The naked gunman

There's a moment in the 1980 comedy Airplane!-one of the funniest films of all-time, available to rent on Amazon Video-where a worried passenger says, "Surely, you can't be serious," and Leslie Nielsen, as the doctor on board, retorts without the twitch of a muscle: "I am serious.

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And don't call me Shirley." It's possibly the most quoted joke in spoof history, and the magic of the moment isn't in the line itself. It's in the look. That straight face. That poker-stiff voice. That impossibly grave delivery of a ridiculous line, uttered by a man with all the solemnity of Shakespearean tragedy. Leslie Nielsen didn't wink. That, dear reader, is precisely what made him hilarious.

Nielsen died in 2010 after a hilarious career, highlighted by the Naked Gun films. As a Naked Gun reboot comes to theatres this week (with Oscar-winning actor Liam Neeson stepping into Nielsen's shoes), it's a good time to doff a cap to this high priest of absurdity. Nielsen's performances were riddled with misunderstandings, malapropisms, and magnificent misuse of metaphor, yet he never broke character. Nielsen acted like he was in 12 Angry Men even when he was drinking urine samples by mistake, or bumbling around in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. He didn't play funny. He was funnier because he didn't know he was funny.

Before Airplane!, Nielsen played square-jawed leads in B-movies and solemn guest stars on TV procedurals. If casting directors needed a stoic face, they called Nielsen. Which is precisely what Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker did. In Airplane!, the ZAZ team (as they'd come to be known) set out to parody the overly sincere disaster films of the 1970s. Instead of hiring comedians, they recruited dramatic actors with reputations for seriousness.