Younger travelers surely know that airplane cabins, like many areas of public life in the late 1970s, were once divided into sections for smokers and non-smokers. (Usually, the smokers had to sit at the back of the plane.) So this gag about a “smoking” ticket was almost a gimme for the writers.
Unpleasant fact about flying back then: Airplanes could sell out of seats in the non-smoking section, leaving passengers who didn’t smoke with no other seating options except for the smoking section. It was a known risk of last-minute ticket purchases.
If you think that’s bad, airlines didn’t even have separate smoking sections before 1971. Passengers could smoke at any seat. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader campaigned for separate sections, which became the rule in 1973, the same year 123 passengers died in a Brazilian airliner fire believed to have been started by a cigarette.
It’s the old story: Despite the situation, the tobacco industry fought every effort to curb smoking on flights using lawyers and lobbying. But by 1988, smoking was finally banned on domestic flights lasting 2 hours or less, and that was expanded to 6 hours by 1990. Bans on international carriers started appearing around the same time, and Delta Air Lines became the first U.S. carrier to ban smoking for flights of all lengths.
By the way, that’s what airline ticket folders looked like back before we could book flights at home. Travelers could only obtain a ticket from the airline or a travel agent. The tickets inside were printed on tissue-thin carbon paper that allowed for duplicate or triplicate sheets in red or black ink—gate agents would usually take one of the copies from you when you boarded. Tickets often came in cute paper folders printed with the airline’s branding. Survivors are popular with collectors today.
Fun trivia: The ticket agent is played by Susan Zucker, the sister of the movie’s co-creators, David and Jerry Zucker. According to the latter in Surely You Can’t Be Serious, “I told our DP [director of photography], Joe Biroc, to put a light on her, and he looks back at me and says, ‘On an extra?’ I said, ‘It’s my sister.’ He says, ‘Gotcha!'”