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Mark Lee, Matt Wrather, and Pete Fenzel whoop whoop (that’s the sound of the police!) for Liam Neeson’s arrival on streaming as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. of Police Squad in The Naked Gun. The overthinkers welcome this successor to the legacy of spoof, tracing the broader historical journey of latter-day parody from the alpine peaks of inflatable pilots and Reggie Jackson, to the dark forest of Poe’s Law and reality more absurd than fiction.

Is The Naked Gun more than the sum of its naked parts, in either its current of previous incarnations? The three parse the themes of the latest film, as well as its predecessors, and the different contexts and relationships with hyperbolic performance that they represent. They chart styles and exemplars of parody, comedic microstructure and macrostructure, and just how surprisingly funny and excellent Pamela Anderson is.

Plus, if you’ve saw the snowman scene, you knew we’d overthink it, as both revellers in madness and aging adolescents of the late 90s, the two creative energies that perhaps more than any others underpin the latest entry in the storied franchise.

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Further Reading

• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (Wikipedia)


• Cue The Sun by Emily Nussbaum


• Liam Neeson | Improvisational Comedy | Life’s Too Short, from Flix & Clips on YouTube


• A Tale of Two Snowmen, from Pugween on YouTube


• Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker promote the autobiographical “Surely You Can’t Be Serious, The True Story of Airplane!” on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, from NPR, May 2024


• Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole receives a zero out of 10 rating in faith and integrity from Dove.org