The long arm of the law takes a more hands-on approach.

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.)

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