Le Monde's verdict – Worth seeing

Following in the footsteps of the master of parodic bad taste Mel Brooks, the trio comprised of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams (1944-2024) and Jerry Zucker – childhood friends from Wisconsin collectively known as ZAZ – helped define American comedy. Their first big success came in 1980 with Airplane!, a hilarious spoof of airplane disaster movies. Beginning in 1988, they created The Naked Gun trilogy, starring Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen (1926-2010). He played Los Angeles Police Department detective Frank Drebin, an incompetent, self-important fool, accompanied by his loyal sidekick Nordberg.

The ZAZ style, which spread across the world at the time and influenced countless comedians – though none quite reached their level – combined cinephilia, slapstick, extreme absurdity, crude humor and a disregard for decorum or boundaries in comedy (featuring sexual obsession, flatulence, scatology, masturbation and pedophilia). Their comedic lineage did not stop at Brooks; it stretched across the wildest strains of American irreverence, from the legendary Hellzapoppin' (H. C. Potter, 1941) to Jerry Lewis (1926-2017) and Tex Avery (1908-1980). This kind of humor might now seem outdated, or at the very least, out of place.

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