A Naked Attempt at Saving Comedy
A dwindling output of funny movies has left multiplexes strangely devoid of laughter. Could Liam Neeson’s ‘Naked Gun’ reboot bring it back?A Naked Attempt at Saving Comedy
A dwindling output of funny movies has left multiplexes strangely devoid of laughter. Could Liam Neeson’s ‘Naked Gun’ reboot bring it back?
On December 2, 1988, the day after Akiva Schaffer’s 11th birthday, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! hit multiplexes. For the elementary school kid, watching the silly cop movie in a crowded theater was a comedy awakening. And maybe another kind of awakening. His favorite moment was when Lieutenant Frank Drebin and his love interest, Jane Spencer, practice “safe sex” in full-body condoms.
“I can really picture my relationship with the giant condoms, knowing what they are, but not having ever seen one in real life,” says Schaffer, who during a recent interview was wearing a vintage The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear baseball cap. “Like, That’s so funny. I thought it was the funniest thing in the movie. Partially probably because I was so proud to sort of get it.”
Growing up in Berkeley, California, Schaffer loved spoofs. Back in the Reagan era, the genre was at its peak. The sense of humor that the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams brought to The Naked Gun—and had pioneered with Airplane!—left an impression on Schaffer. By the early 2000s, he was in a prolific filmmaking trio himself: the Lonely Island. Since then, he and his friends Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone have made SNL Digital Shorts, albums, TV shows, and movies that stack jokes on top of jokes, subvert tropes, and lean on characters whose self-seriousness and cluelessness are played for big laughs. Basically, they’ve followed the ZAZ model.
But as the Lonely Island flicks Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping were becoming cult classics, funny blockbusters were going extinct. The only two live-action original comedies that have made $100 million–plus at the global box office over the last five years, Free Guy and Red One, well, barely qualify as comedies.
The way things have been going in Hollywood lately, Schaffer never expected anyone to offer him a chance to direct a tentpole theatrical comedy again, let alone a spoof. The days of Austin Powers and Scary Movie, after all, are over. “It is a genre,” he says, “that died out awhile ago.”
More Funny Movies
So when Seth MacFarlane’s production company Fuzzy Door and Paramount Pictures asked Schaffer whether he wanted to reboot The Naked Gun, he was both surprised and hesitant. “My first instinct was no,” he says. “I was sure certain audience members our age that love the first one would go, ‘Oh no, they’re ruining another one.’ I mean, I understand that completely. We haven’t been given a lot of faith that people can put a new spin on an older movie and do it justice. That’s pretty rare.”
Schaffer began to come around when he heard who was in talks to take over the lead role from the perfectly deadpan Leslie Nielsen. “Leslie Nielsen is one in a million. Irreplaceable,” Schaffer says. “When they said, ‘Liam Neeson’s interested,’ that was where I kind of started to see the possibilities for what a new version could be that is not the old version. Something new.”
The new Naked Gun, featuring the Taken star as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., comes out on Friday. In the not so distant past, the release of a summer spoof wouldn’t be terribly fraught. But there’s hope that this might be the one that maybe, just maybe, fingers crossed, brings comedy back.
That’s a lot of pressure on a movie with multiple fart jokes.
To people who miss the experience of laughing uncontrollably in a crowded theater, the mere existence of a modern take on The Naked Gun is refreshing. But the movie is not an original comedy. It’s part of a franchise. Now, the franchise is not on the same level of, say, Mission: Impossible, but it’s a lucrative one nonetheless. The first trilogy grossed a combined $216.8 million domestically.
In an industry that’s convinced itself that past success is more valuable than originality, even a series that had been dormant since 1994 has cachet. Which is probably why, to the delight of comedy nerds like me, Paramount has felt empowered to market The Naked Gun like an event.
Neeson’s image is plastered on billboards all over Los Angeles and beyond. The gates at the Paramount Pictures studio are affixed with cardboard cut-outs of Frank Drebin Jr. doing the splits over the words “total cop blocker.” There’s an ESPN promo starring Drebin. And before some screenings of Superman, there’s a Naked Gun trailer specifically playing off the superhero flick. It brought to mind something Schaffer recently talked about on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast: the spooky, kooky Wayne’s World teaser Dana Carvey and Mike Myers made to run before The Addams Family.
The creators of The Naked Gun have also embraced the idea that going to see it will help save comedy. Coproducer Danny Bonacci wrote a fake PSA that’s filled with clips of hit comedies. In it, Neeson makes a straight-faced plea directly to the camera. “Every passing year, more and more comedies go unmade, unseen, and unquoted,” the actor says. “And for the price of one movie ticket, you can help rescue a comedy, and in the process, you’ll get to share a smile, a laugh, and even the occasional groan with the people in your very own community.”
The studio is clearly behind the movie, but a clever advertising blitz alone isn’t enough. The first step to rescuing comedy is actually making something funny. It’s not easy.
Paramount has spent decades trying to resurrect The Naked Gun, a franchise somehow born out of a TV show that lasted all of six episodes. Proposed revivals with Nielsen and Ed Helms ended up going nowhere. Then MacFarlane took over the project and reached out to Neeson, who was interested in playing Drebin. “It’ll either finish my career or bring it in another direction,” he joked to People in January 2021. “I honestly don’t know.”
Schaffer got hired in 2022 and brought on writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, two fellow 40-somethings who had worked with him on the live-action and animation hybrid Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers. “The original Naked Gun and Spaceballs were very much the foundation of my sense of humor,” Gregor says. “And my sense of cinema,” Mand adds.
Even these days, Gregor can’t help referencing The Naked Gun. Remember the post-breakup scene when Frank Drebin sees the two nuclear power station domes that resemble breasts? “Everywhere I look, something reminds me of her …” he says.
While driving from Los Angeles to San Diego during the wildfires in January, Gregor and his wife, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend star Rachel Bloom, passed the same power station from the movie. At that moment, Gregor tried to lighten the mood. “I stop mid-sentence. I’m like, ‘boobs,’” he recalls. “Truly, I was like, ‘Everywhere I look, something reminds me of her …’”
Schaffer didn’t realize it at the time, but he had been preparing to make an action-packed spoof for years before he was offered the Naked Gun gig. During the pandemic, he and his friend Matt Bettinelli-Olpin—who codirected the Scream franchise reboot—watched every James Bond, then every Dirty Harry, then every Death Wish. Then they binged 20 or 30 more Charles Bronson films. “There’s something so fun to me about that older vigilante guy taking on everybody,” Schaffer says.
The director imagined Neeson’s Frank Drebin as gruffer and more naturally macho than Nielsen’s. Neeson’s scene-stealing performance as a slightly heightened version of himself in the British mockumentary Life’s Too Short sold Schaffer on his comedic chops. “He can play a fake version of himself that’s actually an amalgamation of all his badass characters from the last decade, who are absolutely clueless of the joke, but absolutely confident in what they need to do,” Schaffer says.
Drebin changed. His world did, too. It had to. It’s 2025. The days of The Asphalt Jungle and The Naked City are long gone. In the years since the original Naked Gun, old-school cop dramas and noirs have given way to things like Mission: Impossible, Jack Reacher, John Wick, CSI, and Taken. The writers mostly drew from this cinematic well. For good reason. Spoofs work when the audience doesn’t have to dig deep into their memory bank to understand the pop culture references. “That was a rule when we were writing,” Mand says. “It was like, ‘We are not preaching to anyone about anything. We are taking tropes from movies and finding our comedic spin on it and making it ridiculous.’”
That doesn’t mean that real social commentary doesn’t occasionally sneak through. “I mean, I don’t know if you remember what was going on with LAPD in the ’90s …” Gregor says. He points to the scene in the first Naked Gun when Drebin’s recklessness gets him kicked off the force. “Just think,” he says, “the next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.”
When Mand and Gregor started on the reboot, they heard the same question from their friends. “How are you going to deal with O.J.?” That’s right: In the original trilogy, accused murderer O.J. Simpson played down-on-his-luck Detective Nordberg. “We knew it had to be dealt with,” Mand says. “We also learned quickly that we didn’t want to live in it too long. We wanted to let people know and get rid of it and be like, ‘Here it is. Now we’re moving on.’”
And that’s why one of the first gags Gregor and Mand wrote for the movie was about Simpson. “We didn’t want to break the fourth wall,” Gregor says. “But this was one moment that we were like, ‘Oh, this is so deeply the conversation that we are all having as an audience of this experience.’”
The bit they came up with is simple: Frank Drebin Jr. and Captain Ed Hocken Jr. each give tearful tributes to their late fathers—characters in the previous movies—as they stare at portraits of their namesakes hanging on the precinct wall. After a quick cut to a photo of Nordberg, his son, played by Moses Jones, looks at the camera, shakes his head, and says, “Mmm-mmm.”
The only disappointing thing about the joke was that the trailer spoiled it.
For a spoof to work, it needs to be faithful to the genre it’s spoofing. Schaffer set out to give The Naked Gun reboot the sheen of a current action movie and the soul of the original. “I wanted it to look and feel like 2025 meets 1990,” he says. “Somewhere right in between.”
In other words, Schaffer wanted the movie to be cinematic, not something dumped into the streaming grinder. These days, that’s easier said than done. Studios rarely open their checkbooks for comedies. “The moment you start cutting costs—which is invariably what happens on every set—the sentence that would constantly come back is ‘It’s just a comedy. You don’t need this.’” Gregor says. “You have to really hold tight to the belief that the tone and genre is the baseline of what makes this funny.”
The producers of The Naked Gun never let go of that belief. They even hired Mark Vanselow, Neeson’s stunt coordinator (and double) on Taken. “That meant so much,” Gregor says. “The action, even though it’s deeply stupid, still is choreographed the same way that it would be choreographed in a real Liam Neeson movie.”
Neeson, who at 73 is 11 years older than Nielsen was when the first Naked Gun came out, was game to get as silly as the writers wanted. “It was funny for the first time and the second time and the third time watching Liam Neeson say these ridiculous things,” Mand says. “When we were writing it, we would just do bad impressions of Liam.”
Gregor remembers shooting a proof-of-concept scene in which Drebin pronounces the word “manslaughter” as “man’s laughter.” Neeson nailed it on the first take. “The very first time that ‘man’s laughter’ joke came out of his mouth,” Gregor says, “we were like, ‘We’re going to be OK.’” (That was another trailer moment.)
Paying careful homage to action movies was fun for Schaffer—for example, the director says, “The light that I have coming through the windows [was] copied from every Tony Scott cop movie”—but in the end, it’s Neeson who really sells The Naked Gun. “You have all this production value, then it gets into a well-lit close-up on a movie star’s face,” Schaffer says, “and you’re like, ‘There’s the money.’”
And speaking of money … will The Naked Gun make any? Critics love it. But it’s still unclear to its producers whether spoof-starved young people, the kind that used to flood theaters to see comedies, really understand what they’ve gotten themselves into. Schaffer recalls that at test screenings, the movie scored well with men and women over 35. But there was always a group of teenagers that didn’t quite get it.
“We could tell both in the reactions and just watching, listening to the audience, that people under a certain age, it took them five minutes to actually start laughing,” Gregor says. “Because they were like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’ They needed a bit of education on the rules of this type of movie.”
Luckily, there’s not much of a learning curve. And besides, The Naked Gun is only 85 minutes long. How could a movie that short ruin your day? It’s an unabashed throwback to the ’90s—Pamela Anderson is hilarious as Frank Drebin Jr.’s love interest—a time when funny people were given opportunities to make funny movies.
“Every comedy-writer friend of ours, they’re both happy for us and dripping with jealousy,” Gregor says with a smile. “Because they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re just writing jokes?’ … There’s a certain amount of obligations. We’re writing a comedy, but it’s an action comedy. We’re writing a comedy, but actually it’s a rom-com. It’s all these other things that make it palatable to a mainstream audience. And so to just get to push the clutter away and be like, ‘No, no, it’s just a comedy’? It’s deeply freeing.”
The market for his favorite genre is so bad right now that Mand admits that working on The Naked Gun made him feel like he was getting away with something. “We’re Trojan horsing in a comedy through a comedy,” he says. “Hopefully people like it and see it. And we’re hoping just as much that it’ll open the floodgates a little bit [for studios] to green-light some other comedies.”
If The Naked Gun is a hit, then maybe, just maybe, comedy will be back. But if not, the movie was a valiant attempt to save it. “Maybe it’ll blow some minds,” Schaffer says. “But also maybe everyone will say, ‘Yeah, I’ll see that when it’s on streaming.’”
