Airplane! writer and director David Zucker says film could never be made today

The director of the legendary 'Airplane!' movies is speaking out against what he calls the 'joyless Twitter 9 percent' ruining comedy in an op-ed. 

David Zucker, who wrote and directed comedy classics like 'Airplane!' and the 'Naked Gun' series, bemoans today's market where many of his indelible one liners couldn't fly. 

That includes a re-release of his beloved first feature.  

'Although people tell me that they love 'Airplane!' and it seems to be included on just about every Top Five movie-comedy list, there was talk at Paramount of withholding the rerelease over feared backlash for scenes that today would be deemed 'insensitive,'' Zucker wrote in the New York Post. 

Zucker points out specific scenes that he doesn't think would fly today. 

He remembers one in which two black characters speak entirely in a 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.''

'The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view,' he added. 'No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do.'

He also cites some of the movie's jokes involving children, including one in which an 8-year-old girl says 'I like my coffee black, like my men,' or when an airline pilot asks a boy if he's ever been a Turkish prison. He says studios wouldn't return his calls with those jokes today.   

He credits producer Michael Eisner with having faith in him to deliver the movie in his vision. 

'Eisner somehow knew that comedy requires a certain amount of recklessness and that comedy writers and directors need to experiment until they hit that perfect note where a joke can illuminate uncomfortable subjects by giving us permission to laugh at them.'