Jim Abrahams, who with the brothers David and Jerry Zucker surely comprised one of the funniest trios of comedy writers in film history, layering on the yucks in classics like “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 80.
His son Joseph said the cause was complications of leukemia.
Mr. Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — often known around Hollywood as the “men from ZAZ” — revolutionized film comedy with their straight-faced, fast-paced parodies of self-serious dramas like 1970s disaster films and police procedurals.
Along the way they littered pop culture with a trail of one-liners seemingly custom-cut to drop into daily conversation: “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” And “Nice beaver!”
Their films spawned an entire genre of spoof comedy, many of them pale, scruffy comparisons to the tight scripts and cleverly paced plots that gave the ZAZ films their punch.
The trio shared writing credits on five films, starting with “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), a compilation of parody sketches that grew out of a comedy show they developed after college in Madison, Wis., and took to Los Angeles in 1972. It was directed by John Landis, who would go on to direct “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers.”
The idea for their second film, “Airplane!” (1980), came after they watched a 1957 thriller called “Zero Hour!” about an ill-fated passenger plane on which the crew is stricken with food poisoning, forcing one of the passengers, a psychologically scarred ex-pilot, to take control.
Minus the rat-a-tat gags, that’s basically the plot of “Airplane!” In fact, it tracks the earlier film so closely that the writers bought the rights to it, to make sure they weren’t sued.
They shopped the script around to studios, but at first no one bit. Not only did many executives fail to understand their brand of humor, but they resisted the trio’s desire to direct and produce the film, as well as their insistence that they cast dramatic actors like Robert Stack and Leslie Nielsen instead of comedians.
Finally, Paramount said yes, but included a clause allowing the studio to fire all three after a week of production.
On the first day, the trio filmed one of the film’s iconic scenes, in which a passenger, Dr. Rumack (Mr. Nielsen), discovering that bad fish has poisoned the crew and most of the other passengers, asks the recalcitrant Ted Striker (Robert Hays) for help.
“Can you fly this plane and land it?” Rumack asks.
“Surely you can’t be serious,” Striker replies.
“I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley,” Rumack says, full of gravitas.
Before you can say “Ha!” the scene has moved on to the next joke.
“When Paramount Pictures watched the dailies and saw that joke and the way it played, they were relieved,” Mr. Abrahams told Vulture in 2016. “They finally understood the concept and were much more comfortable dealing with us.”
The film, made for just $3.5 million (a little more than $14 million in today’s currency), was a blockbuster, earning more than $171 million and winning over hordes of initially skeptical critics. Today “Airplane!” is considered by many to be one of the funniest movies ever made.
The Zuckers and Mr. Abrahams stumbled after “Airplane!” Their follow-up film, “Top Secret” (1984), a spy-thriller spoof starring Val Kilmer, bombed at the box office, though it has since acquired a cult following, while their attempt at a television series, the comedy “Police Squad” (also with Mr. Nielsen), was canceled after just six episodes, despite good reviews.
“We didn’t quite get the importance of a story,” Mr. Abrahams told Vulture. “We struggled coming up with a story for a while. We came up with a lot of bad ideas.”
They rebounded with the movie “Ruthless People” (1986), starring Danny DeVito and Bette Midler, and then with “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!,” a feature-length extension of the TV show directed by David Zucker, with Mr. Nielsen reprising his role as Detective Frank Drebin.
As they had done with “Airplane!” the trio began with a straightforward story — this time about a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth II at a baseball game — on which they draped nonstop jokes, cleverly treading a line between the profane and the absurd.
“We like to think of our humor as innocent,” Mr. Abrahams told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988. “There’s lots of innuendo, but it’s childlike. I’d take a 7-year-old to see that. The toilet humor — they’d probably like that the best.”
James Steven Abrahams was born on May 10, 1944, in Shorewood, Wis., a northern suburb of Milwaukee. His mother, Louise (Ogens) Abrahams, was an education researcher, and his father, Norman, was a lawyer.
The Zucker boys lived nearby and attended the same synagogue and high school as Mr. Abrahams and later the same college, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Though Mr. Abrahams was a few years older, the three bonded over their shared love for cutting up in class.
After graduating from college in 1966, Mr. Abrahams became an insurance adjuster and investigator.
One day, David Zucker called. He was assembling a crew of funny men to run an improv group and wanted Mr. Abrahams to help him and Jerry write material. “Kentucky Fried Theater” was born, and so was their shared career.
The ZAZ trio’s work together ended with the 1991 sequel “Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear,” for which Mr. Abrahams and Jerry Zucker were executive producers and David Zucker the director. (David Zucker was the only member of the trio involved, as a writer, in the second sequel, “The Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult.”) Mr. Abrahams went on to direct several films on his own, including “Big Business” (1988), with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin; “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael” (1990), with Winona Ryder; “Hot Shots” (1991) and “Hot Shots Part Deux” (1993), both written with Pat Proft; and “Mafia!” (1998). He also wrote “Scary Movie 4” (2006), with Mr. Proft, which David Zucker directed.
He married Nancy Cocuzzo in 1978. In addition to their son Joseph, she survives him, along with another son, Charlie; their daughter, Jamie; and three grandchildren.
As a child, Charlie Abrahams developed a form of epilepsy, which sent his parents searching for a treatment. They eventually succeeded with a high-fat, ketogenic diet, an unconventional cure.
In 1994, Mr. Abrahams created the Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies to support research. In 1997, he directed “ … First Do No Harm,” a TV movie starring Meryl Streep that loosely tracked his family’s experience.
When Vulture asked Mr. Abrahams for his favorite quote from “Airplane!” he said it came in a scene in which Dr. Rumack insists that the crew tell him confidential information. “You can tell me — I’m a doctor,” he says, as if his medical training made him an expert in all things.
“My family has absolutely been subjected to medical arrogance,” Mr. Abrahams said. “Whatever that mentality is that allowed Leslie to say in the movie, ‘You can tell me — I’m a doctor,’ has become satiric in my later life instead of just a parodic point of view.”
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