Sure, laughter is fun, but the more pop culture fractured into separate camps over the decades, the less everyone could agree on what was funny. TV sitcoms and the rise of the internet in the 2000s — when we all took turns giving away laughs for free, high on the power of free expression — met my daily chuckle-quota while American filmgoers voted for Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, the diminishing returns of other SNLers, and Hollywood’s slowly mutated “wisdom” that comedies absolutely had to be R-rated F-bomb barrages because those, they thought, were funnier than actual jokes, despite entire decades’ worth of classic examples that worked just fine without them. Yadda yadda yadda, comedy disappeared from cinemas, except as a secondary component in incessantly quippy blockbusters.

In my childhood the epitome of comedy in any medium was Airplane!: The Movie, that goofy parody of ’70s airport-disaster dramas whose quick-witted reflexes and nonstop Easter-egg sight gags would be embedded in the DNA of The Simpsons and all the other hyper-accelerated comic works since. The skewing of dialogue clichés and the perfectly straight-faced delivery of the most dreadful puns in the world were a tremendous joy, though as a long-term consequence it would become an intrinsic link in the evolutionary chain leading to today’s “Dad Jokes”. For a time I was a disciple to its hilarity-trinity of directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams. Eventually they parted ways and went on to make their own separate comedies with varying degrees of hit-or-miss. David Zucker kept on spoofing longer than the other two until diminishing returns set in as he got older. (His last time in a director’s chair was a 2008 conservative lampoon of Michael Moore called An American Carol, which Zucker’s recent interviewers chose not to bring up.)

His greatest solo achievement was The Naked Gun trilogy, a big-screen continuation of the short-lived Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker TV series Police Squad!, which was too far ahead of its time, in that it wasn’t a sitcom per se and it only lasted six episodes. Former dramatic actor and Airplane! costar Leslie Nielsen satirized his own career in the role of Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the clueless and incompetent Everycop who somehow always got his man anyway. Each chapter got weaker as they went, but at least they knew when to quit. They would prove to be Nielsen’s last watchable movies before his death in 2010, but Drebin lived on in basic-cable reruns.

Thirty-one years after The Final Insult‘s curtain call (ow ow ow ow OW), The Naked Gun and the Drebin family name are back on the big screen with a relaunch roughly within the same “canon” (like that matters) rather than a slate-wiping reboot. Zucker’s inheritor is director Akiva Schaffer from the viral-video collective The Lonely Island. I don’t keep up with them, but his surprisingly funny “live-action” Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie was the closest we’ll ever get to a faithful Who Framed Roger Rabbit? sequel. Sensibly enough, Schaffer reunites with his Chip & Dale writing collaborators Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (veterans of How I Met Your Mother and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and takes a shot at reanimating the spirit of that zany legacy. Fortunately (?) the police world has generated all sorts of new tropes and clichés over the past three decades, both fictional and otherwise.

Stepping into Nielsen’s shoes is Academy Award Nominee Liam Neeson, whose angry-gun-guy movies outnumber the comedies in his career by about 600-to-1. As Lieutenant Frank Drebin Junior, he’s just like his dead dad — a detective assigned to the super-special Police Squad unit, a no-nonsense loose cannon with a head full of loose screws. It’s a variation on his Bad Cop/Good Cop nemesis in The Lego Movie, so not necessarily a bold new stretch for him, except here his shtick’s on-camera. Neeson’s expressions don’t quite have the same Silly Putty elasticity as Nielsen’s did, but to be fair he’s also 73, five years older than Nielsen was when he stopped doing Naked Guns. But Neeson’s game and checks nearly all his dignity at the door, though it takes him a tad more concentration to empty his head.

After a cute prologue in which Our Hero foils a bank job using Looney Tunes violence (which we mostly already watched in the trailers), Son of Drebin will tax his brain capacity to the max as he faces a case straight out of the 21st century: a fatal crash scene involving a self-driving electric car that might not be an accident. But in farce, “plot” is just a clothesline where jokes are hung out to dry. Some shirts get crisper than others, some colors might fade from overexposure, and some wet blankets are just so soggy that you can leave them out for hours and they’ll just stay that way, maybe even grow mold if it isn’t even hot outside, which you really should’ve paid attention to before you did your laundry in the first place, but maybe you can make it work if you wring out the blankets really, really hard until your wrists hurt, but be careful not to soak your shoes or slippers or whatever you wear around the house while you’re doing your chores, because that’s how you get athlete’s foot, and the itching will drive you batty until you want to claw your toes off, and nobody wants to see you standing around with wee crooked stumps where your toes used to be, but hey, at least you’ll go down a shoe size, though that’s kinda irrelevant since shoe stores don’t offer discounts on smaller sizes, or at least not the ones I go to, but then again I’m not exactly an expert shoe-shopper, so don’t take my word for it, not when YouTube probably has foot-fetishistic influencers who know their stuff and can recommend a place or two in exchange for your Like and your Subscribe, because of course they don’t just give away their faux-Consumer Reports advice for free anymore. Hard to blame them in this economy, though.

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…what were we talking about?

Right! Movie! Anyway: all the perfunctory cop-drama parts are there. Baywatch star Pamela Anderson is Beth, the victim’s sister and The Love Interest, and has probably been in more comedies than the rest of the main cast combined. (This one might be her best by default, but she’s got the knack, especially in a nightclub scene where she provides a kind of distraction that reminds me of Tori Amos.) Professional villain Danny Huston (Wonder Woman, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is the victim’s boss Richard Cane, a billionaire tech-bro like 90% of all today’s best villains who also just happens to have a plan to save the world by ending it. (Huston is no Ricardo Montalban or Robert Goulet, but then again, who among us is?) Paul Walter Hauser, last seen two weeks earlier as Marvel’s Mole Man, is Drebin’s pal Ed Hocken Junior, son of George Kennedy’s captain from the original trilogy, and just as funny here as his witless BlacKkKlansman henchman. Once again it’s good versus evil, police versus a master schemer, sci-fi gadgetry versus modern Keystone Kops, a self-proclaimed genius versus a genre, guns versus puns, blokes versus jokes, and the very fates of humanity and Comedy in Cinema are all at stake.

The most important thing: yes, for a good while it’s pretty funny — even gut-bustingly so, a few times. Background prop-bits abound. A solid running gag sees Drebin being handed cups of TV-cop coffee everywhere he goes (though tough-guy noir cigarettes seem in short supply). After Drebin and Beth fall for each other, once again there’s a montage set to a cheesy oldie (the same one that was just used in a Thunderbolts trailer, in fact) in which they spend love-filled nights together, which then keeps going, flies completely off the rails, then keeps going. An all-villain Zoom conference is a fun throwback to the days of Dr. Evil, with bonus Dr. Evil reference included. The overall demeanor is a blatant yet totally welcome send-up of toxic machismo in fiction and reality, culminating in my favorite part, a satire of saintly-hero monologues about the consequences of revenge. And so on, and so on and on and on.

As I said: pretty funny for a while. It’s only ninety-odd minutes, but the second half loses headwinds as it’s stricken with the fatal flaw of many a comedy: it starts taking its plot too seriously and consequently devotes too much laughless time inching it forward, even though it’s the least important part. (See also: Stripes.) Sometimes Schaffer lets an entire minute pass without a single giggle-prompt around, a mortal sin in the ol’ ZAZ playground. Some portions feel like…well, like a normal comedy movie. The big finale is also the series’ weakest to date, set at an MMA tournament that barely matters and makes nary a comment at MMA’s expense. I love that it took place at the Ponzi-Scheme.Com Arena, but it wasn’t hard to guess how many minutes it’d take before Drebin gets into the ring and picks a fight with a referee. That’s some Kevin James stuff right there, not an unguessable Frank Drebin stunt.

Schaffer keeps tossing just enough amusements like candy-pieces all over the funnybone sundae just enough to keep us following to the very end and well into the credits, per ZAZ tradition, but as IP continuations go, Chip & Dale yielded denser laughs-per-minute mileage. Regardless, the all-new Naked Gun was a welcome head-start toward luring audiences into laughing together in public again, like we used to do a lot more often in the Before Times. Surely this won’t be his last try.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: C.C.H. Pounder, who’s played strict, by-the-book bosses in like 6000 different TV shows, is Drebin’s strict, by-the-book boss. Kevin Durand, who excelled as short-sighted muscleheads in Abigail and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, scores a hat trick playing much the same here as Cane’s head minion. (Huston and Durand are basically Elon Musk split into two characters.)

Rapper and occasional actor Busta Rhymes (Halloween: Resurrection, the ’99 Shaft) is a suspect who spars with Drebin in the interrogation room. Other cops include YouTuber Liza Koshy (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts; the recent Netflix smash KPop Demon Hunters). Schaffer wisely keeps the celebrity cameos sparse, so they have more of a punch whenever they drop in from left field.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene after The Naked Gun end credits. Longtime fans knew to stick around and read them in full if they wanted to achieve 100% joke-spotting achievement anyway. At least a half-dozen fake contributors can be spotted here and there, the extra features include an eye chart, and I had to look up the word “chifforobe” when I got home. Merriam-Webster notwithstanding, I’m still not convinced that’s a thing.

Other elements include an oddly straight homage to the original trilogy’s opening credits and Neeson himself singing the love song that Drebin wrote for Beth — a single tossed-off line expanded into an entire tune, which goes exactly as well as you think. For those who skipped all that, fled the theater prematurely, really want to know which special guest returned at the very end of the credits, and didn’t already click to read about them elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…we cut to Cane’s top-secret villain bunker where he’d planned to hide after setting off the kill-crazy apocalypse. As promised earlier in the film, “Weird Al” Yankovic (who’s now appeared in all four Naked Gun films!) is a true professional and shows up on schedule. He takes the stage at the top-secret villain bunker’s nightclub, all ready for accordion jams, only to realize he’s greeting a room full of empty tables and chairs.

Weird Al looks around in vain, confused and not happy. “Cane? Evil billionaires? Crab-Hands Guy? WHAT THE HECK?”