His satires keep rolling

David ZUCKER is a comedy scientist. As a part of the legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, he was involved in creating such maniacal, riotously paced spoofs as “The Kentucky Fried Movie” and “Airplane!” and film comedy has never been quite the same.

In subsequent years, Zucker has worked on such projects as the “Naked Gun” series and has also inadvertently become something of a comedy mentor, giving early work to Peter Farrelly as well as Matt Parker and Trey Stone of “South Park” fame. Now, as director of “Scary Movie 3,” he’s taken over the reins of the spoof series created by Marlon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans.

Zucker, who retains a slight Great Lakes twang from his childhood in Michigan, took a break from finalizing his latest picture to discuss the methods behind his madness.

Your “Scary Movie” is considerably less raunchy than the previous installments. Do you think comedy can go too far?

It can’t go too far, because if it goes too far the movie won’t do well. The Farrellys, you’d think they had gone too far with “Something About Mary,” but a mainstream audience got the joke and wasn’t offended. If you go over the line you get just complete silence. Everybody has done it. The Wayans[es] have gone over the line, the Farrellys, and I have also. You find out during the preview process that you’ve gone over the line, and it doesn’t appear in the finished movie.

You’ve been very open about how much you value the test screenings, even though typically it’s portrayed as a negative and intrusive process from the filmmaker’s perspective.

You need three previews. First, the suicide preview, because you never know how an audience is going to react. Then you test out the movie close to its finished form, and the final preview is fine-tuning. You don’t know anything until that first preview, and 20 minutes of the movie isn’t going to work. Just try sitting in a chair for 20 minutes looking at a wall and that’s what’s somewhere in your movie. After the first preview of “Airplane,” there was no question the movie was going to be a flop. It was just horrible, moderate laughs in the first half and in the second half almost no laughs. The jokes were simply too far apart. We didn’t have a lot of experience, so we thought we’d just boned it. But the next day I sat in my backyard and listened to the tape of the audience and every joke got a laugh, there was just too much time in between. So we cut 20 minutes out of the movie and the next preview was just great.

Considering that the spoof movies you specialize in appeal to a younger audience, has it become more difficult over the years to stay tuned in to what each successive batch of kids will find funny?

You have to remain open-minded, and you can’t be insulated. I can enjoy “8 Mile” as a movie, but at the same time it has certain cliches that can be poked fun at, and I can do that as well as a 25-year-old. If you understand the foundations of satire, really just to set up a familiar situation and reverse people’s expectations of the outcome, you can do it. But you have to guard against “outsider jokes.”

Such as?

Everybody in “8 Mile” said, “Yo, dog” or “Hey, dog,” and it was suggested early on that we have a dog bark when anyone says that. And we knew immediately that was not to be done. That’s an outsider joke, what an old person would immediately interpret as funny about that. Calling someone dog is a legitimate slang term, and to our audience it just wouldn’t be funny. And I understand that. If I was 25 it would never occur to me to think of a joke like that. And that’s what you have to guard against, the isolation of your own perspective. I’m hoping when you’re watching “Scary Movie 3” you won’t be able to tell an old guy directed it.

-- Mark Olsen