This year we lost Leslie Nielsen, the inimitable comic performer who featured in over one hundred films and countless television programmes but will be especially remembered for his roles in surreal spoof films, such as Airplane and Naked Gun.
Born and raised in Canada, as the son of a Danish-born Mountie and a Welsh immigrant who had moved from Fulham, he trained as a gunner for the Royal Canadian Air Force towards the end of the Second World War, but was too young to be shipped out. He went on to study theatre and music in New York and began his career in 1950s live television, first appearing alongside Charlton Heston for 75 dollars. He moved on to play the leading man in many dramas before finding his true calling, aged 54, in the comic movie.
His impressive CV of serious dramatic roles made him all the more perfect for deadpan Dr Rumack in the 1980 disaster-movie spoof Airplane!. Director and writer David Zucker has described how his greatness lay in the fact that he never ‘winked’: Nielsen played his part in this ludicrous goofball comedy as if he had not the slightest hint of its comedic value. When his character announces ‘This woman has to be gotten to a hospital’ and Julie Hagerty’s character responds ‘A hospital? What is it?’, he replies earnestly ‘It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.’ The wholly serious delivery of silly lines like these characterised his performance in this hugely successful comedy and went on to become something of a Nielsen trademark.
A new niche for Nielsen and his impeccable comic timing, as showcased in Airplane!, opened up in the form of tongue-in-cheek parodies. Just as Airplane! playfully spoofed the 1970 melodrama Airport and the whole of the disaster film genre, Top Gun and other police dramas came under fire in the joyfully irreverent Naked Gun trilogy of the later 80s and early 90s. Again, David Zucker directed and again, Nielsen’s comic intensity shone through. Indeed, Airplane! had brought back a playful breed of comedy film based upon inventive slapstick, absurd visuals and mischievous wordplay. Already reminiscent of much earlier filmmaking, such as that of the Marx brothers, Nielsen’s films added a dimension of parody and spoof, now that there was such a body of po-faced cinematic work to be imitated and mocked.
The enormously successful Pink Panther films, which began in the 1960s under the direction of the much-revered and recently deceased Blake Edwards, had already began to put Hollywood on this path with Peter Sellers and co parodying the well-worn detective genre. Airplane!‘s breed of comedy is, however, quite distinct from that of the Pink Panther series, as is Nielsen’s deadpan panache from the larger-than-life style of Sellers, who had already established a comic reputation in The Goon Show.
Airplane!‘s laugh-a-minute, incoherent and surreal style of spoof has spawned many similar parodies in its wake, such as the Scary Movie franchise, in which Nielsen himself has made a cameo appearance. Other spoofs, however, have started to move away from the light-hearted, absurd tone of the comedies we associate with Nielsen: whilst Nielsen’s deadpan performance contrasts with the silly chaos around him in his films, some more recent parody films such as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007) from this side of the Atlantic, have an all-round comic seriousness in their tone and execution whilst some American comedies, such as Zombieland (2009), want to be taken seriously at several points, with genuinely scary or romantic scenes, which make humour take the backseat.
When Leslie Nielsen stars, the comedy of a scene is never muted or relegated to second place. This top-class performer will always be remembered for being hilariously serious and seriously hilarious.
