Film Funniest movie ever, or double your money back.
For someone like me, who saw Airplane! as a child, this movie holds a special place in my memory. It is quite literally one of the funniest movies ever, to the point where you can be on the floor, in stitches, before you get to the second act, and it just keeps getting better from there. What's even more unusual about Airplane! is that it's one of those films where you keep getting more and more of the jokes each time you watch it. As a kid, I completely missed such things as Captain Oveur's brazen pedophilia ("Jimmy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?") and the gag with the inflatable autopilot ("On the belt of the automatic pilot, there's a manual inflation nozzle..."), but years later there came a series of Swiss Moments when I realized just exactly what was going on and died laughing all over again.
Similarly, as an adult watching it for the first time, you may pick up on a lot of things that younger people would miss, such as the "Zipper" speech, the "radar range" joke *
The sequel is still funny, and manages to introduce some hilarious new elements like Joe Saluchi's bomb, the blatant 2001 Shout Outs, and William Shatner in all his glory, but it clearly suffers from the lack of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker stamp and reuses a lot of the old gags. It's well worth watching, though, if you are anything like a fan of the first.
Both movies are eminently quotable, and one way to instantly break the ice at any social occasion is to start spouting lines such as "And stop calling me Shirley" and see who gets it.
Film Random gags thrown onto a normal movie
I often feel bad to give a negative review of a classic, but, look at me, doing it anyway while i will ignore the rasism, given the time it was made, i just... didnt find it that funny :/ and i watched it with my dad, and we always find movies funny. The main problem for me, was that the jokes were so obviously tacked on. There was no parody of the underlying concepts, just of the specific details, most of which i assume didnt even exist in the original movies. sure, it was amusing: the basketball player was pretty funny, but, so? the movie wasnt a parody, it was a totally viable, fairly well-acted movie with random gags thrown in that ruined the mood without creating a better one. not to say the gags werent funny, and it was pretty fun, but... not a proper paradoy, and not a proper comedy, imo.
if someone wants to correct me, i usually get why classics or cult classics are awesome, but this one not so much.
Film Comedy distilled into insanity.
There was an intention in making Airplane—to mock a melodramatic disaster film's most ridiculous moments by placing it into a comedy context. That's there, sure, but the whole is such a wacky, bizarre comedy that I don't think the film is particularly artful and its goal is swallowed up by its execution, where it seemed that literally anything proposed made it into the script for the purpose of a laugh.
I've praised artful parody before in the case of Young Frankenstein, but Airplane! presents a pretty good argument for the worth of a sophomoric free-for-all, since the film is hysterical. It wears its time pretty heavily today, with the culture of the 1970s and some of its social attitudes being hard to ignore as some jokes' references have become obscure and others are bigoted, but the film moves too fast and doesn't make a big enough deal of its more offensive jokes for me to really be upset by them. Some jokes miss, but there are so many it's not a problem. The comedy offers a ton of variety at its breakneck pace, too. The film is fully absurdist, bordering on outright surreal, but gags range from visual comedy, Black Comedy, deliberately corny literal gags, and edgy and sexual shock humor. On top of that, there are elements of parody, including of the source film Zero Hour! whose script was adapted into this film with its most striking and amusing lines left intact.
Airplane feels like it was written and produced by idiot teenagers who thought they were hilarious, except they turned out to be correct. With the acknowledgment that it's dated and makes some jokes I don't like, it's still a wild, crazy flight and works far better than it has any reason to.