Family Movie Night: The Naked Gun (1988)
Recently, for family movie night, my wife and I watched the original Naked Gun (1988) with our not-quite-teenage daughter. The idea was somewhat prompted by all of the advertising we’ve seen around LA for the new Naked Gun reboot coming out this weekend. The experience spurred me to read about what makes things funny and reflect on how audiences engage with comedy over time and how younger generations react with fresh perspectives to old humor.
My first takeaway is simple: the movie is still pretty funny. I laughed at many of the jokes, and my daughter found it funny (in parts), too. Part of this is because the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker filmmaking team is like what basketball fans call a “volume shooter”—if you take a lot of shots, you’re going to score some baskets. Or, to look at it another way, packing a movie as full of gags as possible means that they don’t all need to land.
According to my daughter, the funniest scene in the movie comes just after the credits, when the hapless Nordberg unsuccessfully attempts to singlehandedly bust a drug deal. I tend to agree that one of the true pleasures of this movie is the amount of punishment it dishes out to OJ Simpson’s character, whose limited screen time is unrelentingly humiliating.
I found the jokes she didn’t get just as interesting. It was no surprise that the cold open, featuring lookalikes playing a rogue’s gallery of foreign adversaries in the typical 80s-era American mind, didn’t connect. But I didn’t expect her to ask what was going on during the title sequence, shot from the siren’s-eye-view of a police cruiser’s roof. I guess police emergency lights no longer look anything like spinning reflectors.
Cropped from Federal Signal CJ-284 4-bean Beacon by Rei Findley, CC BY-SA 2.0
Watching the movie got me thinking about what makes things funny in the first place. Researcher Peter McGraw has proposed the Benign Violation Theory, which might come as close as I’ve ever seen to a theory’s name explaining itself. The core idea is that humor arises from situations that an audience perceives simultaneously as both incorrect and acceptable—that is, both a violation and benign. There’s definitely room to argue with this theory, but I do think it explains a lot about what makes things funny.
Consider a few jokes from the Nordberg drug bust sequence through the lens of the Benign Violation Theory. Most viewers are familiar with the idea that a police officer might break down a door to apprehend a criminal. So, when Nordberg attempts this move only to get his leg stuck in the door, viewers experience it as a violation. When Nordberg demands a gang of armed criminals drop their weapons, and one dimwittedly obeys, both characters have violated our expectations of reasonable behavior. Importantly, the sequence only plays as benign because the film has already established (in the cold open) that it is operating in a world where violence does not harm its characters. The scene would not be funny if the audience didn’t already know that Nordberg will be okay no matter how many times he gets shot or how many bear traps he steps in.
Benign Violation Theory also explains why the cold open wasn’t funny to my daughter. For example, she had no reaction to seeing Leslie Nielsen’s character wipe Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous birthmark off his head. To a kid who may never have seen an image of him before, neither Gorbachev nor his birthmark carries any significance, so it doesn’t register as a violation.
This theory helps explain why some humor goes stale and how comedians can create humor that stays funny. While nobody would mistake me for a comedian, I think much of the work of being funny lies in creating the violation, which is more often than not a subversion of the audience’s expectations. The classic structure of a joke involves a setup, in which the comedian does something to trigger an expectation, and a punchline, which violates that expectation. Something purely surprising can be a good punchline, but relying on surprise is one way comedy becomes stale. True surprise is a one-time thing, and once the audience knows the surprise, the trick loses its magic.
Great comedy isn’t only funny the first time around. When you know the joke by heart—perhaps because it’s in a 37-year-old movie you’ve seen more times than you can count—and it remains funny, it’s because the comedian has managed to violate your expectations even though you knew what was going to happen. Sometimes the punchline is truly outstanding or delivered in a uniquely perfect way. But I think most enduring jokes owe their longevity to the way they are set up. A great setup leads audience members almost subconsciously into an expectation, which gets punctured by the violation no matter how familiar they may be with the joke.
Although the classic joke structure persists because it works, comedians can also subvert it to great effect. One thing I noticed while watching The Naked Gun was the number of jokes that have little or no setup at all. These jokes depend on the audience to come preloaded with expectations that the jokes violate. A running gag throughout the Naked Gun movies is how dangerous and violent the police officers are. This is one way the movie reads very differently in 2025, especially the line Nielsen delivers after his character is dismissed from Police Squad, “Just think, the next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.” These jokes worked on the adolescent version of myself who walked into a movie theater with the expectation that police—especially the main characters of detective shows—are helpful authority figures worthy of unquestioned respect. I suppose I find these jokes less funny now for two reasons: my changed expectations diminish the impact of the violation, and my awareness of real police violence makes the joke less benign.
These setup-less jokes not only risk changes in audience expectations, but changes in the audience itself. When future audiences lack the expectations comedians assume they will have—as with my daughter and Gorbachev’s birthmark—the would-be punchlines become confusing nonsense. Comedy that relies too much on specific audience expectations is liable to lose its punch with each passing generation.
The passage of time can also add new context, altering humor beyond the comedian’s original intent. These context shifts can be dramatic, as with OJ Simpson, whose murder trial and resultant infamy could not have been predicted by The Naked Gun’s filmmakers. Seeing a wheelchair-bound OJ Simpson roll down a stadium staircase and tumble helplessly over the railing is funnier to me today than it could possibly have been in 1988. But I can just as easily understand someone who can’t laugh at Simpson no matter how much physical abuse his character endures on screen.
The experience of sharing comedy across generations fascinates me. Sharing something I found funny in the past with my daughter means confronting the ways I have changed, the ways the world has changed, and the ways the two of us are different. But it’s magical when some throwaway gag manages, despite all odds, to connect my past, my present, and my child, like a thread stretching across time. All culture is like this, I suppose, but comedy, with its dependence on shared meanings and expectations, seems especially susceptible to the passage of time. It somehow feels reassuring to know that I’m not the only one who finds “Hey! It’s Enrico Pallazzo!” as funny as I did when I first saw it in my own not-quite-teenage years.
I hope this little digression into humor was enjoyable, or at least interesting. As I think about the direction I want to take this blog, I’d like to make room to write about topics outside of my usual areas of expertise, and I hope I can address them in ways that express how much I enjoy exploring new ideas and learning new things. Explaining a joke may kill the humor, but understanding the universal human experience of laughter feels deeply worthwhile.
One final digression
In the extreme, a joke can be nothing more than its structure. This is what’s going on in one of my favorite species of joke, the shaggy dog story, which was perhaps perfected by the late Norm Macdonald over his many appearances on various Conan O’Brien shows. (Here’s a great example.) These jokes consist of the comedian telling a long story, often full of digressions and unnecessary details, culminating in an anti-climax: either a weak punchline or no punchline at all. The humor arises from the audience’s violated expectations around the structure of the joke itself: setups are supposed to be economical, or at least interesting, and punchlines are supposed to be unexpected and funny. The shaggy dog story does neither of these things, and the audience starts laughing as the realization gradually dawns on them that they’re not getting the joke they anticipated.