Airplane! is one of my favorite movies. I am not an unreconstructed ZAZ fan; I think The Naked Gun is overrated and there are parts of Police Squad! that could have been improved upon, but Airplane! remains in my mind one of the most consistently funny movies of the last thirty years. You know how one of the reasons everyone loved 30 Rock so much was the astonishing rate of jokes per minute? That’s Airplane!, but with the added benefit of Robert Stack. It’s one of the first in a rash of zany, anarchic free-for-all comedies that cropped up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and it’s one of the best. Chances are that you’ve seen it (here I will succumb to gender essentialism and wager that you have seen it at least once with your father) and can recite what the white zone is for without prompting.
One of the best–and coincidentally, most radical–aspects in the movie is Johnny the air traffic controller, played by the brilliant Stephen Stucker. Johnny is part of that time-honored band, the movie sissy, and he’s the most magnificently unrepentant faggots to ever grace the screen in the entire 1980s. Here’s a few of his best moments:
He prances. He pirouettes. He bats his eyelashes. He growls. He sings out facts about Barbara Stanwyck from his desk. At one point he wraps himself in a set of telephone cords and starts screaming about twisters and Auntie Em, making himself a very public, very literal friend of Dorothy’s. He takes over press conferences and rolls his eyes and tickles serious men and turns a weather report into a sensational brooch (and a hat, to say nothing of a pterodactyl).
“Johnny, how about some more coffee?” Lloyd Bridges’ Steve McCrosky asks gruffly. “No, thanks!” Johnny sings out as he steps lightly across the room. It’s glorious.
But unlike his sissy predecessors, Edward Everett Horton (he of the “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear“):
and Peter Lorre:
Johnny is never slapped, pushed out of the way, humiliated, sidelined, mocked, or verbally bested by any of the grizzled, chain-smoking, heterosexual manly men running through the control tower with him. Not once in the entire movie is Johnny the target of a joke (he’s too busy making them himself), which is fairly remarkable, given the treatment gay and sissy characters usually got in most mainstream comedies at the time. There’s nobody else like him.
Incidentally, the actor who played Johnny, Stephen Stucker, was one of the first people in Hollywood to publicly announce that he had AIDs. He died in 1986; there was no one else quite like him.
There are a few brief, lazy fag jokes in Caddyshack, like when Chevy Chase talks about how he avoided the Vietnam draft. Revenge of the Nerds had Lamar, but he was just as often the joke as he was making them.
“Wait ’til you see Lamar’s throw…he designed the javelin to go along with Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style.” There’s nothing like that in Airplane! Johnny’s wrists are as limp as they come, of course, but you’re not going to catch anyone else pointing that out to us. When Steve McCroskey, Rex Kramer, and Johnny read a series of newspaper headlines and exclaim, “Passengers certain to die!” “Airline negligent!” ”There’s a sale at Penney’s!” you’d better believe that the joke is on the boring stiffs, not on him.
The whole point of a movie like Airplane! is to poke fun at the serious and staid world of Zero Hour! and Airport! and the other disaster films of the 1970s, and who’s less serious and staid than a sissy air traffic controller? When the terrified wife of an almost-certainly-dead pilot is brought up to the tower, a perfect picture of permissible heterosexual grief, Johnny immediately and delightedly reduces her to tears: “Where did you get that dress? It’s awful. And those shoes and that coat, jeeeeez!”
He even gets one of the last laughs of the movie, exiting triumphantly and unpunished–just as the airplane is about to touch down, the landing strip goes dark, and the camera pans to Johnny, who waggles his eyebrows suggestively and plugs the lights back in.
“Just kidding,” he says, and he smiles, and no one stops him.
Tags: airplane, gays in film, johnny are you queer, movies, sissies, stephen stucker, there’s a sale at penney’s
Surely you can’t be serious.
I am serious. Stop calling me Shirley.
Thank you for reminding me how incredible this movie was. JOHNNY!
One of my new favorite things is watching ideas unfold on Mallory’s Twitter in real time, and then seeing them show up on The Toast. I was hoping hoping hoping that Johnny would show up here, and lo, here he is!
My favorite line: “The fog is getting thicker!” “And Leon’s getting LARRRRRGERRRRRR.”
Growing up, my mom and I would use that line on the rest of the family, including our dog. Taxes getting higher? Well, “[dog]’s getting LARRRRRGERRRRRR!”
That line is so great. I have, like, a sense memory of it, even though I haven’t seen Airplaine! in probably two decades (wait, what is wrong with me?).
This article brought you by me misattributing a famous joke to “Leslie Nielson” on Twitter.
I once saw ZAZ and Robert Hays give an interview before a late-night screening of Airplane! in Hollywood and it was a Perfect Thing. They gave Hays SO MUCH SHIT.
I loved this.
There’s also that seriously subversive bit when Johnny references May Day:
Ted Striker: Mayday! Mayday!
Steve McCroskey: What the heck is that?
Johnny: Why, that’s the Russian New Year. We can have a parade and serve hot hors d’oeuvres…
I mean, it was 1980, the Cold War was definitely hot. So he’s a sissy and conversant in Soviet holidays? He’s the perfect storm for Sochi 2014.
but but May Day isn’t Russian New Year, it’s International Workers’ Day, the socialist version of Labor Day — which only exists in the US and Canada and was created by Grover Cleveland and the AFL as a less communist alternative to May Day. (I still love that joke tho)
Actually if anyone’s looking for a good wikihole to crawl down, go read about Labor Day, the Pullman strike, Eugene Debs, and Samuel Gompers! Go!
Well, YEAH. But to the average moviegoer in 1980? “Russian” and “May Day” and “parade” from a sissy character is probably as subversive as it gets in a comedy like that.
True! And it’s beyond ridiculous to hold a comedy like Airpline! to that kind of standard — I just like lecturing people about the history of labor day.
(Weirdly, all their drug references were pretty much spot-on.)
Also I love the way he says “brooch”
It reminds me of the spin Donald O’Connor puts on “guillotine” in the lead-in to “Make ‘Em Laugh,” oddly enough.
The first time I watched Airplane! it made me cry with ugly laughs that fought to get out of my trachea, and I’m pretty sure the time I was most in pain from too much laughing was when Johnny intoned, “And Leon’s getting LARGERRRRRR.”
My favorite of all the gloriousness is when they’re all running to the tower and he yells “Rapunzel!” Does a mean arabesque jete too.
REVENGE OF THE NERDS IS GARBAGE
Gender essentialist here. My dad and I saw it together when I was a kid, and we used to quote the whole “Surely you can’t be serious…” bit at each other all the time.
…aaaaaand now I’m going to cry. Time to watch Airplane! and cheer myself up.
We owned it on Betamax. (I’m old.) This movie basically raised me, comedically, and I suppose others might disagree but I think it did a fine job.
My mom was the parent who insisted that we watch this! I assumed that it would be lame, because my mom is very traditional and sweet and was a very thoughtful parent (i..e. we weren’t allowed to watch Growing Pains because of excessive sass-mouth). Her enthusiastic recommendation of this movie was probably the first step in my realizing that she is actually pretty awesome. Yay Mom!
I knew it was love when, prior to any joint viewing or discussion of Airplane! up to that point in our relationship, my boyfriend came over and introduced the topic of a rough work day: “Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop huffing glue.”
I love you all so much.
I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know Airplane! It was just always on in the background, but my brother and I knew we had to stop what we were doing and dive in front of the tv whenever Johnny came on. IT LOOKS LIKE A GREAT BIG TYLENOL.
So am I crazy or was there a just-for-TV version? On TV, for the scene between the little boy and girl sharing coffee, I distinctly remember him introducing himself as “Milton Epstein, but my friends call me Bubbles.”
When I watched the official movie version years later, that was gone! Looks like they added that in because the little girl announcing that she took her coffee black, like her men, wasn’t TV-friendly.
One of the things I wish for in this mixed-up crazy world is that you could just accost random people on the street by hugging their stomachs and proclaiming, “AND LEON’S GETTING LARRRRRRGGGEER!” Can we do this? Can we call it “Leon-ing”? If three people do it, then friends, it’s a movement.
I’m pretty sure there’s an upcoming special issue of Dad Magazine devoted to one pressing in-depth report: “Airplane! Jokes: Is There Ever An Inappropriate Time?”
(SPOILER ALERT: Never.)
Oh, stewardess? I speak jive.
Stephen was a wonderfully sweet man, and in person was much like his on-screen persona in Airplane!, though Stephen knew how and when it was time to turn it “off.” But what you identify as part of his “secret” in “Airplane!,” was in fact the secret to every single hilarious character in the film. It’s the REASON Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Billingsley and all the rest got away with doing what they did, and the reason the audience loved it, literally collapsing into the aisles. It was a premise directors Abrahams and Zucker repeated again and again to all of the actors: No one, through word or deed, would ever regard anything anyone else did on camera as the least bit odd. No one “Joked the joke.” If Bridges said he picked the wrong time to quit sniffing glue, Robert Stack’s look had to say not one thing other than, “You’re right – wrong damn time to quit sniffing glue.” (Stack didn’t actually share the screen with Bridges at the instant of that line, but the example serves to make the point.) Robert Hays had the toughest time with this edict, as can be seen through several of his “takes” in response to goings on. But at no time does anyone else give any indication that anything done by the others is even the least bit funny or unusual. Stephen was the audience’s private sprite, and for all anyone else on the set indicated, Stucker’s response to being asked what he could make of the weather report was some dense information about cold fronts and storm lines.
This article taught me that Edward Everett Horton was not just the narrator of Fractured Fairy Tales.
It’s deeply weird for me to see him in films, I keep expecting a giant book to slam shut on him!
So I’m reading this and nodding along a bit. I saw Airplane! only once, on my dad’s cable subscription sometime in the 80s. I had seen almost none of the things it was parodying, but I understood it to be a parody, and enjoyed it somewhat on that level. Some of the jokes I really liked. Some I thought (even at sub-10-years-old) were really stupid. And some I apparently misunderstood so very hard that they became invisible to me.
You see, I saw all the Johnny love and went, “Who?” I read the lines quoted and thought, “That’s hilarious. Why do I not remember this character?” Besides it being over 20 years ago and I was a kid, duh.
So I clicked to YouTube and watched the best-of-Johnny video and realized that I — who grew up raised by a single mother plugged into the artists-and-freaks-and-fags scene, who knew about homosexuality in an ‘of course’ sort of way before I can even remember learning about it — I had no idea they were coding Johnny gay.
I thought he was a weird random interjection from the slapstick, Warner-Brothers-Cartoon world next door; his bits seemed like they were edited in from some entirely other movie (and a lot of them struck me as not funny, or over too soon to mean anything), so my brain edited him out of the version of the film I remember at ALL, just sticking with the played-far-too-straight-and-isn’t-it-funny storyline.
Man. Now I need to go back and rewatch as an adult and see what ELSE I plumb don’t remember …
Nah, I saw this with my mum. She also introduced me to Blazing Saddles, Sleeper, and Clue (amongst others). Best mum ever. 🙂
Pre-“Airplane!” there was the delightful and underrated “The Big Bus” with Stockard Channing, Joe Bologna and a lot of fantastic cameos. Very funny and definitely worth a look if you liked Airplane!
Johnny was, hands down, the best part of Airplane.
Stephen Stucker was a comic genius.
Sorely missed.