‘Airplane!’ filmmaker Jim Abrahams, a Shorewood High alum, has died

The world is a little less funny today.

Shorewood High School graduate Jim Abrahams, a co-creator of the zany “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun” movies, has died at age 80.

His death was confirmed in an email from his sister Jane Butenhoff.

Abrahams died of natural causes at his home Tuesday in Santa Monica, his son Joseph told The Hollywood Reporter.

While students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Abrahams and his friends Jerry and David Zucker and Dick Chudnow started the comedy group Kentucky Fried Theater, which combined video satires of TV commercials and a stage show.

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Abrahams and the Zuckers moved to Los Angeles, where they put on Kentucky Fried Theater shows for five years before working with director John Landis to turn their project into a movie. After that came “Airplane!” (1980), which sparked a long career in comic filmmaking for the trio, often referred to by the acronym ZAZ. The three were jointly credited as writers and directors of the movie.

Surely anyone who’s seen “Airplane!” can quote a few of its dazzling punchlines — including Leslie Nielsen’s rejoinder, “Don’t call me Shirley.”

The success of “Airplane!” stimulated a vein of slapstick movie spoofs, both by ZAZ and others, that continues to this day. It was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2010 and scored No. 10 on the American Film Institute’s list of funniest films of all time.

“That movie’s going to live forever,” Milwaukee Brewers announcer Bob Uecker, who knows a little about humor, said in a 2005 Journal Sentinel article.

“It’s sort of stunning to me that it has endured this long and has become so popular,” Abrahams said in the same article.

“Perhaps the most canny decision made by the filmmakers was to put actors like Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen in roles that parodied the serious characters they had been playing all their lives,” Journal Sentinel film critic Duane Dudek wrote in 2005.

“You get the sense that they’re having a laugh at their own expense, and that’s part of the endearing quality of the humor,” Abrahams told Dudek.

Abrahams also said that “Airplane!” reflected a Midwestern sensibility. “If you grew up in Milwaukee back then, you had to have a sense of humor about yourself.”

Abrahams gave his mother Louise Abrahams Yaffe, who had wanted to be an actor when she was young, cameos in several of his films, something she was extremely proud of. In her 2012 obituary in the Journal Sentinel, Jim Abrahams shared a favorite anecdote about their movie time together.

In “Airplane!,” Louise played a passenger seated next to Nielsen, who was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope around his neck. Her line in the film: “Oh stewardess, I think the man next to me is a doctor.”

“She wasn’t sure how it would sound best,” Jim Abrahams told Journal Sentinel reporter Jan Uebelherr, “so for several days prior to shooting she rehearsed — each time putting an emphasis on a different word,” he recalled. “‘Oh stewardess, I THINK the man sitting next to me …,’ or, ‘Oh stewardess, I think the MAN sitting next to me ….’”

On his own, Abrahams directed “Big Business” (1988) starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, and co-wrote and directed “Hot Shots!” (1991) as well as its 1993 sequel, both starring Charlie Sheen.

In a 1998 interview with Dudek, Abrahams described a little of his working method — in this instance, for his comic deconstruction of mob movie cliches in “Mafia!” (1998). “We’re sort of equal opportunity. I think everybody gets in the spirit of these movies,” he said. “They’re not mean-spirited. We’re just having a laugh at the way the movies portray the Mafia.”

Abrahams said he and his co-writers spent a lot of time on story and relationships before throwing jokes against the wall. “We watch every movie in the genre we can get our hands on and look for cliches. Then we say, `Wouldn’t it be funny if . . . ?’ “

In addition to his son Joseph and his sisters Jane and Alice, survivors include his former wife, Nancy Cocuzzo, who remained his friend; his daughter, Jamie; his son, Charlie; and grandchildren Caleb, James and Isaac.

As an infant, Charlie had a form of epilepsy that result in daily seizures. The Abrahamses turned to a ketogenic diet of high-fat foods for relief. In 1994, they founded the Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies to provide information about diet therapies for people with epilepsy, other neurological disorders and select cancers. “We advise medical supervision with all ketogenic therapies,” the foundation states on its website.

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