[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Your first rule of comedy is never do a joke on a joke.
David Zucker, Director/Writer/Producer: Right. So if you have a joke on a joke, if you have something funny in the background, the foreground person has to be completely straight. So, you can’t have somebody like Jim Carrey doing funny faces in the foreground and then crazy stuff happening in the background. There’s no discipline to that. And I’m not accusing Jim Carrey of anything. He’s brilliant. But you have to have some discipline.
Often if you do a background joke, that’s more effective when the audience you let the audience find the joke and you let them see something in the background.
We bring that out in the MasterCrash course.
Film Courage: Right. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that coming up. How is it possible though that comedy has rules? Shouldn’t it just be free flowing? It’s whatever works?
David: Sometimes it is, but a lot of comedians had rules like Laurel and Hardy had rules and Preston Sturges had rules. There’s other ones that actually thought about what they were doing and actually had a lot of discipline. Even without necessarily having rules, like The Wayans [brothers] for instance, they have a specific style and if they don’t have rules, they certainly are following their own discipline and it works for them.
The same with Austin Powers, Mike Myers. I doubt if they’re writing just whatever goes.
But when you’re doing spoof and when you’re trying to do our style of spoof, it’s best to follow the rules or else you’re doing it badly or just copying what happened before.
Film Courage: Why did you create MasterCrash?
David: Well, we created MasterCrash because Pat Proft and I had written a script as I may have mentioned before for Naked Gun 4. We thought bringing back Naked Gun was a great idea, but not doing it in a cop station in Chicago or LA. We wanted to do a different genre.
We took Naked Gun and we took it into Mission Impossible, Born Identity and Bond and we thought that was a great idea and the jokes were great, the plot was great, the characters were great.
We knew what we were doing and then suddenly I woke up to see that Seth MacFarlane, who’s very successful and a big fan of of us (Naked Guns, Airplane, Top Secret, etc.) had taken over the franchise and made a deal with Paramount to cast Liam Neeson.
He hired a director and writers and they did the movie. I read the script because they wanted me to put my name on as an executive producer but I can’t put my name on anything unless I work on it from the start. I would have told them not to do this idea.
Without commenting on the script the basic thing is they’re writing it without rules. The trailer came out about a month ago. You can see they break about five of…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
MASTERCRASH: A Crash Course In Spoof Comedy
BUY THE BOOK – Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
About:
Born on October 16, 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, director/writer/producer David Zucker, along with brother Jerry (Ghost, 1990) Zucker and longtime friend, Jim (Hot Shots, 1991) Abrahams, has established himself among Hollywood’s (or at least Wisconsin’s) most successful filmmakers. Starting out after college, with a borrowed video tape deck and camera, the soon to be legendary trio created the Kentucky Fried Theater, on the UW Madison campus, and moved to California in 1972, quickly becoming the most successful small theater group. in Los Angeles history.
After parlaying this success into The Kentucky Fried Movie, the three conceived the idea that would create a whole new film genre. Airplane! (1980) broke all conventions, featuring dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen performing zany jokes with straight-laced sincerity. The spoof became the surprise hit of 1980, beginning a streak of hilarious movies including Top Secret! (1984) and Ruthless People (1986), after which David branched out on his own to direct The Naked Guns (1988, 1991, 1994), BASEketball (1998), Scary Movies 3 (2003), and 4 (2006), and others.
David also found time to produce the successful, but somewhat less hilarious A Walk in The Clouds (1995) and Phone Booth (2002), and recently completed a feature script, The Star of Malta, a comedy set in the Film Noir era, and an international spy thriller, “Counter Intellijence!”.
MORE VIDEOS WITH DAVID ZUCKER
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New book from Film Courage! – See it on Payhip here
