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Jim Abrahams, who arrived in Hollywood with two childhood buddies as a comedy-writing trio that found fame with deadpan parodies and a blitz of puns with “Airplane!” and the Naked Gun series, died Nov. 26 at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 80.
The death was announced by his family, but no cause was noted. Abrahams had been battling leukemia for two decades.
Abrahams built a wide-ranging résumé as a solo director including comedies such as “Big Business” (1988), starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, and “Hot Shots!” (1991) and the 1993 “Hot Shots! Part Deux,” both starring Charlie Sheen in spoofs of action movies – first “Top Gun” and then “Rambo.”
Yet Abrahams delivered some of his biggest comedic punches alongside his longtime friends from Wisconsin, brothers Jerry and David Zucker. The team, collectively known as ZAZ, took mutual credit for all their ideas and for classic lines that became part of film comedy lore.
“Can you fly this plane and land it?” asked a somber Dr. Rumack, played by Leslie Nielsen in the 1980 aviation crisis parody “Airplane!”
“Surely you can’t be serious,” replied a former military pilot (Robert Hays) who is still haunted by the war.
“I am serious,” said a stone-faced Rumack, “and don’t call me Shirley.”
Abrahams and the Zucker brothers began to craft their comedic sensibilities in the early 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin, with their Kentucky Fried Theater – a mix of improv sketches and prerecorded satires of commercials, TV shows and pop culture.
“There were a bunch of groups in that era who were making political jokes, and there were lots of easy, obvious targets,” Abrahams told the Hollywood Reporter. “But that was just never our instinct. Our instinct was always to watch a movie and say, ‘Isn’t that silly?’”
The troupe became the inspiration for the first ZAZ-written film, “The Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), a sketch-filled pastiche directed by John Landis before he turned to 1978′s “Animal House.”
Their next pitch to Paramount Studios sought to wring humor from overwrought drama. They had come across the crisis-in-the-air movie “Zero Hour!” (1957), about a troubled former World War II pilot (Dana Andrews) who must take the controls of a commercial plane when the crew is stricken from eating a meal of bad fish. (The film was co-written by Arthur Hailey, who later found fame with a string of nail-biter novels including “Airport” in 1968.)
For Abrahams and his collaborators, “Zero Hour!” was perfect for parody and their brand of burlesque-style sight gags. They secured the rights. In the script, they used virtually the same name for their hero (Ted Stryker became Ted Striker), kept the exclamation point in the title and lifted some of the dialogue verbatim for its laugh-getting potential such as: “We need somebody who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.”
“That’s an actual line,” said Mr. Abrahams. “That was a line from ‘Zero Hour!’”
The movie was given the go-ahead by Michael Eisner, who was running Paramount at the time, but with a caveat. The studio reserved the right to replace the ZAZ team with an experienced director. A main studio worry was the insistence by Mr. Abrahams and the Zuckers that no big-name comedians have roles.
Instead, the trio demanded mainstream actors such as Nielsen, Hays, Peter Graves as a jetliner captain, Julie Hagerty as a plucky flight attendant and Lloyd Bridges as an air traffic controller. (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appears as a co-pilot who is hassled by a kid who knows he’s really a basketball star.) Abrahams told the studio: The more seriously the actors delivered their lines, the funnier they will be.
“The biggest struggle was to cast straight actors as opposed to comedians,” he recalled in 2019. “At first, Paramount was resistant to that idea. They didn’t quite understand why we wanted to do something like that.”
The “don’t call me Shirley” scene was one of the first shot. Abrahams said the studio executives saw how Nielsen’s gruff retort elevated the joke. “They finally understood the concept and were much more comfortable dealing with us,” he said.
The film was a box office hit and was widely hailed as a worthy successor in the parody genre after director Mel Brooks in the 1970s took on westerns in “Blazing Saddles” and horror in “Young Frankenstein.”
“It is sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny, and quite often very funny,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert in a 1980 review of “Airplane!” in the Chicago Sun-Times. “And the reason it’s funny is frequently because it’s sophomoric, predictable, corny, etc.”
The ZAZ team then turned to cop dramas, creating “Police Squad!” as a midseason show for ABC in 1982 that starred Nielsen as an earnest but bumbling detective. The show was canceled after six episodes but inspired the 1988 film “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!”
Written by the ZAZ trio and directed by David Zucker, the movie brought Nielsen back in the detective role along with an eclectic ensemble that included O.J. Simpson, Priscilla Presley and actor George Kennedy. Two sequels followed: “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear” (1991) and “The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult” (1994).
“Airport!” had a sequel, too. But it didn’t involve Abrahams or the Zucker brothers.
They had pursued an idea that the flight attendant Elaine Dickinson takes Striker to visit her family, which turns out to be the Corleone clan from “The Godfather.” The movie was envisioned as a mafia spoof called “Airplane II: The Godfather,” said Mr. Abrahams.
The “Godfather” director, Francis Ford Coppola, nixed the concept, and studio executives backed off. The ZAZ team called it quits, too.
Director Ken Finkleman took the reins for “Airplane II: The Sequel” (1982), which reunited much of the original cast as hero Ted Striker (Hays) saves a space shuttle full of passengers. The script was written by Finkleman, Al Jean and Mike Reiss.
“We had … pretty much run out of airplane jokes,” said Abrahams in the 2023 book “Surely You Can’t Be Serious” by Abrahams and the Zucker brothers on the making of “Airplane!”
Wisconsin roots
James Steven Abrahams was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, on May 10, 1944. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a researcher on education-related topics.
Abrahams met the Zucker brothers as a child, worshiping at the same synagogue. They all attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Abrahams graduated in 1966. (David Zucker graduated in 1970; Jerry in 1972.)
The Kentucky Fried Theater was founded in 1971, and they headed to Los Angeles after Jerry Zucker finished college. In Landis’s “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” Abrahams and the Zuckers played various roles in the sketches, and performers such as Donald Sutherland and Henry Gibson had cameos.
“I remember making ‘The Kentucky Fried Movie’ and thinking, ‘Someday I’m going to get married. Someday I’m going to have kids. And someday I’m going to have to explain this to them,’” Abrahams once joked.
The ZAZ team’s other films include the Cold War romp “Top Secret!” (1984), starring Val Kilmer, and “Ruthless People” (1986), starring Midler and Danny DeVito.
As a director, Abrahams’s credits include the teen drama “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael” (1990), starring Winona Ryder, and the mobster spoof “Jane Austen’s Mafia!” (1998) with Jay Mohr and Christina Applegate.
Abrahams and Pat Proft (his co-writer on the “Hot Shots!” films) reunited with Craig Mazin on “Scary Movie 4” (2006), directed by David Zucker.
Abrahams married Nancy Cocuzzo in 1976. Other survivors include two sons, a daughter, two sisters and three grandchildren. One son, Charlie, had childhood seizures that later ended. In 1997, Mr. Abraham directed an ABC television movie, “First Do No Harm,” about a woman (Meryl Streep) whose son has epilepsy.
Abrahams often expressed astonishment that “Airplane!” still found an audience decades later. He credits some of that longevity to their decision to play the comedy straight with veteran actors.
“You get the sense that they’re having a laugh at their own expense,” he told the Milwaukee Journal, “and that’s part of the endearing quality of the humor.”