The B-Team

Before, there was sketch comedy. There was Mel Brooks and "Blazing Saddles," a spoof of westerns, but it starred comedians.

"Airplane!" was a spoof of the disaster movies popular in the 1970s, especially the "Airport" films based on Arthur Hailey's best-selling potboiler, but it didn't feature comedians; it had straight actors like Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves.

The "Naked Gun" series served up a parody of cop shows, with washed-up B-movie cop actors. The "Scary Movie" franchise does horror flicks like "Saw," "The Ring" and "The Grudge."

Where did this idea of the spoof come from?

"We'd watch the old, late-night movies, and we'd talk back to the screen," Zucker says. "The breakthrough we had was saying, okay, we're going to re-create those old movies. But have actors speak lines we would have dubbed."

Weiss: "Also one thing we all shared in our background growing up was Mad magazine. The feature called 'Scenes We'd Like to See.' Six panels. First five were straight setup, a western, a gangster movie, and in the last panel there was what we call the switch and spin. Where they'd reverse your expectations, do something wildly different. This had always made us laugh growing up. And was the philosophical underpinning of this kind of humor."

Zucker: "Which we continue to this day. In 'Scary Movie 4,' the first thing you see in each scene is us putting the audience in that world. We start out very seriously. There's Tom Cruise's house in 'War of the Worlds.' Or there's Sarah Michelle Gellar's house in 'The Grudge.' Or the bathroom from 'Saw.' Always starts as a serious setup."

Then the joke. They hope.

"These things work because our audience has watched literally thousands of hours of television and film," Weiss says. "And so what we want to do is stimulate the archetypes and images they already have in their brain, and then the audience starts to work for us. When these jokes work best is when the audience is most surprised where we take them."

Zucker: "If you have people winking and not playing it earnest and it doesn't feel like a real movie, then you have layers between you and the jokes we want to make. You're sitting there expecting what is the next funny thing. Chevy Chase comes on-screen and you're waiting for him to do some shtick. We don't do that. When Leslie comes on, everything he says is a surprise because he says it with the utmost sincerity. We hire these guys because they're straight actors."

For "Airplane!" the filmmakers originally approached Jack Webb, of "Dragnet."

"He didn't have a big sense of humor," Weiss says.