The return of the spoof: can comedy's silliest subgenre make a comeback?

The Guardian

2 days ago

The Naked Gun, a sequel/reboot to the old movie series of the same name, represents the first of its kind in a long time. No, not a legacy sequel, nor a Liam Neeson movie; the in-demand Irish actor still does two or three of those a year. Like its predecessors, The Naked Gun is a spoof – part of a comedic subgenre with astonishing versatility, in that it can lay claim to some of the very best and very worst comedies of all time. Maybe that's why these movies, despite relatively low budgets and decent success rates, will sometimes disappear for years at a time. Now, in a period when a pure comedy hasn't crossed the $100m mark in the US in almost a decade, The Naked Gun seems to be leading a revival. A sequel to the rock-doc spoof This Is Spinal Tap arrives next month, follow-ups to Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars spoof Spaceballs are on the way, and there have even been whispers of a fourth Austin Powers film.
The leader of the latest comeback has a connection to some high-water marks: the original Naked Gun, yes, but more importantly 1980's Airplane!, a feature-length spoof of the then-popular disaster movies from comic film-makers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. ZAZ, as the team was known, didn't invent the idea of parodying familiar genres in a barrage of intentional (and subverted) cliches, sight gags, puns and other stupid-clever jokes. But Airplane! took on movies like Airport with such a deadpan density, and such a shockingly high hit rate, that it wrested the spoof crown from previous king, Mel Brooks (whose Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles are still standard-bearers for loving genre parody).
Brooks often appeared on camera in his films, while the ZAZ boys did not; instead, Leslie Nielsen became the face of their efforts, and an unlikely catalyst for a youth-driven trend in the process. Following his flawlessly deadpan role in Airplane! as a doctor ('I am serious … and stop calling me Shirley'), Nielsen starred in the team's failed (but hilarious) TV procedural spoof Police Squad! which was eventually turned into the 1988 big-screen comedy The Naked Gun. The odd thing about the original Naked Gun is that, unlike Airplane!, it's not a particularly close parody of a classic or trendy film genre. It mostly takes the framework of the Police Squad! show, which was more akin to 60s cop dramas, and throws in some elements of neo-noir crime thrillers. (There's also a grab-bag of other assorted movie references throughout the trilogy.)
Nevertheless, or perhaps because it didn't require any specific genre knowledge, The Naked Gun was a big enough hit to inspire a pair of sequels – and plenty of knockoffs. A spoof boom lasted for most of the 90s, peaking in 1993 with National Lampoon putting their name on Loaded Weapon 1, veteran film-maker Carl Reiner contributing the erotic-thriller goof Fatal Instinct, Abrahams himself directing the Rambo-inspired Hot Shots! Part Deux, and Mel Brooks returning with Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A later entry, a spoof of urban dramas with the omnibus title of Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, kickstarted the next generation of spoofs when writers/stars Marlon and Shawn Wayans moved on to savage resurgent horror movies with Scary Movie.
A spoof built around a movie as self-aware and self-satirizing as Scream should not have worked – the Scream characters crack jokes, while The Naked Gun and its ilk tend to goof on seriousness – but it actually outgrossed its target. Later spoofs trumpeted the presence of 'two of the six writers' of Scary Movie, the non-Wayans-afilliated Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who also wrote the off-brand Nielsen-starring parody Spy Hard. Friedberg and Seltzer more or less got themselves appointed the ZAZ of the 2000s, even as an actual Zucker went on to make some of the later Scary Movie sequels. Their hits include Date Movie, Epic Movie and the 300 parody Meet the Spartans.
Watching the Friedberg-Seltzer spoofs of the 2000s is like watching children attempting to draw their own Looney Tunes or perform their own Saturday Night Live sketches: there's a basic understanding of what their imitation should look like (and a compulsion to have characters crushed by falling objects) but a lack of basic craft that's years away from passably amateurish. At times, projects like their magnum opus Disaster Movie barely seem to understand what a spoof even is; Friedberg and Seltzer know that it sometimes involves referring to other movies and/or cultural figures, which they do constantly, but are at a loss beyond ordering up a playground imitation. Look, I'm Iron Man! I'm Juno! I'm Miley Cyrus! Splat! (It almost goes without saying that the most oft-splattered targets tend to be 'annoying' women.)
Like Nielsen in his post-ZAZ phase multiplied by the force of a thousand suns, Friedberg and Seltzer made so many of these things, and so badly, that when they started to falter at the box office it felt like a relief. That loud, graceless sensibility has now migrated over to YouTube and TikTok, where at least the amateurs-at-heart aren't charging viewers 10 bucks a pop for sub-skit imitations. Even some well-liked spoofs were deemed stretched thin at 85 minutes; maybe stacking dozens of quick-hit joke is a practice better-suited to shorter-form parodies.
Perhaps sensing that, or simply wanting to pay tribute to the spirit of Police Squad! rather than the more mugging-intensive later installments, the new Naked Gun doesn't do much direct-scene parody. Its opening mimics the bank-robbing sequence from The Dark Knight in set design and score, but no one shows up in imitation Joker makeup. Director Akiva Schaffer, who knows from short-form comedy from his work as part of the Lonely Island, counterintuitively avoids taking the proliferation of a particular type of movie (like superheroes) as an imperative to spoof 'em good. That was the instinct behind the biopic parody Walk Hard, one of the last genuinely good spoofs, and a box office bomb in 2007. Instead, The Naked Gun continues to goof on cop thriller cliches and pile on the absurd puns and/or sight gags ('cold case' files in a refrigerator, a car wreck cleaned up via claw machine, etc), with the benefit of Neeson giving it his absolute best, unsmiling deadpan.
So what are the conditions required for spoof movies to multiply? Several confirmed follow-ups seem well-timed if not overdue; dozens of straight-faced horror trends have come through since the most recent Scary Movie, and there's been a 270% increase in Star Wars films since the first Spaceballs. But highly specific parodies are not always an advantage. Done well, they can be exacting, like Young Frankenstein, or a memorable compendium of cliches, like Walk Hard. Done poorly, and suddenly you've got unfunny mash-ups. Then again, it would also be reasonable to ask what, exactly, the new Naked Gun is satirizing.
Schaffer does work in some mockery of older white men exerting an iron grip on the culture while grousing how bad the world has become. Mostly, though, this particular spoof revival offers the gleeful release of watching an intentionally fake, silly movie in a theater, sharing laughs with strangers. Spoofing a movie through at-home streaming or phone-bound TikTok is certainly possible. But gags built around violating a generally agreed-upon reality of cinema work better in its natural habitat. That's something The Naked Gun, with its technical imitations of a 'real' movie, seems to understand more than any particular cop-movie trends: that it can provide the too-rare experience of laughing throughout a deeply silly movie that's as relentless, in its way, as the big-screen spectacle more typical of the 2020s. If the Naked Gun redo becomes the biggest comedy in months or even years, it could ease moviegoers back into the habit. If a subgenre responsible for some of the worst comedies ever made can still make 'em laugh, maybe comedy on the whole will get the chance to leave the house again.