The Joy of Positivity pick of the day is the Zucker Brothers' Riotously Funny Small-Screen Spoof Police Squad!

Leslie Nielsen was paradoxically funniest before he became a comedy superstar. Rather than filling the screen with famous funny men and comic character actors, the Zucker Brothers employed dramatic actors like Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and Peter Graves for their career-making 1980 blockbuster Airplane!

Nielsen was bone-dry in Airplane! He was hilarious precisely because he played everything straight, never winking at the audience or begging for laughs.

Stealing Airplane! helped land the Creepshow actor the lead role of Frank Drebin in Police Squad, the Zucker Brothers’ short-lived but much-loved parody of sixties detective shows.

Nielsen’s stone-faced, straight-laced performance as a man oblivious to his own stupidity and incompetence suited the tone and sensibility of a show that perfectly captured the feel of its satirical target.

Police Squad! didn’t look like a wacky slapstick version of a Dragnet-style procedural. It looked, instead, exactly like what it was spoofing so ingeniously.

Like Mel Brooks before them, the Zucker Brothers understood that the key to successful parody is nailing the details and knowing everything about what you’re spoofing.

It’s not a coincidence that “Weird Al” Yankovic, who is to music what the Zucker Brothers and Mel Brooks are to film, has cited Top Secret!, the Zucker Brothers first project after Police Squad, as his favorite film.

The Naked Gun largely maintained the perfect deadpan of the television classic that inspired it, but Nielsen got wackier and broader with each sequel. The more Nielsen chased laughs and mugged broadly, the less funny he became.

I am cautiously optimistic about the Naked Gun reboot because it’s co-written and directed by Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, who directed or co-directed three instant classics in Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers.