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Airplane!’s Creators Reveal the Origins of ‘Don’t Call Me Shirley’
It may have saved the entire production.
As part of our weeklong 100 Jokes That Shaped Comedy series, we dug into the origins and execution of that exchange — as well as the overall comedic mechanics of Airplane! David Zucker: Some of the gags, like “Don’t call me Shirley,” it’s almost like when you see a concert and the musicians start playing a song and the audience recognizes it and they applaud. In recent years, the one that sticks most with me is “You can tell me — I’m a doctor.” That’s because, when we wrote that, who knows what we were thinking, but as life has gone on, my family has absolutely been subjected to medical arrogance.
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