Jim Abrahams, spoof-comedy great behind ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Naked Gun’ films, dies at 80

Jim Abrahams, the writer-director who with brothers Jerry and David Zucker popularized the 1980s spoof genre with comedies such as “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” series, has died. He was 80.

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

With a friendship dating back to childhood and a professional partnership that began in their college years, Abrahams and the Zuckers created some of the most quotable comedies of the era. Jerry Zucker, in a statement shared with Rolling Stone, called Abrahams “our third brother.”

“Jim brought health, humor and love to so many people’s lives,” Zucker told the outlet. “He was our partner, our friend, and our hero.

“When I asked him if he believed in an afterlife, he shrugged and said, ‘I’ve had a good life. I don’t have any regrets.’ ”

James Steven Abrahams was born May 10, 1944, in Shorewood, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. His father, Norman, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise, an educational researcher.

Growing up, Abrahams attended the same synagogue as the Zuckers, and their families regularly got together for dinner.

“Afterward the three of us would end up in the rec room, playing pingpong and making each other laugh,” Jerry Zucker wrote in the trio’s 2023 memoir, “Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!” “We bonded over our shared sense of humor.” (The memoir’s title is a riff on the famous “Airplane!” one-liner: “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.”)

Later in 1971, while the three were attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison together, they founded the Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, devising a multimedia show of improvisational sketches and pretaped spoofs of commercials and TV shows.

Three days before their show’s debut, a building inspector shut down their plans, but they quickly found a new venue in the university’s Old Union South. The comedy troupe played sold-out shows there for a year before making their film debut with the indie sketch comedy “The Kentucky Fried Movie” in 1977.

Abrahams wrote the screenplay, and John Landis directed. After the success of “The Kentucky Fried Movie,” Landis was tapped to make his 1978 hit “Animal House” a year later.

The trio, then known as ZAZ, went on to make “Airplane!” in 1980. Opening to $83.5 million off a modest budget of $3.5 million, the disaster spoof became the No. 3 grossing big-screen comedy in history at the time, trailing only “Animal House” and “Smokey and the Bandit.”

“Airplane!” also earned a BAFTA nomination for best screenplay as well as a Golden Globe nod and a Writers Guild Award. In 2010, it was selected for the National Film Registry.

“I do believe that when ‘Airplane!’ is really clicking, it elevates stupidity to an art form,” Abrahams wrote in the trio’s 2023 memoir. “I mean, we were writing dad jokes before they became an official category.”

In the following years, ZAZ released the films “Top Secret!” (1984) and “Ruthless People” (1986) and the ABC series “Police Squad!” — spawning “The Naked Gun” film franchise. Paramount is set to release a fourth installment in the series starring Liam Neeson, with a story by Seth MacFarlane, in 2025.

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On his own, Abrahams directed “Big Business” (1988) with Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin; “Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael” (1990) with Winona Ryder and Jeff Daniels; the “Top Gun” parody “Hot Shots!” (1991) with Charlie Sheen and its 1993 sequel that spoofed “Rambo”; and the “Godfather” parody “Mafia!” in 1998.

Spanning all his projects, Abrahams told NPR last year that they “don’t aim for anything higher than: you don’t have to take this seriously.”

“There’s no political meaning. It’s not ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ ” he said. “And I think this is a good message for all of us forever, that there are things we don’t have to take seriously.”

In 1994, Abrahams and his wife, Nancy Cocuzzo, founded the Charlie Foundation for Ketogenic Therapies — an organization that advances awareness of the diet to treat epileptic seizures — in honor of his son Charlie, who as an infant was diagnosed with severe epilepsy.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1976, and sons Joseph and Charlie, Abrahams is survived by his daughter Jamie and his grandchildren Caleb, James and Isaac.