It’s not something I ever thought I would say, but comedy is in danger of becoming a dying art. In movies, at least, it’s become harder and harder to sell a comedy to the theater crowd, mainly because in a world where movie theater attendance has never really recovered from the Covid shutdowns, people are far more discriminating about what they choose when they go out to a movie theater. The prevailing notion is that if you’re only going to see a movie in a theater a few times a year, it’s best to spend those chits on the big-budget special effects spectaculars, the things that really demand that IMAX treatment on the big screen. I know I’m guilty of that – my wife and I only get out to see a movie without our son a few times a year at best, so we’ve got to make sure it “counts.” After all, a comedy that’s funny in the theater will be just as funny at home, right?
No, that’s not right at all, actually.
I’ve written before about that ever-so-thin line between comedy and horror, and about how both art forms are built on a similar formula of tension, buildup, and release, with the primary difference being that horror releases tension through screams whereas comedy releases it through laughter. It’s the reason, in fact, that horror/comedy hybrids can be so effective. But there’s another similarity that people don’t realize. Most horror movies are scarier in movie theaters than at home, where you can feed on the energy of the people around you, hear them gasp and shout with each scare, where you can see the girl a row ahead of you grab onto her boyfriend when the monster leaps at the screen. It makes watching a horror movie a communal experience that’s more enjoyable than watching the same movie alone. (There are exceptions, of course. Certain small, claustrophobic films like Buried or home invasion movies like Hush probably work better in a darkened living room with the curtains drawn and as few people as possible with you. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.)
Similarly, there’s something about comedy that’s funnier when you’re with an audience. There’s an emotional charge in the air that is infectious, spreading from one person to another. Even ONE person can be enough to trigger this. I’ll watch episodes of RiffTrax or Mystery Science Theater 3000 a dozen times by myself and chuckle with the riffs. But if I watch that same episode with my wife, those quiet laughs to myself become full-belly guffaws. Laughter, like terror, is contagious. One person’s laughter eases the path for others – it’s almost like hearing someone else laughing gives you PERMISSION to laugh, a permission that you don’t actually NEED, but that your psyche is waiting for anyway.
Unfortunately we didn’t make it to the theaters for this one, but the reboot of The Naked Gun is available digitally now, and my wife Erin and I watched it earlier this week. I’ve heard from many people whose opinions I respect that it was the funniest movie of the year, which sadly isn’t as bold a statement as it used to be. I grew up on the original Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun movies, as well as the Police Squad series that preceded it. I dearly loved that style of slapstick comedy, the kind we got from Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles or Spaceballs, and that the same Abrahams and Zucker Brothers combo that gave us Police Squad would refine in their disaster spoof Airplane! And I mourned – oh, HOW I mourned – the death of that kind of comedy when it was replaced by Friedberg/Seltzer stinkers like Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, and The Starving Games.
Someone watching a trailer for these movies might not be able to tell what the difference is on the surface. They’re all goofy movies built on absurd, surrealistic comedy that’s almost like a cartoon brought to life. But the difference is that Brooks, Abrahams, and the Zuckers understand how parody works. Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, and The Naked Gun are spoofs of westerns, science fiction, and cop dramas (respectively). They mock the tropes of those films ruthlessly, while at the same time telling their own stories. Date Movie and similar films lack that kind of imagination or creativity. They replace actual gags with straight references to other films, and seem to think that simply acknowledging the existence of a (usually superior) movie somehow counts as a joke, but they have no identity or voice of their own.
Airplane!, incidentally, is the oddball in this group. Whereas the others weren’t parodies of SPECIFIC movies (although Spaceballs leaned harder on Star Wars than most other sci-fi), Airplane! was almost a beat-for-beat remake of a lesser-known and much-forgotten disaster movie called Zero Hour, even borrowing some of the dialogue from the earlier film. They simply took the existing plot and characters and amplified them to absurd levels and created a comedy classic.
But that kind of comedy had died out, as I said, replaced by the Reference Fests that slapstick has become in the last two decades. So when I heard they were rebooting The Naked Gun I was highly skeptical. When I heard that Liam Neeson had been cast as Frank Drebbin Jr., my optimism increased slightly – Neeson is a great actor and I believed he may have the comedy chops to pull it off. But it wasn’t until I saw the trailer, where they included a joke that addressed the elephant in the room – a certain cast member of the original trilogy who became infamous after the series ended – that I realized that this movie might just be self-aware enough to work.
And it really did.
Erin and I watched this movie and, from the first scene, I found myself laughing out loud at the antics on the screen. Liam Neeson has reinvented his career before – after a long period as a profound dramatic actor he took a left turn into action hero starting with the Taken franchise. Now it seems like he’s ready to reinvent himself again. He doesn’t play Frank Drebbin Jr. as completely stone-faced as his “father,” Leslie Nielsen, played the original. Instead, he’s got his own sort of blend of faux seriousness mixed with just enough winking at the camera to indicate that he recognizes just how ridiculous the movie is, and he’s cool with it.
The real revelation here, though, was casting Pamela Anderson as the femme fatale of the movie. It’s been quite a while since Anderson was really in the public eye, and when she WAS making movies more frequently she wasn’t usually being sought out for her comedic skills. But she nailed it in this movie, with the same kind of goofy sensibility that Neeson brought to the screen. Word has it that she and Liam Neeson have actually begun a romantic relationship in real life after working together on this movie. That wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025, but after seeing them together I absolutely believe it, because the chemistry is flawless.
Most importantly, though, the writing is sharp and clever. The jokes are about the tropes of a police procedural, not about the EXISTENCE of it. The screenwriters rarely make reference to any specific movie or TV show, and when they DO it’s actually done well (such as an extended joke where Neeson’s character is distraught that his Tivo has accidentally lost season one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – the joke here being that a hardboiled cop at his age KNOWS so much about Buffy, not that it EXISTS).
The Naked Gun (“the new version,” Neeson says in his first of many fourth wall-leaning moments) is the kind of comedy we don’t get anymore, and it’s the kind of comedy we need. Honestly, when is the last time you went to a movie theater to watch a comedy? I went back and looked at my Letterboxd diary to find the last time I saw a new movie in a theater that was an actual comedy and not just a superhero movie with comedic elements or a cartoon I was taking Eddie to watch. I made it back to 2017 when Erin and I saw The Big Sick, which is really more of a dramedy. Before that I’ve gotta go back to the action/comedy The Nice Guys in 2016. Both of those, by the way, are movies that deserve a lot more love than they get.
The Naked Gun didn’t set the box office on fire, but it was highly lauded by critics and by those audiences that actually DID show up. I’m hoping that’s enough to justify Paramount moving forward with a sequel. Neeson and Anderson are such a great on-screen duo that it would be a crime not to pair them up again. This wouldn’t be the first time a movie – especially a comedy – found its audience after the lights dimmed in the movie theater, so I’m giving this my recommendation. Buy or rent it digitally. Stream it when it eventually shows up on Paramount+. Buy the Blu-Ray or DVD when it hits stores. I want more movies like this, and so should you. I didn’t get to see this one with a tub of popcorn in my lap and a huge screen in front of me, so I’m hoping I’ll get that shot for part two.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. You know what other movie didn’t get enough love? The Rocketeer. Just saying.
Blake M. Petit 