"I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire"
About this Quote
There is a sly self-mythmaking baked into David Zucker's claim: before his crew arrived in the early '70s, smart comedy was basically political. It's an intentionally narrow framing that elevates what he and the ZAZ team (Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker) helped legitimize: a kind of hyper-technical, joke-dense absurdism that treats politics as just another prop to throw through a window. By positioning political satire as the default "smart" mode, Zucker makes the pivot to Airplane! and The Kentucky Fried Movie feel like a jailbreak, not a lateral move.
The subtext is less "politics got boring" than "politics got monopolizing". In the post-Vietnam, Watergate-shadow era, satire had a righteous mission and an obvious target. Zucker's films sidestep that moral posture. Their intelligence isn't in having the correct stance; it's in formal control: the deadpan performances, the visual puns, the relentless misdirection, the way language itself becomes slapstick. He's arguing for a different definition of sophistication - not the comedian as civic commentator, but the comedian as engineer.
The context matters: early '70s America is a nation learning to distrust authority on an industrial scale. Political humor flourishes because the powerful are newly mockable. Zucker's counterproposal is that mockery doesn't have to stop at politicians; it can flatten every genre, every institution, every solemn tone. That's not apolitical. It's a broader, more anarchic critique: if everything is ridiculous, power loses its special effects.
The subtext is less "politics got boring" than "politics got monopolizing". In the post-Vietnam, Watergate-shadow era, satire had a righteous mission and an obvious target. Zucker's films sidestep that moral posture. Their intelligence isn't in having the correct stance; it's in formal control: the deadpan performances, the visual puns, the relentless misdirection, the way language itself becomes slapstick. He's arguing for a different definition of sophistication - not the comedian as civic commentator, but the comedian as engineer.
The context matters: early '70s America is a nation learning to distrust authority on an industrial scale. Political humor flourishes because the powerful are newly mockable. Zucker's counterproposal is that mockery doesn't have to stop at politicians; it can flatten every genre, every institution, every solemn tone. That's not apolitical. It's a broader, more anarchic critique: if everything is ridiculous, power loses its special effects.
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| Topic | Funny |
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