Keeping on my course of watching classics, I Netflixed the short-lived 1982 TV series Police Squad!, starring, of course, Leslie Nielson. Police Squad! was done by the people who made Airplane!, and it was later turned into the Naked Gun movies.The humor is the same in all these endeavors, and it's probably my favorite kind. It's pun-tastic humor. "Let's go outside and talk in the Japanese garden," one of the characters whispers to Leslie Nielson. Then they step out onto a patio where a group of Asian people are standing in oversize flower-pots.
Genius.
And then there's the scene where the bad guy ties the ransom note to a window and throws the window into a pile of rocks.
Side-splitting.The show probably has the most jokes-per-minute of anything ever created, even if it's little throwaway gags like the clock in the background having the wrong numbers. Leslie Nielson deadpans his way through all of this, and he somehow makes it seem both high-brow and low-brow. "Oh jeez, I can't believe they went for that joke," you think, but you wouldn't have gotten the joke unless you were really paying attention fifteen seconds earlier.
1 comment:
I have always called it "70's humor" and I enjoy it a lot too.
"Surely you don't mean it."
"I do. And don't call me Shirley."
My brother and I used to watch the Naked Gun movies when we were really young and we got a huge kick out of them. I saw one of them recently and still enjoyed it immensely.
Here's just one more. In Naked Gun, after Frank drives a tank into the zoo, breaking down a wall and setting the animals free,he attends a fancy party. At the party, the major says to him, "Drebin, do you realize that because of you, this town is being overrun by baboons?!"
He says, "Isn't that the fault of the voters?"
And, to top it off, in the background, the drummer in the band that is entertaining at the party does the little 'ba boom chee!'
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