Fans of the late great norm MacDonald was relentless in his jokes about OJ Simpson in SNL’s Weekend Update slot but The Naked Gun reboot has just the one joke which features prominently in the trailer. So writer-director Akiva Schaffer was asked about The Naked Gun’s OJ Simpson joke and why there’s only one. He explained….
‘We didn’t get pushback or anything. On the edgy jokes, people would go, “Ooh, I don’t know.” And I’d be like, “Don’t worry. The movie is going to be 85 minutes. A fourth of the script is getting cut. Anything that doesn’t work is going to be cut.” So that’s the way I made everyone relax all the time.
When I first told friends, “Hey, I’m actually about to write a Naked Gun,” they’d go, “What are you going to do about O.J?” So, right away, I was like, “Oh, right. That’s the elephant in the room that has to be addressed.” The Hall of Legends scene that was in the teaser then answers everything. Is Frank going to be Frank Sr.? Is he going to be replacing Leslie Nielsen and trying to be Leslie Nielsen? No, he’s going to be Frank Jr., and it’s Liam. He’s going to lean into what he’s known for. How’s it going to look? What’s the music going to be like? It’s all right there, and it was all stuff that was written in the first week as we were asking ourselves those questions.
To be honest, we never wrote another O.J. joke. We just went, “Yep, that takes care of that.” That’s all it ever was. I didn’t know that the joke would kill as hard as it did at our first test screening, and I was like, “Oh, it’s really good. This audience loves it.” If I had known that, then maybe I would’ve written other jokes. I don’t know. But it already felt like it was pushing. You want to be respectful of everything that revolves around him, so it’s not something I really took glee in. We just had to acknowledge it in a way we thought was not dancing on anybody’s misfortunes.
…….and that why there’s only one OJ Simpson joke in The Naked Gun reboot!
related feature : The Naked Gun review
related feature : An improv comedy workshop plus the ‘Deep Cover’ World premiere at London’s first SXSW festival!
source : THR
