Jim Abrahams, who with the brothers David and Jerry Zucker surely comprised one of the funniest trios of comedy writers in film history, layering on the yucks in classics like “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 80.
His son Joseph said the cause was complications of leukemia.
Mr. Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — often known around Hollywood as the “men from ZAZ” — revolutionized film comedy with their straight-faced, fast-paced parodies of self-serious dramas like 1970s disaster films and police procedurals.
Along the way they littered pop culture with a trail of one-liners seemingly custom-cut to drop into daily conversation: “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” And “Nice beaver!”
Their films spawned an entire genre of spoof comedy, many of them pale, scruffy comparisons to the tight scripts and cleverly paced plots that gave the ZAZ films their punch.
The trio shared writing credits on five films, starting with “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), a compilation of parody sketches that grew out of a comedy show they developed after college in Madison, Wis., and took to Los Angeles in 1972. It was directed by John Landis, who would go on to direct “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers.”
ImageJulie Hagerty with, from left, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (lying down), Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves in “Airplane!” (1980), the first film that the team of Mr. Abrahams and the Zucker brothers directed. Credit...Paramount PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.lotsa slots
