Accounts of the American New Wave cinema tend to focus on the drama authors. Yet, the American New Wave also produced remarkable comedy authors who shared with the more respected 'serious' authors some of the cultural tenets: a cinephile knowledge of both the Hollywood tradition and the European auteur cinema, a willingness to rejuvenate Hollywood by hybridising the home tradition with the foreign innovations, a penchant for stylistic experimentation, and an interest in metalanguage and self-reflexivity. The most peculiar comedic product – or perhaps by-product, given its later manifestation – of the American New Wave is perhaps the ZAZ trio: David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. Although their first contact with cinema – The Kentucky Fried Movie (dir. John Landis, 1977) – happened late vis-a-vis the American New Wave canonical time-frame, the essence of their comedy is well-grounded in that spirit. Film-fans like most of the Baby Boomers, they interpreted the American New Wave cinephilia through the lenses of their nonsensical and deconstructionist satirical sensibility. More than Mel Brooks and the early Woody Allen, their comedy is systematically focussed on the ridiculing baring of the stylistic and narrative cliches of film genres, to the point that their films can be considered zany versions of Jean-Luc Godard's deconstructions of the Hollywood genres – e.g. À bout de souffle and Une femme est une femme. The chapter will place the ZAZ trio within the context of the American New Wave cinema and will show how their directorial debut, Airplane!, possesses such self-reflexivity that it can indeed be called an American New Wave film. Airplane! is not so much a parody of the air-travel disaster movies such as the 1970s Airport series, as a satirical remake of Zero Hour! (1957), a B-movie whose dialogue lines are even quoted verbatim. As Godard both paid homage and deconstructed the Hollywood genres through obtrusive stylistic choices that revealed the technical apparatus, so ZAZ, in their directorial debut, took a mediocre B-movie and remade it by exaggerating its traits. They turned the 'bad' into 'comic' and drama into comedy precisely by applying that cinephile self-reflexivity so germane to the American New Wave.