Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like Saturday Night Live, which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back.
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To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘spoof movie’, which does seem to imply a certain dimness of quality. Parody can be sophisticated and classy, “spoof” is cheap and lazy. And though the terms are truly interchangeable, ‘spoof’ is a better characterization of the subgenre as it came to be known to those of us growing up in the 2000s when it hit its cultural zenith, before largely fading away into irrelevance. Young people now won’t remember the prevalence of spoof comedies every year or so, usually with a shelf life of about a year as well given the extremely topical references and minimal effort at real humour beyond that. And at the same time my generation is a bit too young to remember when those kind of movies could actually be fairly sharp and with a sense of humour a little more universal than the immediate six month radius of its release. In fact, you can make an argument that the American spoof movie went from one of the most fun and inventive comedy sub-genres to its most tired and lowbrow before essentially being written off.
At least until this year when a little bit of life came back in Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of The Naked Gun, reminding audiences that these movies could be fun, interesting, and fresh again, while still as ridiculous and charmingly dumb as ever. And coming too at a time where the comedy genre on film is virtually non-existent, turning a profit in spite of that, it means something -maybe even pointing a way towards a revival of comedy cinema more broadly. It is worth hoping.
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But let’s first look at where things started. This form of parody movie began in the 1970s with Mel Brooks; arguably with the oft-re-litigated comedy classic Blazing Saddles. Really, it was a movie that straddled the line between being a full-on parody of the western genre and just a comedy movie that happened to be a western. For instance, while it borrows plenty of aesthetics and archetypes and lampoons them, it doesn’t satirize specific directors, movies, or stars -except arguably in a roundabout way Hedy Lamarr. As I’ve discussed previously, Blazing Saddles was more broad cultural satire than strict parody -mocking the general romanticization of the Old West and in particular the racism of rural conservative America in both that time and the contemporary 1970s.
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It is Brooks’s other notable movie of 1974 that can more definitively be called a parody. Unlike Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein is very clearly a comedic take on a specific movie series -Universal’s 1930s Frankenstein pictures, specifically the first two. Unlike with Blazing Saddles it was mostly a loving parody -Brooks went so far as to track down the original laboratory set from the James Whale films and use it again. And many of the stylistic touches speak to an admiration for the classic film rather than a desire to knock it down a peg. This approach would be found in Brooks’s subsequent parodies, which tacked much more to Young Frankenstein than Blazing Saddles. Whether in Silent Movie, High Anxiety, Spaceballs, or Robin Hood: Men in Tights, there was rarely ever any streak of mean-spirited mocking of the work being lampooned. And on top of that, the comedy was quite sharp and inspired, both in where it pulled from the source and what it derived from outside -such as the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” sequence- often with a lean towards pure silliness. In heightening the sharpness of the spoof, how broad can the jokes and routines get? Brooks had a certain flare for absurdism, variety show-style slapstick, and especially fourth wall breaks, which all his parody movies include to some degree or another. Rarely did he trade in shock value, deadpan, or surreality -the hallmarks of the folks who essentially succeeded him in the parody genre.
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Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker -a trio of Midwestern comedy writers- were of a younger generation than Brooks, indebted much more to acts like Monty Python out of the U.K. than the TV and radio comedians who Brooks was inspired by. And they hit upon a break in 1977 when they wrote (and featured in) an indie sketch comedy film called The Kentucky Fried Movie -named after their local theatre troupe- directed by a then relatively unknown John Landis. Though it was a sketch movie, there was virtually nothing “original” in it -it was just about entirely made up of spoofs on various film genres, commercials, TV shows, and news programs. In fact roughly a third of the film is taken up by one very long sketch parodying Bruce Lee kung fu movies, and it has aged exactly as horribly as you’d think (it’s also just broadly one of the more boring sketches of the movie). Though it is the stuff around this portion of the film that is largely more pointed, funny, and satirically effective, clearly broadly sending up a specific movie or type of movie is where Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker’s interests were.
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That of course brings us to Airplane!, the directing debut of the trio and to this day perhaps the most consistently acclaimed spoof movie in Hollywood history. In fact its legacy has far outpaced the subject of the original parody, a 1957 film called Zero Hour!, from which the spine of the plot, various lines of dialogue, and even a few character names are lifted directly. Airplane! likely got away with this only because it was made for Paramount, the same studio that produced the earlier film. But unlike something like Young Frankenstein, there’s no base familiarity with the source needed going into Airplane! It is enough that it is a comic take on the disaster movie genre more broadly, an architecture that can additionally sustain as many other kinds of jokes as can be crammed in. And that was the preferred style for ZAZ, who are not particularly good writers of story (something that is apparent through several of their more plot-heavy movies that followed). Airplane! is thus purely a nonsensical movie, with no honest stakes, drama, or three-dimensional characters -in fact it actively makes fun of all of these, playing much of that obligatory material here to the most extreme parameters while the actors maintain a dull, deadpan style. And of course all this material is buffeted by a barrage of gag-a-minute non sequiturs -once again many spoofing other cultural or media tropes. Not all of them hold up -the racist and homophobic bits leaping immediately to mind, but also the riffs on then topical media figures or ad campaigns that are only puzzling after forty years. But quantity really buries quality when it comes to Airplane! -if one bit doesn’t land there are a half dozen waiting in the wings in the next few minutes- and the energy of the movie is infectiously frenetic. It’s nowhere near as sharp or witty as Brooks; in fact many of the jokes feel a tad too easy (the fast food allusion of The Kentucky Fried Movie is somewhat apt to the sensibility of ZAZ). But the pace, structure, and absurd bombast of Airplane! makes something like Young Frankenstein look positively slow and staid.
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Airplane! came out in 1980 and through the rest of that decade, ZAZ gradually continued their streak, establishing themselves as the kings of this genre essentially all their own. There were imitations of their style, such as in Zorro, the Gay Blade and of course Airplane II: The Sequel, but they failed to leave any impression and were generally quite bad. Though not as remembered or beloved as Airplane!, their follow-up Top Secret! (1984) is almost as good. Notably, it was the movie debut of its star Val Kilmer, and features a few of the best sight gags and the single greatest action sequence in ZAZ's entire filmography. However, given its subjects of satire are Elvis musicals and World War II spy movies, it is squarely aimed at the nostalgia of a baby boomer audience. For as much as they loved their classic references, ZAZ needed to target a broadly more contemporary audience with their next project.
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In 1982, they had tried their hand at television with a spoof of stale procedural cop shows like M Squad and Dragnet -calling it Police Squad! (the exclamation mark was firmly their brand at this time). Of the serious actors who had been tapped for Airplane! to subvert their own performance styles, the breakout for both ZAZ and the audience was easily Leslie Nielsen, and so Police Squad! was written around him and his distinct deadpan comic delivery. It was a good show, but was canceled after six episodes and largely forgotten by all but the most dedicated comedy nerds. It was another satire of a style from an earlier time. But by the late 1980s, the cop genre on film was going through a renaissance manifested in the like of Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, and Midnight Run. And in the midst of these, ZAZ revived Police Squad! in 1988, giving it a modern sheen and re-titling it The Naked Gun -a spoof of the modern cop movie genre that begins flagrantly in a contemporary context, as Nielsen comically beats up on a cabal of 1980s world leaders. The Naked Gun stuck to the ZAZ formula, though it eased up on the deadpan performances and gag consistency. By necessity of having an arc, Nielsen is no longer straight-laced the whole way through -there's a little more expression and broadness in his acting, and the world around him is more tangible if still occasionally cartoonish. Yet it is still a funny movie, there is less obscurity to the parodied material. What holds up the worst is the plotting and an overlong last act at a baseball game. What holds up the best are all the times O.J. Simpson is badly hurt. The movie was an enormous success, widely regarded as the best parody movie since Airplane! itself.
For the future of the genre though it may well have been a couple other movies from around this time that would prove more consequential. The year prior, Mel Brooks's Spaceballs came out, a very specific spoof on a highly popular contemporary movie sensation, Star Wars. It was a hit naturally, and its approach did not go unnoticed. And the same year as The Naked Gun, a low-budget blaxploitation parody called I'm Gonna Git You Sucka also came out. It was the directorial debut of one Keenen Ivory Wayans, and featured in its cast in their debuts, his little brothers Shawn and Marlon.
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ZAZ unofficially broke up by the 1990s, though each individual member continued their careers in much the same fashion and genre, with the exception of Jerry Zucker who made the wild leap to serious romantic drama by directing Ghost in 1990 -a movie subsequently parodied by his brother David a year later in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. While Jerry pursued this career trajectory further (also directing 1995’s medieval drama First Knight), David took the reins of The Naked Gun for one movie, a pretty okay if unremarkable sequel, before handing the abysmal third movie off to Peter Segal (though he and Pat Proft -the team’s co-writer- contributed to the script. The Naked Gun trilogy kept to that fairly consistent style of its humour, but to diminishing returns with each movie. Nielsen remained enough of a potent comic anchor and there was always a handful of good gags, but by the mid-90s the franchise already felt pretty tired. That Airplane! magic was mostly sapped.
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It still had a little bit of juice in Jim Abrahams though, who started his own spoof franchise after his failed attempt at a more serious film called Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. Hot Shots!, a parody of Top Gun, wasn’t as good as the trio’s prior efforts, but it is direct and modestly silly enough and was a little bit more relevant. Abrahams did bring back Lloyd Bridges from Airplane! but cast young stars like Charlie Sheen, Cary Elwes, and Valeria Golino (hot off of a major role in Rain Man) as the leads. It’s sequel, a take on the Rambo franchise, is less good; and Abrahams’ final film from 1998 called Mafia! became the first spoof movie of this wave to be largely rejected by critics and audiences. None of the parody movies of this decade in fact captured the same level of acclaim or popularity. Mel Brooks put out his last two movies, and while the former -Robin Hood: Men in Tights- has found a cult audience in the years since, the latter Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which united Brooks with Leslie Nielsen, was a bomb by every metric, killing Brooks’s directing career. For his part, Nielsen -now entering his seventies- exploited his new career path like there was no tomorrow: Repossessed, Spy Hard, Wrongfully Accused, 2001: A Space Travesty -all atrocious. Without the guidance of ZAZ he was nothing more than a huckster clown recycling the same kinds of routines and the deadpan that was once celebrated was giving way more and more to cheap mugging. By the end of the 1990s, the parody genre had regressed into a gimmick, no longer smart or structurally original, or inspired in its mockery. And it might have died out for good then had it not been for the voice of a new generation.
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Partially inspired by the work of ZAZ, in 2000, Keenen, Shawn, and Marlon Wayans -previously known for their work on In Living Color, entered onto the spoof movie scene by specifically targeting a pair of populist teen-centric horror films of the late 90s -Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Mixing their stories together in a highly irreverent style, much more brash and forceful than previous parody films (and intentionally tasteless), the result was Scary Movie, which by the box office remains the most successful spoof movie ever made. Coloured in the distinctly transgressive youthful flavour of its filmmakers, Scary Movie was as broad a comedy as could be, going much further in its aesthetic mimicry, down to specific details in the costuming and cinematography. In fact replication of specific scenes with merely an exaggerated or comical element added is a favourite tactic of the Wayans Brothers. Another is reference humour -jokes where the main gimmick is the popular reference being made, such as a random invocation of the bullet time effect from The Matrix and characters frequently shouting the Budweiser "Whassup" line into their phones. And virtually anything remotely topical is fair game. Crude shock comedy is the last pillar the movie makes ample use of -predominantly toilet humour, drug humour, and graphic sex jokes -designed to provoke and alienate. All of this apparently went over very well with Gen-X audiences, who welcomed such an uncompromisingly drastic new type of spoof comedy -though the critics were much more mixed.
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And it must be said that compared to the previous movies discussed here, Scary Movie holds up notably poorly -and not just because of the rampant sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and particularly heinous ableism (though they don't help). The intense focus on topicality in its cultural references has rendered much of the movie extremely dated on multiple fronts of its humour, which is also just extremely dumb and lazy -and nowhere in a creative way. The characters are uniformly cheap stereotypes, the gag scenes fundamentally meaningless, and the beats of intelligent satirical commentary or interesting genre deconstruction can be counted on one hand. Just a deeply dull and unpleasant movie all around. Still firmly lowest common denominator shit.
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But it was a hit, and so a new spoof era was born. Scary Movie would be spawn three sequels within the next five years, all of them operating under the same general formula of re-enactment paired with empty references, mindless sex and violence jokes, and easy edgelord humour. The Wayans once again helmed Scary Movie 2, which attempted to actually be more of a holistic horror spoof, taking on The Exorcist and Poltergeist as much as the 90s remake of The Haunting -its principal parody. But it was a rush job released to diminished returns and much more universal critical condemnation, which together drove the Wayans away from the franchise. The studio brought in David Zucker for Scary Movie 3, though had him conform to the outlines of the Wayans’s style. With Zucker came Leslie Nielsen to play the U.S. President, and Charlie Sheen from the Hot Shots! movies. Centred on parodies of The Ring and Signs, this one pulled back on the crudest and raunchiest elements of the previous films but was no more interesting or novel. Scary Movie 4 in 2006 was finally enough to lay the franchise to rest for a time, the negative reputation of these movies really catching up. Zucker directed this one too, and even Jim Abrahams contributed to the script. And yet nothing of value was gained to an interminably poor parody of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, that also featured for no reason a toothless riff on Saw with Dr. Phil and Shaquille O’Neal.
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As the Scary Movie franchise wound down though, its junk food form of the spoof genre continued to force itself on the public. Though the Wayans re-wrote most of it, the original script for Scary Movie was penned by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. The pair had also been involved in the writing of Spy Hard, directed by Friedberg's father, and developed a relationship with producer Peter Safran (now of course co-head of DC Studios), who auctioned their original script for Scary Movie. It can be assumed that these valuable connections gave them a leg up in the industry where their script-writing and filmmaking competence clearly couldn't. Despite their work having no real presence on the film, they were happy to cash in and shamelessly ride the coattails of the Scary Movie franchise -adapting to its format when they produced and directed their first solo spoof movie in 2006, Date Movie, ostensibly a parody of romantic-comedies. Recognizing a cash-cow, they hastily milked this basic spin-off formula for all it was worth, rushing out Epic Movie the very next year and intentionally playing up a resemblance to the Scary Movie series. Two assembly-line productions followed in 2008, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans, while in Scary Movie's hiatus, the Craig Mazin-directed Superhero Movie released in its stead. None of these did much at the box office, but were so cheap to make it hardly mattered. Their profound stupidity, crassness, laziness, and dated-on-arrival references (of all the populist options available, Epic Movie chose to single out The Chronicles of Narnia as its principal target) grated, and pretty quickly they became among the most widely hated movies of the twenty-first century. Before Michael Bay (perhaps unfairly) took the mantle, the work of Friedberg and Seltzer became for a time the most mocked pieces of Hollywood dreck, avatars for the worst, most pandering traits of studios and the brain-dead audiences who ate them up.
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But apart from just the intense awfulness, the market was so quickly and so heavily saturated with these types of parodies, that everyone just lost all patience with them. Though Friedberg and Seltzer had been able to pluck the occasional talent like Alyson Hannigan and Kal Penn, the celebrities willing to do these movies seemed to dry up fast, all but disappearing from 2010'S Vampires Suck. In the meantime nobody bothered with the Wayans' Dance Flick, or David Zucker's conservative An American Carol, or Extreme Movie, which did have some genuinely funny people both in front of and behind the camera including the Lonely Island and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, but was relegated pretty decisively to the direct-to-DVD bin, a fate that quickly befell all other Friedberg and Seltzer imitators -as though it was possible to sink lower on that totem pole.
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Spoof movies were virtually eradicated through the 2010s. Those creatively bankrupt products that flooded mainstream cinema in the 2000s left a bad taste in everyone's mouths and the parody film as a form was bestowed a foul reputation. People didn't hear the term and think of Blazing Saddles or Airplane!, they thought of Scary Movie and Meet the Spartans. There was an attempt to revive the form with a Scary Movie 5 in 2013 directed by Malcolm D. Lee (his most embarrassing film until Space Jam: A New Legacy) but nobody noticed it. The Wayans Brothers made two Haunted House movies in 2013 and 2014 -presumably manifestations of what subsequent Scary Movie sequels would have been like with their involvement -but these received very little attention and poor reviews. What other parody movies came out during this time both flew under the radar and were far better than what had preceded them. 2014's We Came Together was actually a good, funny throwback to silly films of the 1980s and parodied romantic comedies way better than Date Movie ever did. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, released by The Lonely Island in 2016 was one of the funniest movies of that decade, a parody of indulgent popstar documentaries that were a craze in the 2010s. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story in 2022 similarly lampooned biopics and their creative liberties to good effect. These were all commercial failures, but signs that the parody genre was perhaps merely hibernating, not dead.
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And that brings us back to 2025 and the Naked Gun reboot, the first modest success at the box office for a parody film in about twenty years. Hell, it is one of the rare comedies of the last decade to be profitable, and it can’t have simply come from baiting nostalgia. The Naked Gun is hardly a beloved franchise institution, especially among younger millennial and Gen-Z audiences. But its legasequel is funny, and in an unapologetically silly way. It doesn’t wear itself down in topical references and instead is allowed to be driven by an absurdity of tone informed by a gag-oriented approached; a high quantity of sharp jokes delivered by actors -specifically Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson- giving it their all, and a director with a knack for this sort of thing. Akiva Schaffer directed, and the movie might be read as justice for the failure of Popstar. Timing certainly isn’t unimportant -people needed a good laugh right now and The Naked Gun has plenty -and it’s a humour that is sharp and effective without being tasteless. But being so different from the last round of spoof movies, still seared into our collective memories (at least for us older folks), while also a nostalgic throwback of approach though adapted organically for the times and parodying the legasequel concept on its face all the while -I think these things are refreshing to a lot of people, even amongst those to whom the name Naked Gun, or even ‘spoof movie’ means nothing.
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Does it mean that the parody genre is back? Not from just one movie most likely. Flashes in the pan do happen and Hollywood so rarely learns the right lessons from successes. The parody genre had another shot at a revival in development before this movie came out: yet another franchise extension, Scary Movie 6 -boasting the return of the Wayans Brothers as though that was ever any sign of legitimate quality. Spaceballs 2 is also happening, though I don’t have high hopes for it even with the involvement of Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis. It would suck if a good Naked Gun movie gave way to exactly a repeat of the parody movie status quo of the 2000s, but maybe there might be a Naked Gun sequel to offset it -or Schaffer or someone in a similar orbit could try an original parody film. The genre is still in a very weird place, but it has our attention again, and for the first time in a while, not in a negative light. Hopefully something can come of that.
Because parody movies when done right are a lot of fun, and can even be good or necessary skewerings of genre conventions and media tropes -the western needed Blazing Saddles, the 70s disaster film deserved Airplane!, and the horror genre was ripe for something like Scary Movie (it’s just a shame it wasn’t better). Parody films are a great way of using the medium of cinema to comment on cinema, to draw attention to the absurdities in our fictions and help us understand them more. And also as an outlet for comic experimentation -the exaggerated format is apt for that. The American spoof comedy has been on a wild journey over the decades, an outlet for classics in the 70s and 80s gradually sinking to trash in the 2000s -and it has spent half a generation exiled before possibly showing signs of renewal. I’ll be curious where it goes next, whether or not it descends back into reference porn. But if that be the case, after this year’s Naked Gun the notion there isn’t anything smart or inventive left to be found in the genre, well -surely, you can’t be serious.
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