The Original Airplane Jive Talk Script Was Lacking
David Zucker explained that when Norman Alexander Gibbs and Al White auditioned for their roles, “they came in and they had prepared this entire run of jive talking and we were just hysterically laughing the whole time.”
Al White explained in Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker’s excellent 2023 book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane, that when he read the script, “I couldn’t make hide nor hair of the actual verbiage… they wanted jive as a language, which it is not.”
He and Gibbs agreed to work on it. So White consulted two books on language, one of which was by J.L. Dillard, a linguist known for his expertise on African-American vernacular, and then took the meaning of the writers’ script and tried to “jive it down, using actual words.” He explained: “It’s not a bunch of gibberish. It does mean something.”
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