Akiva Schaffer makes spoofs the old way: the joke is on screen, nobody in the frame sees it, and the next one arrives before you have judged the last. When the rate holds, as it mostly does in The Naked Gun, it works.
Fi1m perspective
A sign in a police squad room reads "Cold Cases". Nobody looks at it, nobody mentions it, and the scene carries on underneath. That is the whole of Akiva Schaffer's method in The Naked Gun (2025), and it is the rule Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker set down for the original trilogy: nobody on screen may know they are in a comedy. Schaffer, who directs and writes with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, keeps to it, and Liam Neeson keeps to it for him. We laughed out loud at that sign, in a room full of strangers, and again at a love montage that runs on long after a sensible editor would have cut. Brian Scott Olds is the editor, and the not stopping is a choice he and Schaffer made together.
He came to the form the long way round. Schaffer started out making comedy videos with Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, as The Lonely Island, on Channel 101, after a film degree at Santa Cruz in 2000. Saturday Night Live took them on in 2005, and Schaffer directed and co-wrote many of the Digital Shorts: hip-hop parodies, absurd set-ups, famous faces wandering through. The features followed, none of them far from that template. Hot Rod (2007) put his Lonely Island friends in front of the camera. The Watch came in 2012, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a mockumentary he co-directed, in 2016, and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) mixed animation with live action. He has also directed episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in 2014 and 2018, and co-directed I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.
What he is good at is speed and escalation. A Schaffer set piece starts small, adds a step, adds another, and does not check whether you are still with it. He can get a deadpan performance from actors who are not comedians, which is what a spoof needs most, since a comedian playing a straight man tends to wink. He has said the Zucker films seem to play by certain rules and then break them at once. That is a fair account of what he does himself.
What he is less good at is keeping it up. The gags in The Naked Gun thin out in the last stretch, and critics found The Watch uneven, the jokes landing in patches. That is the risk built into the form. A spoof has no story to hide behind; when a joke misses there is only the next joke, and if that misses too the film is standing in a room with nothing to do.
He has been making the same kind of comedy for twenty years and has got better at it without changing his mind about what it is. That is either stubbornness or knowing your trade, and on the evidence of The Naked Gun we lean towards the second. Watch it, and watch the background.
Biography
Akiva Schaffer is an American director, writer and comedian. He is a member of the comedy group The Lonely Island alongside Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone. He began his career writing for Saturday Night Live and directing the troupe's digital shorts.
Schaffer directed the feature films Hot Rod (2007), The Watch (2012), Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022). He also directed episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. He directed and co-wrote The Naked Gun (2025).
Born on 1 December 1977 in Berkeley, California, Schaffer graduated with a degree in film from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is married to writer Liz Cackowski.
