Drebin is crafted in the grand tradition of other inept lawmen like Inspector Clousseau. Even the characters in films like these matter, and Lt. They've forgotten that the most effective way to make fun of a cliché is by coming up with an ingenious twist. This type of cleverness is largely absent from the modern spoofs, which assume that they have no reason to be creative when their ideas are based broadly on other films. Car chases may not be original, but "The Naked Gun" is, as far as I know, the first film in which the chase is conducted by a student driver. They've forgotten that making a good spoof requires a measure of invention, even if much of the plot is ripped off from elsewhere.
The modern spoof films have forgotten all this. They have far more to do with audience anticipation than with trying to make us laugh at bad puns. I was used to this sort of humor, because I'd seen it in the earlier Zucker-Abrams films, where the jokes had a definite logic to them, and trying to predict them in advance was part of the fun. Drebin looks in a drawer and says "bingo," I knew immediately that the drawer would reveal a bingo board.
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What I understood even at age eleven was that the movie was essentially playing games with the audience. As I grew older, I would gain a greater appreciation for the one-liners, like "You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street or sticking your face in a fan." To be sure, many of these jokes are dumb. Thus, "The Naked Gun" is farce as much as it is satire. Drebin breaks into a building and tries to be as quiet as possible, but then inadvertently sets off a player piano, is masterfully filmed. As long as it makes me laugh, who cares that it's not "sophisticated"? For example, the scene where Lt. Even as an adult, I appreciate unsubtle cartoon humor when it is handled effectively. I loved "The Naked Gun" for pretty much the same reason I loved the Three Stooges or Bugs Bunny cartoons. None of this makes any sense, of course it's just an exercise in pure absurdity. Or the opening credits where the police car goes on the sidewalk, inside buildings, on a roller coaster, and so on. Think of the scene at the beginning when we discover that Ayatollah Khomeini secretly sports a mohawk underneath his turban. So what was it about the film that appealed to me so much, that made me laugh till my sides hurt? The answer is simple: it was the film's utter silliness. And the celebrity cameos meant nothing to me. I was vaguely familiar with some of the clichés it was making fun of, but many of the political and sexual jokes went right over my head. When I first watched "The Naked Gun" at age eleven, I had not seen many of the movies it was spoofing, such as the early James Bond pictures. At what point did the genre go wrong and become such a dreary, uninspired affair? Is it that I've just outgrown this sort of humor? I have another theory. What's the big deal about such jokes, anyway? There's nothing intrinsically funny about making references to other films, even if you do it in a silly way. An entire movie filled with such scenes doesn't amount to much. Seeing a ponytailed Leslie Nielsen imitating John Travolta's dance sequence in "Pulp Fiction" is funny for a second, but there's nothing enduring about such humor. These included "Hot Shots," "Loaded Weapon 1," "Jane Austen's Mafia," "Spy Hard," "Wrongfully Accused," and "Scary Movie." These films would typically feature some funny stuff, but you'd walk away indifferently, wondering what the overall point was. But the following decades gave us a variety of similar spoof films, some of which involved one or more of the Zucker-Abrams-Nielsen team, and none of these films were even remotely in the league of their predecessors. That was my standard of great humor at the time. When I first saw "The Naked Gun" in the theater when I was eleven, I was in uncontrollable laughter for the first few minutes. I used to adore this sort of movie when I was a kid-"Airplane," "Top Secret," and the six-episode "Police Squad" show, which became the basis for the "Naked Gun" series, were among the funniest films I knew. The real question that "The Naked Gun" poses is not why it's one of the funniest spoofs ever made, but why virtually no subsequent movie in this genre has been any good at all.
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