Comedy can at times be an art form, but it’s just as frequently a science. Which is to say that there’s some hard numerical data behind your enjoyment of the genre. Appreciation of a farce might be heightened by solid characterization, or a sense of satisfaction expanded on from a satire’s most ironic of well-clipped witticisms. Still, at the end of the day, the audience either laughs or it does not. Dependent purely on the law of averages, these things usually come down to how much they tickle the funny bone.

By this metric, and perhaps this metric alone, Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is a gratifying study in guffaws. With a rough estimate of more jokes landing than not by a ratio of two-to-one, Schaffer, Dan Gregor, and Doug Mand’s relentless, rapid-fire script kept a theater of typi

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