Jerry G Zucker

Airplane! is often cited as the funniest movie of all time, and surely, Jerry Zucker ’72 can be held responsible. Zucker — writer, director, and producer of more than a dozen Hollywood films — found big laughs on campus in the 1960s as part of an outrageous comedy troupe, Kentucky Fried Theater. The Milwaukee-area native joined his brother, David ’70, and friends Jim Abrahams x’66 and Dick Chudnow ’67 to perform groundbreaking comedy shows around Madison, including their debut in the old Union South. After morphing their live show into the irreverent Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), the Zucker/Abrahams directorial dream team went on to create comedy classics, including Top Secret! (1984), Ruthless People (1986), and The Naked Gun (1988) and its sequels. Zucker does have a more serious side: he directed the Oscar-nominated Ghost (1990), and he’s produced films like A Walk in the Clouds (1995) and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). Zucker and his wife, Janet, a fellow Hollywood producer, are vice chairs of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences. Zucker says that his role in connecting scientists and entertainers is inspired in part by the research that helped his daughter when she was diagnosed with diabetes.