We were doing a comedy without comedians. Jerry Zucker: We got the call and it was kind of like, “Oh, now we get it.” I think they previously said, “Okay, fine, you can have Stack, Bridges, Nielsen, and Graves,” but I don’t think very many people understood what we were doing by casting these serious, straight-men actors until they saw it.ĭavid Zucker: It was a radical concept. They finally understood the concept and were much more comfortable dealing with us. When Paramount Pictures watched the dailies and saw that joke and the way it played, they were relieved. What do you recall of filming the “Don’t call me Shirley” gag?Ībrahams: Well, Paramount Pictures was apprehensive about three first-time directors working together on a movie.ĭavid Zucker: Our contract said they could fire us after one week.Ībrahams: As it turned out, the “Don’t call me Shirley” scene was filmed on the first day of shooting. Jerry Zucker: We just put that line in, verbatim. Jerry Zucker: “Stewardess, can you face some unpleasant facts?” And then, in Zero Hour!, she says, “Yes.” But in our movie, she says, “No.”ĭavid Zucker: Or “We need somebody who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.”Ībrahams: That’s an actual line! That was a line from Zero Hour! Written by Arthur Hailey.ĭavid Zucker: The whole plot of Zero Hour! is that everyone on a plane who ate fish, including the pilots, got sick. There’s a line in Zero Hour! that says - how does the line go? So you’d do that for lots of the dialogue? That was one of those lines where someone actually did say, “Surely you can’t be serious.”ĭavid Zucker: The other person might have even said, “I am serious.” But we added the “Don’t call me Shirley.” Stop the tape,” and we’d go back and we’d put in our punch line or our gag in the background. Jerry Zucker: The origin of that joke is similar to the origin of a lot of jokes in the movie: While we were writing, we used to watch a lot of old, serious movies that had a lot of this overly dramatic dialogue. What was the origin of “Don’t call me Shirley”? Rumack (Leslie Nielsen), “Surely you can’t be serious,” and Rumack replies, “I am serious - and don’t call me Shirley.”Īs part of our weeklong 100 Jokes That Shaped Comedy series, we dug into the origins and execution of that exchange - as well as the overall comedic mechanics of Airplane! - with the trio who wrote and directed the film, Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. There are few movies as quotable as the 1980 disaster-movie parody Airplane! - and of the movie’s many memorable gags, arguably the most enduring is the moment when reluctant pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) tells Dr.
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