with epilepsy after his year-old son, Charlie, came down with the condition in 1993. After finding a way to help cure his son through a ketogenic diet, Abrahams created the nonprofit Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies to help others with the condition.
Abrahams leaves behind Nancy Cocuzzo, his wife of 48 years, his daughter, Jamie, sons, Charlie and Joseph, and his grandchildren, Caleb, James, and Isaac.
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