Airplane!: Convincing Bob that "Surely you can't be serious!" is funny

For Thanksgiving this year, Bob cooked a turkey -- but I couldn't get him out of bed until 9:00, so the turkey went into the oven at 11:00, and we didn't eat until 6:00 pm.  We passed the time by watching "Thanksgiving" movies, such as Airplane! (1980).

A parody of 1970s disaster movies like the Airport series (1970, 1976, 1977, 1979), it holds up surprisingly well -- for me, anyway.  Probably because there is a real plot, with characterization and suspense: when the cockpit crew and many of the passengers are disabled with food poisoning, traumatized pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays), who hasn't been able to fly since the War, is forced to land the plane.

Many of the jokes still made me laugh, although Bob was annoyed by my habit of laughing before the punchline: 

"Surely you can't be serious!"

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!"

"The hospital called."

"The hospital!  What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients in it, but that's not important now."

Other jokes were still funny to me, but I had to explain them to Bob, who wasn't born yet in 1980:

The stewardess gives a passenger a second cup of coffee, and his wife muses "He never asks for a second cup of coffee at home": a popular tv commercial.

Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer: a parody of his 1970s tough-guy roles.

An elderly white woman can "speak jive" to communicate with black passengers: she was Barbera Billingsley, the button-down conservative Mom on Leave It to Beaver.  Interestingly the team of Abrams, Zucker, and Zuker was also responsible for Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch-parody movie starring both Wally and the Beaver.

Bob had never hears of any o fhtem.

Other jokes made him glare at me and say "You liked this?"

Racist jokes are everywhere.

1. The two black guys speaking jive, with subtitles translating into English.

2.  A isolated African tribe who "have never seen white people before" are instinctively good at basketball.

3. Striker's life history is so boring that everyone he tells it to tries to kill themselves: a Japanese guy commits seppuku, and an Indian guy tries self-immolation.

4. We could do without Captain Oveur's pedophilia jokes: "Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?  Do you like gladiator movies?"

5. Striker sees his future girlfriend Elaine for the first time in a sleazy bar during the War.  He is so oeverwhelmed by her beauty that he thinks he is dreaming, and asks the guy sitting next to him to "pinch me."  The guy glares and moves away. thinking that he is gay.

6.  We were torn about the character of Johnny, who seems to be an assistant ("How about some coffee?"  "No, thank you"), but is listed in the credits as Air Traffic Controller Johnny Henshaw-Jacobs.  Sometimes he evokes gay stereotypes: he criticizes a woman's outfit, respnds to "What do you make of this?" with "Oh, I could make a lovely hat," and calls his Auntie Em during the crisis like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  

But at other times he comes across as just wacko.  While the plane is landing, he umplugs the lights on the runway, then says "Just kidding" and laughs maniacally.

Compared to the uber-swishy gay characters of other movies of the era, such as Lamar in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), we see a much more nuanced performance.  We wondered if the actor tweaked his performance to cut down on the swish: Stephen Stucker was something of an activist.  He was one of the first performers to publicly announce that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, a  few months before his death in 1986.

Verdict:  Me, A-.  Bob: C.  I guess you had to be there.