Airplane! Is a perfect example of a film made up almost entirely of slapstick and gags, which, despite this fact, has plot. Most of the individual gags do not further the narrative of the film. They are littered throughout, there is often not more than a minute or two without a joke. If the gags were taken out of the film and replaced entirely by serious plot developments, the film would have had a standard narrative structure. With the gags, Airplane! has a unique voice and is considered to be one of the funniest films ever made. Due to its release in the 1980s, long after the era of slapstick had ended, Airplane!’s unique stupidity sets it apart from other comedies of the time.
At the beginning of the movie there is a sight gag which captures the essence of the type of joke entirely. There is an air traffic control worker who is guiding a plane using two glow-sticks. A man comes up to him and asks where the bathroom is, instead of saying where it is, he adjusts the direction of his sticks, directing the plane into the side of the airport. The punchline has no verbal aspect, it is only the build up which contains words. Donald Crafton writes “The gag may also contain its own microscopic narrative system that may be irrelevant to the larger narrative, may mirror it, or may even work against it as parody.” (109) This joke is a perfect example of this. It has its own narrative: a beginning, middle, and end. Despite this, the fact that a plane crashed into the airport does not affect the narrative of the film at all. It is completely moved on without any significant reaction. In this way, the narrative of the joke is entirely contained.
In Crafton’s essay, he speaks more about the introduction of longer gag films as films in general became longer. He categorizes the longer gag film as one which “Each gag ends in such a way that the gag machine must be started all over again to produce an additional one.” (96) This phenomenon is evident in this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNkpIDBtC2c
Initially, there is a panicing woman. She gets repeatedly slapped. It is then shown that there is a line of people waiting to slap her or perform an increasingly violent act against her. After this gag, another begins directly back at the airport. A pilot is attempting to get through the lobby and is repeatedly stopped by members of different religions, a bit from earlier in the film, and gets increasingly violent towards them. This sequence is especially significant because it contains two very violent, yet unconnected gags. There is no plot development in either of these gags but they both fit into the narrative of the entire film, differentiating it from the disparaging view of slapstick in its earliest form.