![]() When Steve McCroskey, Rex Kramer, and Johnny read a series of newspaper headlines and exclaim, “Passengers certain to die!” “Airline negligent!” “There’s a sale at Penney’s!” you’d better believe that the joke is on the boring stiffs, not on him. “Wait ’til you see Lamar’s throw…he designed the javelin to go along with Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style.” There’s nothing like that in Airplane! Johnny’s wrists are as limp as they come, of course, but you’re not going to catch anyone else pointing that out to us. Johnny is part of that time-honored band, the movie sissy, and he’s one of the most magnificently unrepentant faggots to ever grace the screen in the entire 1980s. One of the best–and coincidentally, most radical–aspects in the movie is Johnny the air traffic controller, played by the brilliant Stephen Stucker. Chances are that you’ve seen it (here I will succumb to gender essentialism and wager that you have seen it at least once with your father) and can recite what the white zone is for without prompting. ![]() ![]() It’s one of the first in a rash of zany, anarchic free-for-all comedies that cropped up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and it’s one of the best. You know how one of the reasons everyone loved 30 Rock so much was the astonishing rate of jokes per minute? That’s Airplane!, but with the added benefit of Robert Stack. I am not an unreconstructed ZAZ fan I think The Naked Gun is overrated and there are parts of Police Squad! that could have been improved upon, but Airplane! remains in my mind one of the most consistently funny movies of the last thirty years.
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