When I was ten years old, I thought the greatest actor in the world was Leslie Nielsen. He was the star of every movie I loved, and I was always thrilled to see a trailer or find a VHS of a movie that had him in it.
My favorite of his performances came in the Naked Gun movies, where I felt like his humor and timing were unmatched.
Truly, when Nielsen passed over a decade ago, it felt like the comedy world shifted. We stopped having those big-budget, wide-release, slapstick, satire, and spoof movies.
Today, I want to look into the pedigree of Naked Gun and talk about how the reboot, whose trailer just dropped, looks to revive it.
Let's dive in.
The 'Naked Gun' ZAZ Comedy Formula
The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear'
Credit: Paramount
Before the Naked Gun, there were the comedic talents of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker-- that's David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, who get referred to as ZAZ.
They are renowned pioneers of the parody film genre. They met at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and later formed the "Kentucky Fried Theater" sketch comedy group in the early 1970s.
And Leslie Nielsen became their favorite tool for their brand of comedy. They burst onto the scene with Airplane! and Kentucky Fried Movie, and continued their spoof success with the Naked Gun movies.
Let's look at a few tools they used to craft these movies.
- Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker (ZAZ) Brand of Parody: This is the foundational element. Having honed their style with Airplane! and the original Police Squad! TV series, ZAZ brought their signature approach:
- Rapid-Fire Gags: Jokes come thick and fast, often overlapping. If one doesn't land, another is seconds away.
- Literalism and Wordplay: Taking idioms, phrases, and instructions absolutely literally for comedic effect (e.g., responding to "Cigarette?" with "Yes, I know").
- Visual Comedy: Heavy reliance on sight gags, background jokes happening unnoticed by the characters, and absurd visual non-sequiturs.
- Slapstick: Exaggerated physical comedy, often involving destruction or bodily harm played purely for laughs.
- Deadpan Delivery: Leslie Nielsen's masterful portrayal of Frank Drebin is crucial. He delivers utterly absurd lines and participates in ridiculous situations with complete seriousness, amplifying the comedy through contrast. The supporting cast often follows suit, treating the bizarre as mundane.
- Spoofing Police Procedurals and Film Noir: The film meticulously apes the visual style, narrative structure, character archetypes (hard-boiled detective, femme fatale, stoic captain), and dramatic tropes of classic cop shows (Dragnet, M Squad) and film noir, then subverts them with absurdity. The serious tone and look provide the perfect straight-faced setup for the gags.
- Absurdity and Non-Sequiturs: The film operates on a logic entirely its own. Situations escalate to ludicrous extremes, and random, unconnected events or lines often punctuate scenes, keeping the audience off-balance and entertained.
- High Joke Density: More than just rapid-fire, the density is key. Jokes aren't just in the dialogue but embedded in the set design, props, costumes, background action, and even the editing. It rewards repeat viewings.
Slapstick, Satire, and Spoofs
The original Leslie Nielsen movies took slapstick comedy to another level. It mixed them with the spoof and satire genre to create gold.
The way these movies worked was that they took a popular genre full of tropes, like the rogue police detective movie, and then flipped all the tropes on their heads, acknowledging them and making fun of them at the same time.
You have to be smart to make a good one of these movies. You also have to be a fan of the kinds of movies you're making fun of, because you need to watch a ton of them in order to get all the beats.
Once you have all of that, you basically write a straightforward version of the movie. You'd do an outline and craft something that could be pitched like a real version of one of those movies.
The narrative twist is that you're going to make all the beats usually used for drama into comedy.
The Naked Gun's DNA is a potent mix where slapstick provides the physical comedy, satire mocks the conventions of the police genre, and spoof/parody uses imitation, exaggeration, and relentless gags to deconstruct and ridicule those conventions.
The deadpan delivery, particularly from Leslie Nielsen, and from Liam Neeson in the new trailer, acts as the crucial catalyst that makes this blend work so effectively, creating an enduringly hilarious and influential style of comedy.
I wish we had more of these movies. It felt like the legacy of them became these straight-to-DVD movies that never really caught on streaming. But the new trailer for the reboot gives me hope these stories are coming back in a big way.
Summing Up The Cinematic DNA of 'The Naked Gun'
So, whether you're marveling at the background gags, groaning at the puns, or simply enjoying Drebin's latest blunder, you're experiencing the core DNA of The Naked Gun.
It's a brilliantly silly, expertly crafted movie that proves we should have more of these stories hitting the big screen to make us laugh.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
