How Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker spoofed their way to a serious comedy legacy

Even if you’ve never seen a single film by the writing and directing team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (collectively known as ZAZ), surely you’re familiar with the ubiquitous references to their work in popular culture. And if you just read that sentence and heard the words “don’t call me Shirley” in your head, then you’ve just proved the point.

The true story of how two Wisconsin-born brothers and their childhood friend rose from obscurity to create some of the zaniest film comedies of all time, only to break apart at the height of their success, has as many twists and turns as any Hollywood movie. Together, they managed to blend camp and earnestness in their genre sendups, mining both high and low sensibilities for comedy gold. Directing duos aren’t unheard of in Hollywood, and writing teams of three or more are common, but not many films can boast having three writer-directors (Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse being a recent and rare exception) working together in harmony. For a while, at least.

Since it’s Comedy Month here at The A.V. Club, we thought it would be fun to take a look at the ZAZ filmography, specifically the projects they worked on as a team before separating to pursue their individual careers (with mixed success). Within the span of a decade, their collaboration produced five classic films and a remarkably resilient television series, all packed with memorable sight gags and rapid-fire humor, performed with deadpan precision by some of the brightest stars of the era. Sure, some of the material feels very much of its time, but a lot of their jokes and parodies are still just as funny today as they were in the 1980s. And no one has done it quite as well since.

Kentucky Fried Origins

The Zucker brothers and Abrahams got their start making fun of pop-culture in comedy sketch shows, and never really stopped. While at The University of Wisconsin in the late ’60s and early ’70s they founded The Kentucky Fried Theater, where they would routinely spoof B-movies, TV shows, and the nightly news. Instead of taking shots at political targets like Nixon and Vietnam, though, they were more interested in “the silly stuff in media,” according to Abrahams. While other students were protesting the draft, they were busy studying kung fu films, women-in-prison melodramas, blaxploitation, beer commercials, pharmaceutical ads—whatever they happened to come across that made them laugh.

It would all become fodder for their first feature film project, The Kentucky Fried Movie. The trio moved their theater from Madison to Los Angeles in 1972 and started working on ideas to turn the multimedia aspects of the stage show into a big-screen production. After seeing a young director named John Landis promoting his debut film, a monster movie tribute called Schlock, on The Tonight Show, they reached out to him and convinced him to come on board the project. Following rejections from investors and every major studio in town, Landis—who would go on to direct comedy classics like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and Coming To America—helped produce a 10-minute short to test the concept. All it took was a few screenings in front of actual audiences, and the project was back on track.

Still considered the “gold standard for sketch movies” The Kentucky Fried Movie is a little rough, decidedly crass, and feels hopelessly dated looking back on it, but it delivers so many laughs that at least few are bound to land even now. The cast features cameos from the likes of George Lazenby, Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, Donald Sutherland, Tony Dow, Stephen Bishop, and Bong Soo Han. It now enjoys a cult status, if not on its own merits then as an impressive first outing for team ZAZ.

Airplane! takes off

With one moderately successful film (thanks to a shoestring budget) under their belts, ZAZ decided to take the unusual step of writing and directing their next project on their own. Rather than an anthology, the entire film would be a parody of a single genre—specifically disaster movies, and more specifically airplane disaster movies.

For his oral history on the making of Airplane! for The A.V. Club in 2015, (soon to be released in book form) Will Harris spoke to as many of the people involved in the film as he could, including the Zuckers and Abrahams. It’s clear from the interviews that no one, not even the filmmakers, really knew what they had until they saw the completed film for the first time. Their idea was to hire serious actors like Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen (who, as luck would have it, had a secret desire to be a comic actor and would go on to work with ZAZ as the star of Police Squad! and the Naked Gun films) as straight men, so the audience could better appreciate the wackiness unfolding around them. It proved to be a winning formula.

The template was Zero Hour!, a low-budget adaptation based on a Canadian teleplay by author Arthur Hailey. A veteran pilot with PTSD trying to save his relationship, the food poisoning from the in-flight meal, the tough-as-nails ex-military officer who talks him through the landing—all of that came from Zero Hour! It was so similar, in fact, the filmmakers actually purchased the rights to remake it in order to avoid copyright issues.

“We were so fortunate to have had Zero Hour! as our blueprint,” Jerry Zucker told The A.V. Club in 2015. “Because we really knew nothing about film structure. We were funny guys, but we knew nothing about crafting a movie. The people at Paramount really taught us about making plot points into jokes, about making jokes into plot points.”

Of course, they also threw in references to Airport and its sequels, Airport 1975 and Airport ’77, not to mention jokes based on completely unrelated films like From Here To Eternity, Jaws, and Saturday Night Fever. There are too many great gags to list here, but our favorites include Barbara Billingsley talking Jive, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar insisting he’s not himself, every moment Stephen Stucker is on screen, and the recurring “but that’s not important right now” bits.

It all somehow works together brilliantly, and upon its release Airplane! became a huge hit with audiences. With a budget of just $3.5 million, it grossed $158 million worldwide and still consistently ranks high in lists of the best comedies of all time.

Police Squad! and The Naked Gun

Having conquered the cinema, ZAZ turned their attention to the small screen. Their next project was the short lived but much loved series Police Squad! As the name implies, it sends up overly serious cop procedurals of the past and present (the present at the time being 1982), like Dragnet, M Squad and Felony Squad. In the leading role of Det. Frank Drebin they cast Leslie Nielsen, who enjoyed his experience playing the doctor on Airplane! so much he couldn’t wait to come back for more self-serious silliness.

The show received critical acclaim, but that didn’t help it in the ratings. ABC didn’t even opt to air all six episodes before canceling it (only four originally premiered on the network). The short-lived series eventually found an audience thanks to cable reruns and home video, and became such a cult hit that six years later it was revived as a film, The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! Nielsen returned alongside George Kennedy, who replaced Alan North in the role of Captain Ed Hocken. ZAZ had previously pursued Kennedy for Airplane! but he’d turned it down because of his involvement in the original Airport films. And yes, we have to mention it, O.J. Simpson is also there.

The Naked Gun would prove to be the most successful of all of the ZAZ films, spawning two more films—The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult—though David Zucker would be the only one of the three to return for the sequels.

Top Secret!

Among the spoofs ZAZ produced, Top Secret! didn’t enjoy the lasting success of Airplane! or the Naked Gun films, but it’s worth revisiting for Val Kilmer’s performance alone as Nick Rivers, an American rock star who gets caught up in an East German plot while performing overseas. Combining elements of war films, espionage thrillers, and an Elvis musical (somehow it works, trust us), it follows the same joke-a-minute formula the filmmakers had perfected by this point in their careers. As usual, they assembled an unlikely cast of hidden comic talents, including Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing. It bombed at the box office, but has held up over the years, and even grown in estimation. Memorable sight gags and lines like, “I know a little German” have kept its humor in the public consciousness, if not the film itself.

Ruthless People and parting ways

The 1986 film Ruthless People would be the final collaboration between Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. It was more of a farce than a spoof, with a story not specifically based on anything that had previously existed. ZAZ directed the film as a trio, but the script is credited to Dale Launer (who also penned Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and My Cousin Vinny). It starred Bette Midler as Barbara, who’s so annoying her odious husband Sam, played by Danny DeVito, schemes to get rid of her. In an O. Henry-style twist, Barbara is kidnapped by Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater, but rather than being distraught by his wife’s abduction, Sam is delighted. The film is chock full of terrific performances, and represented a promising evolution for the directors. Unfortunately, it would prove to be the last time they would work together as a team.

“After a while, it became too many guys sitting in the same chair,” David Zucker told Premiere magazine in 1988. The trio split amicably not long after that. Beyond their desire to create projects on their own, there was also the financial reality that as long as they worked as a writing-directing trio, the studios paid them each a third of the salary for a single writer or director. You can’t really blame them for wanting to grab a bigger piece of the pie.

Jerry Zucker left writing behind for the most part, but would go on to direct the films Ghost, First Knight, and Rat Race. David Zucker continued to make spoofs as both a writer and director, including the two Naked Gun sequels, High School High, and several entries in the Scary Movie franchise. Abrahams, too, stayed in the spoof business, writing the mob satire Mafia! as well as the Top Gun parodies Hot Shots! and Hot Shots! Part Deux (guess he also retained the copyright on the exclamation points in titles). Some of these separate projects were more successful than others. None of them, however, ever came close to achieving the kind of success the filmmakers enjoyed when they were working together as a team.