Blazing Saddles at 50: the button-pushing spoof that could never get made today
Source: The Guardian
Blazing Saddles at 50: the button-pushing spoof that could never get made today
The 1974 spin on westerns sees Mel Brooks pointing at the absurdity of racism and the history of human evil while always ensuring a steady stream of laughter
Scott Tobias
Wed 7 Feb 2024 09.11 GMT
Last modified on Wed 7 Feb 2024 12.16 GMT
Though it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller and the wave of revisionist westerns that came out of Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles doesn’t need any artfully hazy Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography to upend Old West mythology. True, it is a comedy where a horse gets cold-cocked, a Native American chief (one of three characters played by Brooks) speaks Yiddish and Count Basie’s orchestra makes an appearance on the plains. Yet from the opening sequence, where Chinese immigrants and recently freed Black slaves work under the white man’s whip to build a railroad, this irreverent Looney Tunes spoof of the genre takes a dimmer view of frontier life than the classics it parodies
One of the more popular things to say about Blazing Saddles is that it could never be made today, due to its frequent deployment of the N-word. But it should be noted that it barely got made in 1974 for the same reason. As the grinning white foreman who requests the Black workers sing on the line (“When you was slaves, you sang like birds”), Burton Gilliam was so ashamed to use the word that he apologized to the star, Cleavon Little, who reminded him of its villainous context in the script. Throughout the film, the N-word is a hard slap that’s intended to sting – then as much as now, 50 years later – and it’s Little, the sly Bugs Bunny of Brooks’s cartoon west, who makes buffoons of everyone who utters it.
Expecting a grim spiritual like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot or the minstrel song Camptown Races, Little’s Bart instead leads his men in a hilariously anachronistic rendition of Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You, a tune so modern in 1934 that the line “some get a kick from cocaine” had to be altered for the movies. Yet here Bart is in 1874, clowning on a pack of yokels so racist that when he and another Black laborer run a pushcart into quicksand, they rescue the cart first. For Brooks, the ability to toggle freely across timelines gives him that many more opportunities to make jokes – “I must have killed more men than Cecil B DeMille” is a favorite – but it also suggests that not much has changed in a century.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/07/blazing-saddles-at-50-western-spoof-mel-brooks
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Funny as hell, irreverent, and Lilly had great legs! 
"Ohhhhh, it's twooo, it's TWOOO!"
I figured it was a western/comedy. Well it was all of that and more!! I have seen it so many times I just about know the entire script. I was uneasy about the N word, but watching how it played out was an a-ha moment for sure.
This movie also made me always seek out any Mel Brooks stuff, just too damn good 
Saw it opening weekend at the Lowe’s theater in Times Square , NYC.
We were a bunch of white kids from NJ. It was a packed house with lines down the street.
Inside the theater… two thirds of the audience was AA.
When the N word made its appearance.. it was as if all of the air was sucked out of the building and then something magical happened… EVERYONE started laughing.
Everyone understood the point of the satire and from them on in, one could barely hear the lines for all of the hysterical laughing. Sitting next to me was a fiftyish AA gentleman and when the lights came up and everyone stood to leave, he turned to me and said, “What did you think?” I was eighteen and I said “ I loved it and Clevon Little is a fox.l”
He laughed and gave me a hug.
When life was fun and we were moving closer to understanding.
