David Zucker

Co-wrote and directed Airplane! (1980) with his brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams, inventing a rapid-fire, joke-every-few-seconds parody style that reshaped studio comedy and became the template for decades of spoof films that followed. As a solo director he created The Naked Gun franchise, built around Leslie Nielsen's deadpan Lieutenant Frank Drebin, and later directed Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, carrying the same anything-for-a-laugh sensibility into a new generation of parody.