[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Another rule that you have is ‘Merely Clever.’ And I’m hoping to clarify that. You have to go beyond what is merely clever?
David Zucker, Director/Writer/Producer: Yeah. Well, one of the rules, and I wish I could recall which number rule it was, but it’s called merely clever. And you see that we give examples of this in our MasterCrash course.
You see something that appears to be funny, but you don’t laugh. Jim and Jerry and I and Pat Proft always had this mantra that it has to get a laugh.
We’d preview the movies and if we didn’t hear a laugh, people may have been smiling and liking it, but we cut it out. It’s got to get an audible laugh to stay in the movie. Otherwise, it’s merely clever.
The corollary to that is that we have a hundred terms which we call the glossary of terms and one of them is bull fighting.
You can do an impressive thing like, Olé, look what I did, look at this! but it’s not funny.
In so many comedies you see something clever but it doesn’t get, we want to deal in belly laughs. I mean you’ve just got to hear it.
It has to get a laugh.
Film Courage: Are there rules in comedy about being too offensive?
David: I’ve been asked, are there rules in comedy about being too offensive? I can’t recall any rule that we have. If it’s funny, it gets a laugh, we know it’s not offensive.
So, if Julie Haggerty’s line got a kind of a gasp, we would have cut it out. But if you get a laugh, it’s not offensive. People laugh. Like the whole…(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
New book from Film Courage! – See it on Payhip here
