Whether or not you enjoyed the recent Naked Gun, one thing is for sure…it brought attention to the original David Zucker classic. Nearly everyone was hoping that the Liam Neeson updated incarnation of the iconic 80s broad comedy could at least provide enough laughs to be entertaining, as everyone knew it couldn’t possibly surpass the original. And while the consensus was that the new film provided plenty of belly laughs, the Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun was recently named as the number one best comedy of all time by Variety.
The publication recently posted their list for The 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time and Naked Gun beats out titles like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Annie Hall. The top ten portion of the list also goes back to the 1930s with Duck Soup and the 1940s with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Groundhog Day rounds out the top ten, edging out the 1924 movie, Sherlock Jr. Variety’s list ranges from Saturday Night Live alums to movies like Fargo and His Girl Friday. Many might be older titles that you may not have heard before, such as She Done Him Wrong and The Awful Truth.
You can check out the top 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, as voted by their writers on their site HERE.
Recently, David Zucker shared his thoughts on the new Naked Gun from Seth MacFarlane and Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer. As protective as Zucker’s been of his franchise and his stance against a new one without his input, he definitely wasn’t over the moon for it. Zucker stated, “My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style — and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently,” he said. “People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.“
Zucker also points out that big budgets have no place in comedy. “You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz,” he said. “Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.“
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