Surely You Can’t Be Serious.

My favorite movie when I was a kid was Top Secret!, the third feature and second studio film from the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, who were, of course, responsible for Airplane! and the greatest television series of all time, Police Squad! I actually didn’t see the full Airplane! until much later, probably because my parents thought it was stupid … and it is stupid, gloriously so, and so much of it still holds up today.

Jim Abrahams died in 2024 at age 80, but not long before his death, the trio collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a hilarious recounting of the making of that movie and their lives and careers up to that point. A friend suggested I track down the audiobook, which you can get on Apple Books or Amazon, because it’s read by the authors with a huge cast of people reading their own reminiscences from working on the film – including stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty – and comedians who remember how influential the film was in their lives and careers. Even Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, both studio execs who were there as the film was greenlit and produced, chime in. It’s a blast, not just funny, but fascinating because of how the trio recall coming into the movie business as rank amateurs, having to figure it out as they went along while also convincing established actors to go along with a script many of them didn’t understand until they saw the finished product.

The three men were childhood friends from Wisconsin who naturally always gravitated towards comedy, and while in college in Madison they created a playhouse where they put on sketch-comedy shows, eventually settling on the name Kentucky Fried Theater. They took that show to Los Angeles and turned it into a movie called, of course, Kentucky Fried Movie, written by ZAZ and directed by a then-unknown John Landis, who went on to direct Animal House because of his work on this film. They’d already started work on the film that would become Airplane!, which was built around a spoof of a mediocre air-disaster film called Zero Hour, from which the trio cribbed not just the framework of the story but entire bits of dialogue. The resulting movie was like nothing else, packed with jokes, non sequiturs, sight gags, puns, wordplay, and an inexplicable shot of a topless woman, and it was both a huge box-office success and a turning point in the history of comedy.

I rewatched Airplane while about halfway through the book, and most of it is still pretty funny, probably because so many of the jokes are just silly, like the one that provides the title of the book, the “The hospital? What is it?” running gag, and several of the visual jokes that it would be pointless to describe. It’s hard to watch that film, then or now, and think that some of the main actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack, were seen as dramatic actors incapable of comedy. They all nail the deadpan style that ZAZ wanted, and it’s essential to the film that they do so. Only Bridges really does anything overtly funny, when he sniffs glue; the others are just reciting ridiculous dialogue like it’s Shakespeare. There are a few jokes that sound dated now because they refer to something contemporary to the film, and a few that you probably just couldn’t tell today due to changing norms, although I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in the film might truly be offensive by today’s standards. I’m sure someone could find offense with a lot of what’s in Airplane!, but it’s all pretty tame compared to modern comedy; maybe Captain Oveur’s lines to Joey wouldn’t make the cut, but they’re just so stupid I found it hard to see them in that light. (The movie was on Hoopla, available through my local library.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the movie business, so much of what the book describes is new to me, even though I’m sure much of it doesn’t apply now, forty-five years later. I also couldn’t get enough of hearing the actors describe what it was like reading the script and working on the set; the book still has quotes from some of the older actors who died well before the book came out from previous interviews, just read by a narrator, and they’re almost all interesting. Most of them didn’t get what the script was; several had to be convinced by a loved one just to take the offered parts.

I wish the main part of the book hadn’t ended with Airplane!, although we do get one Top Secret! Fact, around the origins of that film’s “skeet surfing” scene. (I didn’t know that film was a box-office bomb; I was eleven when I saw it, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever watched.) There’s also a three-part epilogue where each of the writers talks about his career and life after Airplane!, which goes off the rails at several points, including one of them veering into some weird anti-science territory. You could probably skip that part, as none of it has much of anything to do with why you’re here. The rest of the book is either funny, interesting, or both throughout. The only catch is that if you haven’t seen Airplane! … well, what’s wrong with you?