The Naked Gun Origins in Shorewood, Wisconsin

As fans prepare for a 2025 reboot of The Naked Gun, we remember how Shorewood’s own comedy heroes put the Wisconsin village on the comedy map.

Film directors Jerry and David Zucker and their childhood buddy Jim Abrahams – collectively known as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker or ZAZ – all grew up in Shorewood. (The comedy is also one of several high-profile alumni of Shorewood High School.)

They wrote and directed a string of hit comedy films (Airplane!, Kentucky Fried Movie, Top Secret! and the Naked Gun series) that pioneered today’s parody genre.

As Shorewood alum Jerry Zucker once quipped, Milwaukee was “a place where things came to – not where things came from,” but he and the others proved that Shorewood could create big laughs. This local trio’s success has become a point of hometown pride – Shorewood even honored them in 2016.

From Shorewood High to Sketch Comedy

David Zucker fondly recalls that his humor began in Shorewood High School. While fooling around in class one day, a teacher warned, “‘Zucker, I know one day I’ll be paying good money to see you make me laugh.’” She was right. Shorewood’s hallways and classrooms were the trio’s first stage: David, Jerry and Jim wrote skits for school assemblies and performed them on campus.

“This is like home because we would write skits for assemblies, right here,” David later told students during a visit back to Shorewood High. That early experience — generating laughs for classmates — gave all three confidence in their comedic instincts. David, who describes himself as a “class clown,” said Shorewood in the 1960s was full of witty kids and joking teachers. Looking back, he noted that being verbally sharp at Shorewood High was a way of life in those days.

All three alumni remember Shorewood as “a creative period in their lives.” In interviews they joked about their Midwest roots – Guardian writer John Patterson described the ZAZ trio as “three wiseass Jewish kids from the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin”– but also noted that their normal midwestern upbringing kept them humble and hungry.

“We weren’t even Chicago!” David laughed, recalling how Milwaukee (and Shorewood) felt like “a bend in the road: nothing originated there.” None of them were top students, but they were quick-witted: “None of us were great students,” Jerry told Patterson, “so we distinguished ourselves by being class clowns”. Their North Shore childhood planted the seeds of humor that would grow into films seen by millions.

Kentucky Fried Theater and Breakthrough

After high school, all three friends attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where they turned college life into comic material. There they founded Kentucky Fried Theater (a student sketch troupe) in the early 1970s. The group performed rambunctious live shows at UW-Madison, honing the rapid-fire gag style that would define ZAZ films. In fact, their stage revue was so popular in Madison (and later Los Angeles) that Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live famously recruited them for NBC’s early variety TV experiments.

In 1977 the trio turned sketches into a movie called The Kentucky Fried Movie, directed by their friend John Landis. It was an anthology of spoof commercials and parodies – a raw, irreverent debut built from Shorewood-originated ideas. This underground hit paved the way for bigger projects. By 1979 the ZAZ team had sold a parody script called Airplane! to Paramount.

The rest is comedy history: Airplane! (1980) was a smash, earning over $80 million and turning actor Leslie Nielsen into a comic star. (Jerry and David Zucker, with Jim Abrahams, even shared screenwriting honors – they were BAFTA and Golden Globe nominees for Best Screenplay.) As Jerry and David would say, their time at UW-Madison and earlier in Shorewood “followed their passion” – they moved to Los Angeles in 1972 with nothing to lose.

Hollywood Hits from Shorewood

With Airplane! breaking through, the Shorewood trio took their madcap style to a string of hit movies. They co-directed and wrote Airplane! (1980), which critics called a “revered comedic milestone.” This film’s success led to sequels and TV spinoffs (the Police Squad! series) and cemented ZAZ’s reputation. Their next big parody was Top Secret! (1984), a send-up of spy films, followed by Ruthless People (1986), a more traditional farce. In 1988 they launched The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! with Leslie Nielsen, the first of a trilogy of spoof-cop comedies that became cult favorites (and made Nielsen’s career for decades).

These films put Shorewood’s creative team in the pop culture spotlight. (In fact, Shorewood-area media later dubbed the three friends a “trinity of comedy” and celebrated them at alumni events.) The trio’s relentless parody style – fast jokes, visual gags and breaking the fourth wall – influenced a generation of comedians and writers. As one observer noted, Airplane! alone “launched an entire comedy franchise” and even “inspired Saturday Night Live,” while helping to launch directors like John Landis and the Farrelly brothers. In short, Shorewood’s own David, Jerry and Jim helped invent a new kind of Hollywood humor in the 1980s.

Key ZAZ Film Credits: In bullet form, their most famous collaborations included:

• Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) – sketch anthology film built from their college routines

• Airplane! (1980) – the parody of disaster films that became a blockbuster comedy

• Top Secret! (1984) – a Cold-War spy spoof filled with visual jokes

• The Naked Gun trilogy (1988–94) – Leslie Nielsen’s police spoof series, beginning with From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
  Each of these works bore the trio’s signature irreverent stamp, and all trace their roots back to those early Shorewood skits

Legacy and North Shore Pride

Today the Zucker-Abrahams legacy is a point of pride on the North Shore. Shorewood’s alumni newsletter and local media often remind readers that “Shorewood’s own” creative team helped shape modern comedy. In school talks, Jerry Zucker has praised Shorewood for sparking his creativity, saying it felt good to return to the high school “where his love for film and theater started.” The trio’s biography highlights – Mel Brooks called Airplane! “the funniest movie ever” – all connect back to Shorewood roots. Even outside the village, fans recognize that Airplane! and The Naked Gun were the work of a Milwaukee-area team.

Now the Naked Gun franchise is coming full circle. Paramount’s upcoming reboot, set for August 2025, casts Liam Neeson as Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. For Shorewood readers, this revival is a fun reminder of homegrown talent: it’s the first big-screen outing for the series in decades, reviving characters created by Shorewood’s comedy pioneers. It shows that the “cultural icon” Jerry, David and Jim helped build in the 1980s still has legs today.

Looking back, what’s clear is that these Shorewood native filmmakers blazed a trail from local school assemblies to international fame. They took the absurdities of everyday life (even at high school in Milwaukee) and turned them into timeless laughter. As we await the new Naked Gun movie, North Shore residents can smile knowing that Shorewood High once incubated the biggest spoof comedy team in Hollywood.