Airplane!: 20 Behind the Scenes Stories of a Perfect Comic Takeoff

Al White Put a Lot of Gray Matter Into the Airplane Jive Scene Rewrites

Here’s an example of Al White’s contributions, which illustrates how much he finessed the jive dialogue.

At one point, White’s Second Jive Dude tells Gibbs’ First Jive Dude, aka Arthur: “That gray matter back, lotta performers down, not take TCB-in’, man!”

White explains in Surely You Can’t Be Serious how he came up with the phrase: “I needed a word to jive down the word ‘remember,’ but I didn’t find it in either of the books, so I said, ‘Well, let me see — gray matter. That’s the thinking part of the brain, and ‘back’ for remember back. I can say ‘Gray matter back.’

“And from there I’m just saying that a lot of performers stayed down and weren’t taking care of business on the technical side… man!”

The film translates all this jive as “Each of us faces a clear moral choice.”

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