On the spur of the moment, Drebin comes to the conclusion that there’s a criminal at the helm of his car, so he starts shooting at it. A startling ball of flame belches from the trunk, sending the boot lid roaring down the street. Then the car trips over a fire hydrant, leaving a geyser of water in its wake.

Bystanders are running all over the place. Some of them are screaming. In the midst of all the chaos, Drebin remains calm, even as the gradual realization dawns in his eyes that he, once again, is the eye of the storm in this latest disaster.

The entire scene is over in less than a minute, but within it you’ll find everything that makes David Zucker’s 1988 comedy The Naked Gun such a classic. It’s that perfect mix of one error leading to another, like falling dominos or a snowball gathering momentum. Like the best moments elsewhere in the film, and in Zucker’s other movies like Airplane! and Top Secret!, it mixes believable physical impact with outrageous absurdity.

We all know that air bags down behave as they do in The Naked Gun, slowly inflating like barrage balloons until they’re bulging suggestively from the rolled-down windows. We know that the backs of cars don’t explode into flames when shot. But none of this matters, because there, in the midst of it all, is Leslie Nielsen.

Beautifully staged though Naked Gun‘s car scene is, it’s Nielsen who’s the lynchpin as Frank Drebin. Nielsen’s performance is so perfect because he plays the role of the clumsy, clueless detective almost entirely straight; the situations in which Drebin finds himself may be absurd, but the character at the center of them is entirely serious.