Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! Book Review
Surely You Can’t Be Serious is an in-depth and hysterical look at the making of 1980’s comedy classic Airplane! by the legendary writers and directors of the hit film.
Airplane! premiered on July 2nd, 1980. With a budget of $3.5 million it went on to make nearly $200 million in sales and has influenced a multitude of comedians on both sides of the camera.
Surely You Can’t Be Serious is the first-ever oral history of the making of Airplane! by the creators, and of the beginnings of the ZAZ trio (Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker) – charting the rise of their comedy troupe Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin all the way to premiere night. The directors explain what drew them to filmmaking and in particular, comedy. With anecdotes, behind the scenes trivia, and never-before-revealed factoids – these titans of comedy filmmaking unpack everything from how they persuaded Peter Graves to be in the movie after he thought the script was a piece of garbage, how Lorna Patterson auditioned for the stewardess role in the back seat of Jerry’s Volvo, and how Leslie Nielsen’s pranks got the entire crew into trouble, to who really wrote the jive talk. The book also features testimonials and personal anecdotes from well-known faces in the film, television, and comedy sphere – proving how influential Airplane! has been from day one.
Four decades after its release, Airplane! continues to make new generations laugh. Its many one-liners and visual gags have worked their way into the mainstream culture. This fully organic expansion of the ZAZ trio’s fan-base, prompted solely by word-of-mouth, comes as no surprise to longtime fans. When all around us is in flux – laughter is priceless.
Non-Fiction Book Review: Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!
I can’t say for sure when I first saw Airplane!, but I can say that there are a myriad of things that resonated with me. “Surely you can’t be serious! I am, and don’t call me Shirley,” is certainly one of them, if not my most quoted from the film. Others include, in no particular order:
And so much more! I swear that Airplane! featured joke after joke with barely enough time to catch your breath. Of course, it has been a very long time since I’ve seen the movie since It was released in the summer of 1980, the year of my birth, so I can only ponder on whether the movie or its jokes hold up.
Still, thinking about Airplane! and the jokes still give me a good chuckle so when I saw that the film’s creators wrote a book about the movie, billing it as the true story behind Airplane! it piqued my interest. I am in no way a hardcore fan of the movie, but reading about the film intrigued me. I opted for the audiobook book version as, again, my interest in the story was more curiosity, and had no loyalties to the film nor the filmmakers, so I didn’t care whether I had a copy on my shelf. And so, my commute to and from work would be solely focused (other than the road, of course) on the story of the making of a movie that I vaguely remember.
Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! is written by the filmmakers themselves; the Zucker brothers (Jerry and David) and Jim Abraham. It is a documentary written in book format that highlights their journey from their beginnings with the formation and creation of The Kentucky Fried Theater to the development of Airplane!. The book features several testimonials (all positive, of course) of how funny, unique, and life-altering (to some) how the movie was to them, including the filmmakers. Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! is a love letter to the filmmakers from the filmmakers themselves.
The authors couldn’t help but constantly toot their horns. I get it. They were proud of their film, and of what they accomplished. But to hear about it ad infinitum became a bore. The constant appraisals from actors and comedians from the likes of Bill Hader, Jimmy Kimmel, Quentin Tarantino, Jill Haggerty, Bill Hays, Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Sarah Silverman, and the list goes on and on seemed to be included as fluff and further testimony of the greatness of the film. I certainly could’ve done without this as I could’ve just gone to IMDB and filtered all the Five-star reviews. But, in case you didn’t know it, the Zucker brothers and Abrahams saved you the trouble of doing that and included them in the book for you.
There were a ton of nuggets in the book about their comedic process and what made it unique, something never done before. I could appreciate this because I remember what made the film so funny. They had an all-star cast of leading actors known for their serious and heroic roles and putting them all in comedy. The way the filmmakers put it, it was like putting these serious actors into a movie and not letting them know that they were in a comedy. And it worked out magnificently. Again, I don’t know if it still holds up, but I still get a good chuckle just from the memory of the jokes I remember.
I had mixed emotions reading Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!. There were times I laughed and there were times I rolled my eyes in frustration. I felt like there were some redundancies and repetitive anecdotes and lots of fluff to lengthen the book, some of which were unnecessary, like the experience and testimonial of one the actors’ wife – I simply did not care to hear about Mrs. (Insert Name Here) wife’s great review of her husband’s film. Again, that’s what IMDB is for. While there are some fun moments in Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! I can’t say that it was a great read and would’ve bade my time reading something else, something better. But, for fans of the film and its creators, then yeah, this is a good read.