The Genius of Airplane!: How to Make a Comedy by Playing Everything Completely Straight

Not every 46-year-old comedy still gets laughs, but Airplane! seems only to get funnier with the decades. Some viewers too young to have caught it in its theatrical release even take the Benjaminian view of it as the kind of great work that creates its own genre: the rapid-fire deadpan joke machine, we could call it. […]