It is with great sadness that we bring you the news Jim Abrahams, the legendary writer-director who — alongside brothers Jerry and David Zucker — gave us such comedy greats as Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Police Squad, has died at the age of 80. His son Joseph confirmed the news to THR, telling the outlet that his father passed away of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica earlier today.
James S. Abrahams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin on 10 May, 1944. The son of educational researcher Louise M. Abrahams and lawyer Norman S. Abrahams, it would be fair to say that young Jim Abrahams didn't develop his love of comedy from studying his folks' vocations. Rather, it was the childhood friendship he formed with the Zucker brothers — sons of his father's business colleague, and classmates at Shorewood High School and then the University of Wisconsin in Madison — that helped Abrahams Jr. find his funny bone.
And it was there in Madison in 1971 with the Zuckers that the comedic troupe we now know today as ZAZ was born. It all began with the Kentucky Fried Theater, a sketch-and-spoof revue Abrahams and his partners in crime created to lampoon popular shows and commercials they'd seen on TV. It was this show, transferred to LA in 1972, that caught the eye of a young John Landis, who convinced Abrahams and the Zuckers to take their revue and turn it into a movie he would direct himself. The result, The Kentucky Fried Movie, plays back today more as a ZAZ proof of concept than the kind of comedy classic the trio would go on to make, but several of its bits — kung-fu parody 'A Fistful Of Yen' and sexploitation eyebrow raiser 'Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble' typify the tittering schoolboy brio of ZAZ's finest — stick in the memory.
If The Kentucky Fried Movie was Abrahams and his pals' tentative first dip in the pool of comedy moviemaking's major leagues though, then it was with 1980's all-time classic Airplane! that Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker really made a splash, going from small fry to big fish over the course of a single, breathless 88 minutes of mile high madness. A riotous send-up of disaster movies, inspired by 1957 stinker Zero Hour, Airplane! saw Abrahams and his brothers-in-gag-writing-arms assert their status as heirs apparent to Mel Brooks' parodic throne by casting actors known for drama (Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges) and having them deliver a simply staggering amount of GPM (that's Gags Per Minute). When we gave the film the Empire Essay treatment, we took a single minute of the movie and found no less than eight jokes straight off the bat: you could take any minute from Airplane! and do the same.
From that point, the keys to the kingdom of wackadoodle, lightning quick comedy were ZAZ's. In 1982, Abrahams co-created cop show parody Police Squad! starring Leslie Nielsen, a short-lived but Emmy nominated series that would eventually lead to The Naked Gun movie and its sequels, The Naked Gun: 2½ and The Naked Gun 33 ⅓. Between the Police Squad! series and Sgt. Dt. Lt. Frank Drebin's big-screen debut, Abrahams directed Val Kilmer in Top Secret!, which lampoons Elvis movies, WWII espionage flicks, and — in a pitch-perfect fourth-wall break that sees Kilmer's Nick Rivers recite the entire plot of the picture — itself.
Elsewhere, Abrahams' writer-directorial instincts led him to guide Charlie Sheen in the Top Gun aping Hot Shots! and its inspired, First Blood riffing wild ride of a sequel, Hot Shots! Part Deux, the latter of which gave us perhaps one of the best meta moments in movie history by virtue of the scene in which Martin and Charlie Sheen — respectively sending up their roles in Platoon and Apocalypse Now — pass each others' riverboats and pause to shout "I loved you in Wall Street!" in unison. It's the kinds of hat-on-a-hat, absurd moment that speaks to Abrahams' zany comic sensibility on one level, but to his abiding love and encyclopaedic knowledge of movies on a whole, incomparable other.
In 2016, in an interview with Vulture, Abrahams reflected on the perennial love film fans have for Airplane!, the movie he will perhaps be best remembered for. His response speaks to both the man's humility and his prevailing faith in laughter as the ultimate medicine no matter how troubling the times in which we find ourselves living. "Even in that line, “Don’t call me Shirley,” we pointed out that there are things in culture and media that we all take seriously that we don’t need to take seriously," shared Abrahams, musing on the infamous "Surely you can't be serious" exchange from the film. "I like to think, even today, when you hear in the news somebody say “surely” this, or “surely” that, I like to think that there’s a whole bunch of people around the world who hear that and kinda chuckle to themselves because they remember the line and they know they don’t have to take that seriously."
As we revisit the films of Abrahams and his ZAZ co-conspirators in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, we'll be reminded time and again of a filmmaker and a funnyman with a singular sense of humour and an ability to find points of levity amid troubling times that only grows more comforting, more needed, year on year. James S. Abrahams will be sorely missed, and our thoughts are with his wife Nancy Cocuzzo; his sons Joseph and Charlie; his daughter, Jamie; and his grandchildren, Caleb, James and Isaac at this difficult time.