A salute to Leslie Nielsen, the real Naked Gun

Mint

31-07-2025

There's a moment in the 1980 comedy Airplane!—one of the funniest films of all-time, available to rent on Amazon Video—where a worried passenger says, 'Surely, you can't be serious," and Leslie Nielsen, as the doctor on board, retorts without the twitch of a muscle: 'I am serious. And don't call me Shirley." It's possibly the most quoted joke in spoof history, and the magic of the moment isn't in the line itself. It's in the look. That straight face. That poker-stiff voice. That impossibly grave delivery of a ridiculous line, uttered by a man with all the solemnity of Shakespearean tragedy. Leslie Nielsen didn't wink. That, dear reader, is precisely what made him hilarious.
Nielsen passed away in 2010 after a hilarious career, highlighted by the Naked Gun films. As a Naked Gun reboot comes to theatres this week (with Oscar-winning actor Liam Neeson stepping into Nielsen's shoes) it's a good time to doff a cap to this high priest of absurdity. Nielsen's performances were riddled with misunderstandings, malapropisms, and magnificent misuse of metaphor, yet he never broke character. Nielsen acted like he was in 12 Angry Men even when he was drinking urine samples by mistake, or bumbling around in Dracula: Dead And Loving It. He didn't play funny. He was funnier because he didn't know he was funny.
Before Airplane!, Nielsen played square-jawed leads in B-movies and solemn guest-stars on TV procedurals. If casting directors needed a stoic face, they called Nielsen. Which is precisely what Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker did. In Airplane!, the ZAZ team (as they'd come to be known) set out to parody the overly sincere disaster films of the 1970s. Instead of hiring comedians, they recruited dramatic actors with reputations for seriousness. Nielsen, as the gravely concerned Dr. Rumack, delivered lines about "a passenger who had fish for dinner" with such terrifying urgency that you could be forgiven for thinking this was high-stakes drama.
Airplane! was a tonal earthquake. The blockbuster reinvented spoof comedy, shifting the form from broad gags to rapid-fire absurdism layered so thick that repeat viewings were essential. And Nielsen was at the centre of it all, the knight who never let the court know he had mislaid his horse. He was 54 when he did Airplane!, and the rest of his career was about to get improbably, gloriously, silly.
If Airplane! was a revelation, The Naked Gun trilogy was scripture. Spun off from a short-lived ZAZ television show called Police Squad!, the Naked Gun films (all three of which are streaming in India on Netflix) captured the Airplane! spirit, and merrily went overboard. Nielsen stars as Frank Drebin, an improbably all-conquering police lieutenant with the absurd idiocy of Inspector Clouseau. He was a man out of time, out of touch, and frequently out of pants.
In the 1988 film The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, Drebin attempts to comfort the widow of a colleague and says earnestly, 'Like a midget at a urinal, I was going to have to stay on my toes." It's a joke so wrong, so politically incorrect, and yet so perfectly aligned with the utter cluelessness of the character. Nielsen kills it. Like Shakespeare's Polonius, he's never in on the joke, and that's what makes it eternal.
In The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), Drebin is part of this exchange:
'Now, Jane, what can you tell us about the man you saw last night?"
Jane: 'He's Caucasian."
Drebin: 'Caucasian??"
Jane: 'Yeah, you know, a white guy. A moustache. About six-foot-three."
Drebin: 'Awfully big moustache."
The gag is in the rhythm, in the misunderstanding, in the blind confidence of a man who assumes nothing could ever be his fault. Nielsen doesn't break character for a second, even as the entire frame crumbles around him. In The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994), he reminisces about lost love: 'She had a tear in her eye, a glint in her teeth, a bug up her nose, and a bee in her bustle." It's an absurd line that Nielsen recites with the gravitas of a poetry professor.
The Naked Gun films are masterclasses in timing, in repetition, in throwing everything at the wall and letting Nielsen's gravity give it coherence. He was the axis around which the absurd revolved. And it wasn't just that Nielsen could land a line; he could underplay a pratfall, understate a catastrophe. His comedic superpower was restraint.
What made Leslie Nielsen so unique was that he played not to the audience, but against them. While everyone else mugged and gurned, Nielsen remained resolute, the man who insisted this wasn't funny. The joy was in watching him flail so confidently that it looped around into triumph. He weaponised seriousness, making it his ultimate punchline. In today's meta-saturated landscape, where everyone is a little too self-aware, Nielsen's brand of humour feels almost radical. His characters weren't winking at us. They were begging to be taken seriously, even as they tumbled through pianos, exploded in labs, or accidentally mooned the Queen of England.
Spoof, in its finest form, is a magic trick. Leslie Nielsen was the magician who never showed us the rabbit: only a very confused man who mistook the rabbit for a hat and offered it a cigarette. He was, surely and sincerely, sublime. Just don't call him Shirley.
Streaming tip of the week:
One of the best recent spoofs is Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, available for rent on Amazon Video. In this 2016 film the comedian Andy Samberg plays a wonderfully daft former-boyband star who has gone on to become solo. It's all a bit Spinal Tap, and sometimes the autotune even gets to eleven.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.