First person to make a "Shirley" joke gets punched

Leslie Nielsen passed away tonight.

Focus: I think this one's a little obvious. R.I.P. and discuss this comedic legend's life.

 

I was surprised at the outpouring of love and respect from the usually-cynical Internet yesterday about this.

What was weird for me was that I grew up seeing Leslie Nielsen in comedic roles (Naked Gun and the like). However, he was always playing it perfectly straight and serious, which is why it was so funny. So when I saw him in Forbidden Planet years later, playing an actual straight character, the whole thing seemed off. I was like "wait, that wasn't funny, was it?"

I'm hoping for some good posts in this thread. Good luck, everyone, we're all counting on you.

 

What greater compliment can you give a man than to say he made baseball interesting.

 

I'd rank the first Naked Gun movie as one of the top 5 funniest films EVER. I saw it in the theatre as a kid, and waws instantly a fan of Neilsen's deadpan, dead-perfect American answer to Inspector Clouseau: Frank Drebin, the dumbest cop ever, in a movie where the gags come at machine-gun fire pace, and are always funny.

Thug: "I got a message for ya from Vincent Ludwig!!!! (fires gun at Drebin) TAKE THIS, YA LOUSY CHUMP!!!!"

Drebin: "I can't hear you!! Don't fire the gun while you're talking!!!"



and who could EVER forget....


Just for fun...

Spoiler

 

Indeed, he did nothing but straight roles prior to Airplane AFAIK. I still haven't seen his last straight role, in Nuts. I must rectify that...

 

Troof. From 1948 to about 1980, he played almost entirely dramatic parts, and it wasn't until Airplane that people realized putting his deadpans into a comedy would work so well.

 

Check him out in the schlocky 70's horror film Day Of The Animals as Jensen, a hiking tourist that goes nuts, stabs guy with a homemade spear then later gets eaten by a bear.

 

The Naked Gun movies came out of the 1982 TV Series "Police Squad." It was cancelled after 6 episodes, yet Nielsen was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. The other nominees were Alan Alda (M*A*S*H), Robert Guillaume (Benson), Judd Hirsch (Taxi) and Hal Linden (Barney Miller). I can't remember if Hirsch or Linden won.

"You might end up dead is my middle name."

R.I.P.

 

"Like a midget at a urinal, I was going to have to stay on my toes."

RIP you hilarious bastard.

 

I was quite saddened to hear of his passing Sunday night.

Below is a story from our local paper talking about one of Leslie's favorite gags.

Spoiler

Remembering Leslie Nielsen...and what's that strange noise?

By Jay Stone, Postmedia NewsNovember 30, 2010 12:44 PM

Leslie Nielsen died on the weekend, and most of the stories talked about his strange career: the straightforward, stolid roles he had as the handsome not-quite-leading-man in Hollywood — it began in 1950 on television's Studio One, and went on to include more than 100 movies, most of them in such stolid roles as Tammy and the Bachelor or The Poseidon Adventure — and the second part, which started with Airplane! and the Naked Gun series of films, which revealed his surreal capacity for misplaced klutziness and deadpan silliness. Nielsen called it "looking the wrong way at the right time," and he added, "I don't need a pyramid. Those movies will be seen long after I'm dead."

However, Nielsen's signature move — aside from saying "thank you for talking with me" after every conversation — was a couple of fart machines that he used to carry around. One of them he built himself, using plans sent by a friend. The other was a commercial device called The Farter that came with a remote control. Both worked in the same way: push a button and it would make a quiet blurrp that was, for unaccountable and cosmic reasons, funny.

So Nielsen would be talking to someone or (in a brilliant coup de theatre, a sort of one-man performance piece that he could perform in elevators) simply looking distracted, with one hand on the hidden button. He would press it and you were treated to the sight of a fan, someone star-struck by the idea of being in the same room as their comedic hero, trying not to notice. Better still, he would not press it, but just widen his eyes innocently. Simply anticipating the reaction was just as funny: it was like Hitchcock's definition of suspense being a bomb that doesn't go off. "Elevators are my playground," he said. James Allodi, a Canadian actor who worked with Nielsen on the movie Men With Brooms, called him "the Foster Brooks of the lower intestine."

I got to know Nielsen (and Allodi) a little eight years ago. To promote Men With Brooms, the Alliance company sent the cast — headed by star/director/writer Paul Gross — on a cross-country promotional tour by private jet. I accompanied them, and while the younger actors would go out to celebrate every night, Nielsen and I would go to bed early (he was 77 at the time, and I was in my mid-50s) and get up early. We'd meet in a hotel lobby and sit there talking, waiting for the rest of the cast to arrive, usually wearing sunglasses to keep away the early morning light.

Nielsen was the only person I ever met who arrived places earlier than I do. He said that when he was a five-year-old in Edmonton, his father promised to take him on his first-ever bus ride, but when the family got there, they discovered buses didn't run on Sundays. He said that since then, he's lived in fear of missing a bus. Many days, as we sat and talked, fans would come up to him and thank him for his movies. There was always a touching note of affection in their voices, and he was always gracious in thanking them, but if you know the weapons he kept at hand, those meetings were fraught with comic suspense.

Here's part of what I wrote about the tour at the time:

"Nielsen uses his farters the way Isaac Stern used his violins. He's the Faure of flatulence. Allodi told me that everyone knew of Nielsen's fart machines when filming started, but the veteran actor played it cosy for the first few days. Things were silent on that front, so to speak, until the day at a curling rink when everyone had to be quiet for a full minute so director Gross could record the ambient sound of the arena. Forty-five seconds into the silence, the low rumble exploded. So did all the extras. Timing is everything in the flatulence game.

"The sounds will be heard at various times throughout the day — including during live television interviews — as Nielsen looks the other way with exquisite, Frank Drebinish timing . . . When the fart machine is in use, it's like being in a whoopee cushion factory: Nielsen's theory is that, while some people tell him the joke is getting old, you can just work through that and it gets funny again. 'It does have a certain appeal,' Nielsen acknowledges. 'A great Canadian windbreaker.'

"That night, during a screening of the film, one of the publicists was carrying the Farter in her purse when it suddenly went off while Nielsen was on stage, being introduced to the crowd. The publicist was standing next to the theatre manager, who eased away from her. She suspected battery failure, but I knew about the remote control."

The tour was exhausting — when I asked Nielsen if they were all this bad, he said that they can be even worse: "When you work with assholes, it can seem like a year" —but you could see him rallying at each stop. (At one stage, a reporter asked him if he could throw a curling rock, and he replied, "I've actually thrown a whole basketball game.") It was the fart machine, though, that brought out his truest artistry, and watching him use it during an interview with a newspaper reporter, talking right through the noise with only the slightest hiccup in his voice to indicate gastric distress, was to witness a work of unparalleled comic timing.

So when I heard the sad and surprising news that Nielsen had died, my first thoughts had to do with flatulence. It's probably not the most respectful memory — the man was a member of the Order of Canada, after all — but I have a feeling that he wouldn't mind. He loved to get the last laugh.

 

Ugh. I know he wasn't born in Edmonton, but he was raised and took his first acting classes here. I'm calling dibs on calling him one of our city and coutry's greatest actor exports. What ever comedic abilities I have, they were strongly influenced by Mr. Neilsen. I haven't been this sad about a celebrity/someone I never met dying since Carlin. Fucking shitty balls, man. Shitty, shitty balls.

Decent article.

 

Dammit, I was honestly saddened when I heard about this. I loved the straight deadpan delivery, in fact it's how I say most of the shit I say in real life. Hell, I could see Nielsen saying exactly what I just posted:

 

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Just watched Airplane! again. God that movie has some hilarious running gags. The pedophilic captain, Kareem Abdul Jabbar as the co-pilot, that blow-up autopilot... and of course Dr. Rumack stole the show.

His first scene in the movie:


Bonus clip:

 

I will only add that the man had the notoriety and ability to make me watch a shitty movie in its entirety. See: Spy Hard and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
His authoritative, deadpan delivery of the simplest lines made them laugh out loud funny than they would be delivered by most other actors.
"This woman has to be gotten to a hospital."
"A hospital? What is it?"
"It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."