David Zucker is the guy who turned comedy into a contact sport. Airplane!, The Naked Gun series, Top Secret!, BASEketball, Scary Movie 3 & 4 — the man’s filmography is basically a crash course in weaponized absurdity. Now he’s putting that crash course into an actual course: Master Crash, launching August 4, where Zucker will teach the sacred (and profane) rules of spoof comedy that he and his ZAZ brothers perfected while Hollywood was still trying to figure out how to make a joke land.
Zucker’s mission is simple — save comedy from the corporate dream-killers who’ve drained it dry. “Could you do Airplane! today? Sure — just without the jokes,” he quips, taking a not-so-subtle swing at risk-averse studio boardrooms that think audiences are too delicate for actual laughs. “It’s not that audiences wouldn’t get it — it’s that the studios are frightened.”
“Could you do Airplane! today? Sure — just without the jokes.”
The Master Crash course is interactive, meaning Zucker won’t just be preaching — you’ll get to trade punches with him in real time. He’ll give examples from his own movies and dozens of others, showing why the rules matter, and when to break them. The #1 rule? “The biggest mistake is having characters act funny… You have to have the characters be dead serious upfront.” That’s why Airplane! works — pros like Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack treated the insanity around them like Shakespeare.
And for the love of comedy, don’t mug for the camera. “You have to have respect for the audience’s intelligence,” Zucker says. “Don’t point to the joke. Don’t cut to the joke. Let them find it.” That’s why his movies are packed with blink-and-you-miss-it background gags — like the two cops playing tennis in Ruthless People or a woman tossing her baby in Airplane! as a jet crashes through the terminal.
Zucker is also brutally honest about the industry: comedies are harder to make than ever, not because talent is gone, but because the suits don’t trust you to laugh unless they spell it out in Comic Sans. That’s why Zucker’s course doesn’t just teach joke mechanics — it’s about how to survive in an “impossible business to get into or out of.”
“I never had a flop. I just had cult classics.”
He’ll also break down why story — yes, even in the most unhinged slapstick — is the anchor. “In the craziest ZAZ comedies, the story is what’s important. The audience has to feel like something is won.” That’s the difference between a comedy that lasts two weeks in theaters (Top Secret! — now a cult legend) and one that lives forever in midnight screenings (Airplane!).
And don’t expect him to apologize for his so-called “flops.” Zucker grins: “I never had a flop. I just had cult classics.”
Master Crash launches August 4 at mastercrash.com. If you’ve got a spoof script, a half-baked comedy pitch, or just want to learn how to drop a joke like a precision airstrike, this is your ticket to learning from the guy who wrote the book on playing it straight while the world burns down around you.
