David Zucker Is Doing MasterCrash Because MasterClass Turned Him Down

If you can’t join ‘em, spoof ‘em.

That’s what David Zucker has made a career out of, and it’s what he is still doing with new instructional-video web series, MasterCrash, a play on MasterClass. In the first episode of MasterCrash, coming out in July, Zucker (Airplane! The Naked Gun! movies) will teach viewers his 15 rules of writing parody. The writer/director’s motivation isn’t (solely) money or fame, nor is it really about teaching a new generation of comedy writers. It is, to some degree at least, about revenge.

“My manager, about three years ago, tried to enter me in MasterClass,” Zucker told The Hollywood Reporter. He was rejected. (MasterClass did not respond to requests for comment.)

Zucker is used to rejection these days. His script with Pat Proft (Hot Shots!) for Naked Gun 4!, which they titled Naked: Impossible!, was passed over in favor of giving Akiva Schaffer (Saturday Night Live, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) a shot at the franchise. Zucker has seen the trailer for the Fuzzy Door-produced (and Paramount Pictures-distributed) version, and he’s…not a fan.

“Everybody thinks that they can do it, do spoof,” Zucker told THR, but “it’s really, really specific.”

Seth MacFarlane didn’t ask Zucker to be a part of his banner’s Naked Gun — at least, not until after the script was locked, per Zucker. At that point Zucker says he was offered sort of an honorary producer credit (not wholly unlike MacFarlane’s); he passed.

A spokesperson for Seth MacFarlane did not immediately respond a request for comment.

The new Naked Gun trailer alone “violates at least five” of the 15 rules, Zucker said, starting with “the rule of logic” when a little girl is later revealed to be Liam Neeson, our new Frank Drebin, in a mask.

The 15 rules started in 1972, when the Zuckers (David and his brother Jim) and Jim Abrams (who is since deceased) first previewed their live sketch-comedy show Kentucky Fried Theater on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. A friend of Abrams’ from college, also a writer, attended an early performance. He liked it, but had some feedback: “Never do a joke on a joke.” It became their first rule — and their first brush with structure.

The trio “had a good instinct for comedy,” Zucker said, “but it was more anything goes.”

What “joke on a joke” means is this: If something silly is going on in the background of a scene, don’t have the person in the foreground “also being clowny,” Zucker explained.

In the OG The Naked Gun!, after a villain rides a giant military bomb directly into a fireworks shop, Leslie Nielsen, the original Frank Drebin (and father of Liam Neeson in the new story) deadpans: “Nothing to see here, please disperse.” The joke, of course, is that what is going on behind Drebin is quite literally the biggest possible spectacle.

The scene is not just an example of “joke on a joke,” it is an illustration of why the Zuckers and Abrams wanted straight actors — like Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves — to play out their comedy.

“They could be serious in the foreground, or just be serious and say funny things like, ‘Don’t call me Shirley,’” Zucker said. “And that invented this: this style of humor.”

“They didn’t have to get it,” Zucker added, though some got it better than others.

Nielsen did, though it took a minute, Zucker recalled. After a not-so-great first table read on Airplane! (“Leslie was putting some kind of spin on it”), Zucker sent Nielsen home with a VHS tape of Zero Hour, the very serious, very old film on which Airplane! is primarily based.

We said, “Leslie, watch this, play this character,” Zucker recalled.

Nielsen was a quick study. He played the doctor role so straight and so well, the Zuckers and Abrams made Nielsen the lead in their Police Squad! and its Naked Gun! movies. He played those so well, other directors began to get cast Nielsen in their comedies.

“They were thinking that, ‘Oh, this guy is funny.’” Zucker said. “It’s a fine line. Yes, Leslie’s funny, but he’s really a really fine, consummate actor.”

Stack was another one who got that the joke is not making jokes. Bridges … not so much.

“Lloyd, he just thought he had to act like he was in a comedy,” Zucker said.

“‘Forget you’re in a comedy. Your acting can be no different than it would be if were doing Sea Hunt,’” Zucker recalled telling Bridges, “or, you know, any of the dozens and dozens of roles that he had done before.”

(We can get you two more rules, free of charge. MasterCrash will be a paid course, though the price and specific launch timing is TBD.)

Like: “Jerry Lewis,” the shorthand for another one of their rules. It backs up what we’ve talking about: Zucker doesn’t cast naturally funny people, like Lewis, Adam Sandler (his example) or Chevy Chase (ours). It’s a compliment to those comic actors — it just doesn’t happen to complement Zucker’s style.

“All the comedy has to come from behind the camera, you know, from the director and from the script,” Zucker said. “Of course, we work very hard on the script, and we go through draft after draft— the actors just have to play it straight.”

And then there’s “never cut to a reaction.” Listen up directors, camera operators, editors and even location scouts.

“Reactions are great, but you don’t want to cut to them,” Zucker said. “It dilutes the joke by 50 percent.”

Case in point: in The Naked Gun!, George Kennedy as Nielsen’s police captain reports back on the status of fellow Detective Nordberg, played by O.J. Simpson. Nordberg got pretty messed up throughout the movie.

“The doctors give Nordberg a 50/50 chance to live — but there’s only a 10 percent chance of that,” Capt. Ed Hocken (Kennedy) says in the film.

“You see Leslie in the background look at— he does the reaction,” Zucker said. “But to cut to that [would ruin the joke].”

Kennedy and Nielsen went back to the same well later, when the film’s big baddie Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) meets his fate. Ludwig takes a dart to the neck, falls several stories to the concrete, gets run over by a bus, then flattened by a steamroller and finally trampled by the USC marching band.

Watching on from above, an emotional Kennedy says to Drebin, “My father went the same way.”

“And Leslie is right next to him, and he looks at him,” Zucker said.

The perfect ending to the perfect spoof movie — and now you know how they did it.

“It’s not like we’re born geniuses. We worked at it and we developed it and we learned it. We taught it to ourselves,” Zucker said, “and we go over each one in the course.”