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Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of Maximum Fund.org and is distributed by NPR. It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Forn. How many jokes are in the movie Airplane?

One movie blog says 223. Another says 178. How many minutes are in the movie airplane? Well that

one's easier to find out. 88 according to the back of the VHS box in my cabin.

In any case, that's over two jokes per minute.

So many jokes.

But it isn't just about volume. For one thing, those jokes are basically all perfect.

I mean, they are profoundly dumb in almost every case, but perfect. And so's the tone. The cast is full of serious actors, folks from B movie dramas and TV police

procedurals. Every bit of silly nonsense is delivered like it was the address of a crime scene

on Dragnet. Nobody else has ever been able to replicate that combination of unhinged silled Silliness and Dead Dry Sincerity. It's a Zucker Abrams Zucker original

Those three guys wrote and directed airplane among many other films and TV shows, Police Squad, top secret, several of the scary movies.

They started in a homemade theater in Wisconsin, a theater that they actually literally built themselves. Then they took it apart, they put it in a

U-Haul and they rebuilt it in Los Angeles, inside an abandoned halfway house. They were a phenomenon and their stage shows became a tiny film,

Kentucky Fried movie, then a huge film, Airplane, and ultimately a cultural

phenomenon that endures today.

David Zucker, Jim Abrams, and Jerry Zucker recently wrote a book.

It's called, Surely You Can't Be Serious,

The True Story of Airplane.

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