Naked Gun vs. Airplane
Which one is funnier?
It's tough for me to decide. This one has more of Leslie Nielsen and the hilarious baseball scenes at the end so I'll go with this one.
"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue."
Naked Gun. I think it's overall helped because it's a self-contained story around a clear-cut cast. Airplane gets sidetracked into side jokes with a bunch of different passengers, but they don't contribute anything to the momentum of the story. It even gets sidetracked into that flashback of Striker in the Peace Corps, totally unnecessary to the rest of the movie.
More of the gags in Airplane just don't work. The spear and watermelon. The woman with eggs in her mouth. The flight crew playing instruments like a band. "Win one for the Zipper." The only bad joke I can think of in Naked Gun is the line "it's way past the time we talked."
Whoever said Airplane is MORE deadpan than Naked Gun is totally wrong. Just look at Lloyd Bridges sniffing glue and hanging upside down from the ceiling, Ethel Merman's cameo, or ALL of Steven Stucker's lines. Airplane veers off into silly, wacky comedy several times while Naked Gun NEVER does. Naked Gun is deadpan from start to finish thanks to Nielsen providing the strong center throughout the movie. He just does that better than Robert Hays. And Julie Hagerty herself is a non-deadpan actress. You can tell by her voice that anything she says is supposed to be comedy. Priscilla Presley acted much more like a B actress you'd see on a TV cop show. Hagerty would never be cast in a real disaster movie, only in a comedy version. Airplane didn't have the courage to cast non-comedic actors as the leads, only the supporting players. For Naked Gun, they knew what worked and were able to make the leads straight, deadpan players too.
So Naked Gun ALL THE WAY!
"Pretentious" is a three-syllable word for any thought too big for little minds.