“Criticism,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1988, “quails in the face of The Naked Gun.”
This was not a complaint; Ebert adored The Naked Gun, which he considered an absurdist triumph. His point was that David Zucker’s surprise blockbuster—adapted with his brother Jerry and their ZAZ collaborator Jim Abrahams, from their own short-lived and much-loved ABC procedural spoof, Police Squad!, starring Leslie Nielsen as the clueless LAPD investigator Frank Drebin—was a work of such shrewd and lucid stupidity that it was pointless trying to deconstruct it.
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