It's been years since I've seen it, but damn, there were so many things that I loved that I forgot about. It kind of feels dumb explaining it in words as it doesn't do it justice but I should note that there are a lot of visual gags as well as blink and you'll miss it things written on signs or labels. A good number of jokes are misinterpreting a person's response answering what you thought was a generic inquiry and quickly dismissing it. Also, a lot of jokes are repeated, but still funny, i.e. "I picked the wrong day to quit _____ ".
Parts where I laughed out loud
- When the doctor from the Mayo Clinic calls Captain Oveur at the airport, you can see jars of mayo behind him and a beating heart in a large petri dish.
- Zooming in on the doctor, after cutting back to him from the captain on the phone, with the jars out of focus, the heart is shown bouncing in and out of frame
- The guy dancing with the knife in his back in Striker's flashback
- Striker asking the guy at the bar to pinch him and the guy gives him a confused look and slowly backs away
- Joey visiting the cockpit for the first time is probably the best scene in the movie
- When the stewardess is looking for a doctor and Leslie Nielson's character is sitting there wearing a stethoscope
- Leslie Nielson aka the doctor saying he had the lasagna
Gags that kind of fell flat
- the passengers killing themselves when listening to Striker's story
- the jive guys, while entertaining, isn't super funny
- the stewardess singing with the guitar and knocking out the girl's IV
- Rex Kramer's bad driving
- the dog attacking the guest
- Oveur's wife sleeping with a horse
- Stephen Stucker's character of Johnny, who I probably found hilarious as a kid, was actually quite annoying and I didn't find anything he was doing or his side comments during the crisis funny. When he said, "____ is getting larger" reminded me of when Family Guy stole that line to use it in their Star Wars satire. It wasn't funny then either.
Overall, it's definitely one of the funniest movies ever created, and I appreciate that it can still make me laugh 38 years later. I would definitely say the first 2/3 of the movie is very strong comedically while the last 1/3 kind of falls flat. My wife not getting the jokes and rolling her eyes made the movie a little more enjoyable as well.
Side note: I didn't realize Jonathan Banks was in the movie until I looked at the IMDb cast listing. He even has two speaking lines, but he looks totally different.
