Original ‘Naked Gun’ Director Suggests That the Reboot Filmmakers Should Have Taken His Online Parody Courses

Most people seem to be loving the new Naked Gun movie, with one notable exception — no, we’re not talking about the polyamorous enchanted snowman community. 

Even though he directed the original 1988 classic The Naked Gun, David Zucker hasn’t exactly been the biggest supporter of the reboot. Zucker, whose pitch for a fourth movie (The Naked Gun 4: Nordberg Did It) was rejected by Paramount, has told interviewers that he’s boycotting the 2025 version and once said that “just being a fan” of the original trilogy doesn’t qualify the new filmmakers to take on the parody genre. 

In recent weeks, Zucker has been slightly more complimentary. “People are liking it, which is great,” he told The Guardian after the movie’s opening weekend. “I really like the director, and I just couldn’t wish him more well. I texted him already, saying, ‘I hear the reviews are great, and it’s tracking well.’ He was very happy to hear from me, and we’ll probably get together later in the month when the smoke clears.”

But now Zucker is once again publicly critiquing the movie that he still has no plans to see. 

The Airplane! co-director recently spoke with The Huffington Post, and took the opportunity to promote MasterCrash, a series of instructional videos that he launched after being rejected by MasterClass. In the online tutorials, Zucker lays out his “15 essential rules” of comedy for people who want to spend $99 a month to learn about something they could just Google in three seconds. 

Zucker told The Huffington Post that the team behind the reboot, including director Akiva Schaffer and producer Seth MacFarlane, “would have benefited” from taking his MasterCrash course, explaining, “I think they broke all the rules.”

Again, he hasn’t actually seen the movie, and is seemingly basing all of his criticism on the first teaser trailer, in which Frank Drebin Jr. takes on a gang of armed bank robbers while dressed as a schoolgirl. Zucker claimed that this scene broke his “Jerry Lewis” rule. “That was ‘Jerry Lewis’ to me,” he argued. “We don’t make characters into clowns.”

The Jerry Lewis rule, which somehow isn’t about avoiding making comedies about the Holocaust, states that parody filmmakers shouldn’t “use a comedian in a straight man role,” nor should they rely on “‘funny’ wardrobe” because it’s a “joke on a joke.” The bank robbery scene’s punchline, involving Liam Neeson exposing his strawberry underpants, is therefore in violation of this rule.

That being said, most of the movie does hew fairly closely to the guidelines established by previous Zucker-Abrams-Zucker films, and it doesn’t break “all the rules” as David Zucker is suggesting. Not to mention the fact that rule number one is literally “There Are No Rules.” 

And with all due respect to the guy who gave us some of the greatest comedies of all time, if this same mandate also produced movies like An American Carol and the Zucker-produced Superhero Movie, perhaps it shouldn’t be treated as sacrosanct?