Director David Zucker, best known for cult classics comedies Airplane! and The Naked Gun, has again decried Hollywood’s current comedic climate. In a recent video posted by Dennis Prager’s Prager U, he described how his classic movie Airplane! could not be made today. 

“When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today,” said Zucker. “The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.’” 

Zucker continues to describe his preferred sense of humor:

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

Zucker continues, “It was pure oatmeal, so mild,” he 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 humor. We could be as offensive as we liked. 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.”

“Comedy’s in trouble, but I think it’s gonna come back. I think there’s a pendulum and it’ll swing back. I’d just like to see comedy filmmakers do comedy without fear…We just want to make people laugh.”

Zucker shifted his focus from comedy to working on political ads for the Republican Party in 2004. His most recent work was writing and producing Scary Movie 5 in 2013.