12 Stories of the Wildest Joke in Airplane!
"Oh stewardess? I speak jive," may be the most memorable line in The Airplane, a comedy classic packed with jokes. Here's the story of a joke that may not fly today.
In Case You've Somehow Never Seen Airplane
The jive jokes in 1980's Airplane begin when two passengers, played by Norman Alexander Gibbs (credited as "First Jive Dude") and Al White (credited as "Second Jive Dude"), sit down and begin a conversation so filled with slang that the film provides translations to help audiences follow along.
The joke is heightened when Barbara Billingsley, best known for playing "the whitest white lady on the planet" (more on that soon), offers to help flight attendant Randy (Lorna Patterson) understand the men's complaints.
Billingsley, listed in the credits as "Jive Lady," starts off with the immortal line, "Oh, stewardess? I speak jive." But she is soon rebuffed.
Here are 12 stories about how the Airplane jive scenes came to be.
The Airplane Jive Scene Was Inspired by Shaft
Jim Abrahams, who wrote and directed Airplane with brothers Jerry Zucker and David Zucker, explained in an Airplane behind-the-scenes commentary that "the whole notion for jive dialogue originated from when we went on saw Shaft," referring to Gordon Parks' 1971 blaxploitation-action classic, starring Richard Roundtree (above).
"We went and saw it and didn't understand what they were saying," Abrahams said.
They decided to include some jokes in Airplane about slang that would befuddle white people: "So we did our best as three nice Jewish boys from Milwaukee writing jive talk in the script," Abrahams said.
The Original Airplane Jive Talk Script Was Lacking
David Zucker explained that when Gibbs and White auditioned for their roles, "they came in and they had prepared this entire run of jive talking and we were just hysterically laughing the whole time."
Al White explained in Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker's excellent 2023 book Surely You Can't Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane, that when he read the script, "I couldn't make hide nor hair of the actual verbiage... they wanted jive as a language, which it is not."
He and Gibbs agreed to work on it. So White consulted two books on language, one of which was by J.L. Dillard, a linguist known for his expertise on African-American vernacular, and then took the meaning of the writers' script and tried to "jive it down, using actual words." He explained: "It's not a bunch of gibberish. It does mean something."
Al White Put a Lot of Gray Matter Into the Airplane Jive Scene Rewrites
Here's an example of Al White's contributions, which illustrates how much he finessed the jive dialogue.
At one point, White's Second Jive Dude tells Gibbs' First Jive Dude, aka Arthur: "That gray matter back, lotta performers down, not take TCB-in', man!"
White explains in Surely You Can't Be Serious how he came up with the phrase: "I needed a word to jive down the word 'remember,' but I didn't find it in either of the books, so I said, 'Well, let me see — gray matter. That's the thinking part of the brain, and 'back' for remember back. I can say 'Gray matter back.'
"And from there I'm just saying that a lot of performers stayed down and weren't taking care of business on the technical side... man!"
The film translates all this jive as "Each of us faces a clear moral choice."
Al White Was Also a Very Serious Theater Actor
White was, as you've probably gathered, very committed to his craft. He was a member of San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theater company for several years, appearing in more than 17 plays, from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, who was the playwright in residence at the time. He also traveled to the Soviet Union with the group in 1975 as part of the U.S.'s bicentennial cultural exchange program.
His roles after Airplane included performing in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean. (Barbara Billingsley came to see him perform, and sent him a card praising his performance.)
Norman Alexander Gibbs, meanwhile, has TV credits including The Bionic Woman, Colombo, Roots: The Next Generations and Hill Street Blues, and film credits including Runaway Train and Blue Thunder.
The Airplane Behind the Scenes Commentary Has a Jive Callback
In the Airplane behind the scenes commentary in the film's home release, someone made the very meta decision to add subtitles as Al White and Norman Alexander Gibbs explain their roles in the film — so that people who only speak jive can follow along.
Barbara Billingsley Was Cast in the Airplane Jive Scene by Being 'the Whitest White Lady on the Planet'
"Just the thought of June Cleaver in that role made us laugh," David Zucker said in Surely You Can't Be Serious. "She was simply the whitest white lady on the planet."
Billingsley said in an interview for the Archive of American Television, "I was sent the script, and I thought it was the craziest script I'd ever read. My husband said, 'I think it's funny!' Well, my part wasn't written, really. It just said I talked jive. So I went to see the producers and I said I would do it."
Jerry Zucker said meeting her "was like we had been put up for adoption, and now we were finally getting to meet our real mom."
Al White and Norman Alexander Gibbs Taught Barbara Billingsley Jive
"These fellas were wonderful, and they taught me," Billingley said in her Archive of American Television interview. "They could rattle off jive like you have no idea. I could never get a clue as to how it was done. ... Maybe they were good teachers!"
She also said she had done some research into the history of jive, and that no one knew if it was "street talk" or if enslaved Black people had invented it because "they didn't want whitey to know what they were talking about."
Al White explained in the book, "I ended up writing Barbara Billingley's jive dialogue and instructing her in the proper elocution. She was very intent on getting it right."
White's mother was a Leave it to Beaver fan, and White asked Billingsley if she would mind talking with her on the phone. "I called my mother, and I said, 'Mom, I have Barbara Billingsley here, and she'd actually like to speak with you. She was so excited, and Barbara was so gracious," White said in the book.
ZAZ Had Serious Leave it to Beaver Credentials
Leave it to Beaver, the squeaky clean black-and-white family sitcom that aired from 1957-63, was a staple of the Zucker household.
It starred Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver, Tony Dow as his their teenage son Wally, and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver, aka Theodore.
Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker were huge fans of the show that they even cast one of Tony Dow in their first film, 1977'sThe Kentucky Fried Movie. In a courtroom scene, he played his Leave it to Beaver character, Wally, while Jerry Zucker played Theodore.
Airplane Reignited Barbara Billingsley's Career
Barbara Billingsley was typecast as a perfect 1950s TV mom after Leave It to Beaver, and in the 17 years between the show and Airplane, her only TV appearances were two 1971 episodes of The FBI.
"She was a great actress. And a lot of people, you know, when they see her talk jive talk, they always go she can do other things besides be a mom on Leave It to Beaver," Jerry Mathers said in a 2000 CNN special about TV moms. "And I tell them... she's been a great comedian all her life. And in a lot of ways... we kind of stifled her, because her true talent didn't really come out in Leave it Beaver."
Airplane, she told the Archive of American Television, "started my whole career again." She worked steady from 1980 through 2003, when she was nearly 90. She passed on in 2010, at the age of 94.
In Germany, the Airplane Jive Scene Joke Was Different
David Zucker said in Surely You Can't Be Serious that when Airplane was dubbed in German, rather than trying to translate both the jive and the translations into German, "they dubbed them in a Bavarian dialect, which evidently northern Germans have trouble understanding."
But the humor translated.
"Oddly, that joke got a huge laugh in Germany," Zucker said.
The Airplane Jive Jokes Aren't Just About Jive
What elevates the Airplane jive scenes beyond making fun of slang is how the two Jive Dudes reject the jive Lady's attempt to play cultural mediator, and to perpetuate the white American tradition of co-opting Black culture.
Jim Abrahams remembers going to see Airplane anonymously, in a Black neighborhood.
"I was a little nervous when the Black dudes came up," he said in Surely You Can't Be Serious. "Would it be offensive? But the audience genuinely loved it.
"Then I remember thinking, Maybe this isn't merely a joke about jive talking and the stupid white guy subtitles. ... Perhaps inadvertently we wrote a joke acknowledging the tone deafness of White America to the whole four hundred years of the African-American experience."
Roger Murdoch Approves
NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who plays co-pilot Roger Murdoch in the film, has a long history of activism and cultural criticism, and calling out religious and race-based discrimination. He has said he vowed, even as a child, to be "Black Power in the flesh."
He also has a sense of humor. Abdul-Jabbar said in Surely You Can't Be Serious that he loved the Airplane jive scene "because they poked fun at a very real subject without diminishing it."
By the way: Here is the main Airplane jive scene.
So, Would The Airplane Jive Jokes Fly Today?
David Zucker, who wrote and directed Airplane with his brother Jerry Zucker and friend Jim Abrahams (they're collectively known as ZAZ), said in a 2021 essay for Commentary that "there was talk" at Paramount, which released Airplane, of withholding the 1980's film 40th anniversary rerelease "over feared backlash for scenes that today would be deemed 'insensitive.'"
He added: "I’m referring to scenes like the one in which two Black characters speak entirely in a jive dialect so unintelligible that it has to be subtitled. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said to me, You couldn’t do that scene today.'"
Zucker continued: "But I always wonder, why not? Half the gags in that joke were aimed at white people... The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view. No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do."
Thanks for Reading 'I Speak Jive': 12 Stories of the Wildest Joke in Airplane
You'll probably also like our list of Movies That Don't Care If You're Offended, Including, of course, Airplane, and Kentucky Fried Movie (above), which the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team made prior to Airplane.
Main image: Airplane. Paramount.