'Airplane!' director feels Hollywood is 'destroying comedy'

Ace filmmaker David Zucker doesn’t think Hollywood is doing justice by the genre of comedy. One of the biggest names in comedy in the 1980s thanks to ‘Airplane!’ and ‘The Naked Gun’ franchise, David feels Hollywood has become overly sensitive when it comes to comedy and thus “destroying” comedy.

On his successful directing career, David said, “We could be as offensive as we liked,” in reference to films like ‘Scary Movie 3’ and ‘Scary Movie 4’. He added, “We went where the laughs were. We never thought that we were offending anyone, but if we were offending people we knew we were on the right track. As time went on, it got to be the ’90s and the 2000s and it did change… We never worried about any of this stuff with the ‘Naked Gun’ or ‘Scary Movie’ films.”

“My current writing partner and I wrote a parody of ‘James Bond’ and ‘Mission: Impossible,'” Zucker said. “One female executive said, ‘This joke is getting pretty risqué.’ It was a mild joke about the lead female character, because she had come up through the police department and FBI, she said she needed a breast reduction to fit into the kevlar vest.”

“It was pure oatmeal, so mild,” Zucker said of the joke. “Not one of our funniest things but this was too much. I thought, ‘If this was the criteria for it, we’re in big trouble.’ They’re destroying comedy because of nine percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humour.”

For his fans, you can see his work in his next directorial stint, ‘The Star of Malta’. The film, however, doesn’t have a release date yet.