Director Akiva Schaffer has always been funny. But being Naked Gun funny? That's a different skill entirely.
"It wasn't easy," Schaffer tells The National. "I had to go back as an adult and study these movies and dissect what makes them work."
And, in an era in which pure comedies rarely make it to the big screen – let alone gain wide critical acclaim – Schaffer's reboot of the cult film series of the 1980s and 1990s is a hit, garnering more laughs per minute than any film in recent memory.
It's especially surprising because audiences have largely forgotten that spoof movies can be funny. For at least a decade, the genre has been relegated to the guilty pleasure category at best – a far cry from the days when filmmakers such as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (known as ZAZ) produced films that were both hilarious and widely respected for their craft.
Schaffer, best known as one third of the Lonely Island trio responsible from one of comedy's few bright spots in recent years, garnered several key lessons in order to bring the genre back to those heights.
1. Follow the old rules – but know when to break them
One of the main things Schaffer studied was the ZAZ 15 rules of comedy – which guided films such as the original Naked Gun, Airplane! and Top Secret.
Those rules, as outlined by David Zucker, were practical, including tips such as "two jokes at the same time cancel each other out" and "don't use a comedian in a straight man role".
But that was only helpful to a point, Schaffer explains. "Those movies seem to be playing by certain rules and then they immediately break them."
But when do you break them? When it's in service of the story, Schaffer says.
"They had the discipline to stay in the detective genre the whole time, but then they would drift into a cheesy 80s' love montage. It was always about allowing the movie to move forward and to do so at the right pace," says Schaffer. "Momentum is so key."
2. Identify tropes
Another key ZAZ rule of parody is that the joke should be set up by something outside the movie. To do so, they studied the detective and police genres to the point where they recognised all the reflexive patterns, which were then ripe for satire.
For Schaffer's film, he wanted to ensure that he was not making the same jokes again. To do so, he studied where the crime genre has evolved since and applied the ZAZ method to a new generation of storytelling.
"I tried to find tropes that were in movies and TV shows of the last 30 years, as opposed to the 80s and 90s. They were doing that for the 50s, so we picked up from 1995 to 2025, which gave us 30 years to mess with. So we focused on how people disassemble guns, or rip off Mission: Impossible masks," Schaffer says.
3. Tell a story good enough that audiences can ignore it
After watching the entire history of spoof movies, Schaffer came to another realisation: the best had far better stories than anyone realised.
"You have to make such a good story that the audience can ignore it," Schafer explains. "With those old movies, audiences leave saying: 'The story didn't matter, it's just a bunch of jokes, it's great!' And I think that's the magic trick that they're pulling off."
“In reality, the story has to be so clear, easy to follow and engaging that you can, as an audience member, throw it away and not pay attention to it. If the story moves too slowly or isn't interesting enough, the jokes stop working."
The initial Naked Gun film is one such example of a great yarn.
"If you think about the first Naked Gun, it's actually a complex story. There's a Manchurian Candidate element of sleeper cells and assassins, and a real estate magnate and all this stuff. But they tell it in such a specific order and such a specific way that you're able to just lay back and enjoy the jokes," says Schaffer.
"Austin Powers pulls that off, and Blazing Saddles pulls that off. So, that was actually the thing I studied almost more than anything else."
4. Stay visual to maintain joke density
Another hallmark of the ZAZ movies is to keep jokes on the screen at all times – even if you don't notice them at first.
Producer Erica Huggins, who is also the president of Seth MacFarlane's Fuzzy Door Productions (Family Guy, Ted), explains: "There had to be foreground and background jokes. That was a big part of the original movies and so is part of our movie as well. We had to keep that visual frame constantly funny."
5. Don't hire comedians
While the ZAZ rules did say not to hire funny people for straight roles, Schaffer took that further – hiring actors who have rarely done comedy for nearly every role.
"To honour the spirit, we cast dramatic people, not comedians," says Schaffer.
That meant not only casting Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in the lead roles, but also instructing them to play the roles straight.
Neeson says: "That was my note to myself every day: Just be serious."
6. Don't improvise
Many films can stay funny by having its actors come up with funny lines on the spot – and in recent years, films such as Deadpool have found their humour almost entirely by relying on the wit of its lead stars.
But not all humour is found in wit. Often, the best jokes are expertly crafted rather than found in the moment – a lesson Hollywood had seemingly forgotten.
"I barely improvised at all," says co-star Paul Walter Hauser. "When the comedy is good, you don't need to break from that."
The Naked Gun is in cinemas now across the Middle East
