Yes, You Could Make ‘Blazing Saddles’ Today

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Blazing Saddles, director Mel Brooks’s landmark spoof film that did to westerns what Walk Hard and Weird did to the modern music biopic. Over the last decade, we’ve consistently heard the argument from certain hacks that “comedy is under attack”. This often includes the bizarre  bizarre thesis statement, “You could never make Blazing Saddles today.”  That argument has only grown louder with the anniversary, especially in right-wing social media, Reddit and entertainment press circles, as if it’s the first time anyone has ever advanced such a theory.

Putting aside the need to ignore basic laws of quantum physics in order to advance or debate such an argument, the idea completely ignores the true genius and purpose of Blazing Saddles and the standard it set for the spoofs that followed it. You don’t need to even see the movie to understand its true purpose and reason for existing. All you have to do is read the tagline on the poster that sits under artist John Alvin’s iconic design: “or never give a saga an even break.”

People who make the “you couldn’t make it today” argument are just completely ignoring what Blazing Saddles does best is spoofing the long, worn out cliches of the great American western. They also assume that the use of the n-word in a classic western setting is the joke. It ignores the context that makes all of the movie’s jokes work. The only way to spoof western at that time is by adding a little historical accuracy with the language and attitudes of the characters. Everything Blazing Saddles achieves from its slapstick humor to its daring and hilarious use of language stems from how it takes down the western a peg or two by showing the west without a rosy lens.

It seems like an obvious thing to say on its surface. Hell, you could deduce that just from its title, but it feels like we’ve lost that point under a wave of wrong reasoning. The average American western made before the 1970s feel like revisionist history pieces that portray its heroes as do-gooders with almost no flaws and no knowledge of bad language who always ride off into the sunset and the annals of an American history that never existed.

There are exceptions, of course, like the genius Dollars trilogy from Sergio Leone, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the bloody westerns that made Sam Peckinpah’s career. But Mel Brooks wasn’t making fun of the revisionist Western that came into vogue during Hollywood’s auteur revolution. He was mocking the Hollywood Western from his youth. For the most part, classic Westerns feel like they’re putting on the outfit Doc Brown picks for Marty to wear before he jumps back to Hill Valley 1885 in Back to the Future Part III.

Blazing Saddles, first and foremost, is about pulling back the curtain on the absurdity of the grand American Western and showing the West with all of its flaws. He deftly uses of curse words in dialogue and songs and even the dreaded N-word as a way to take the stuffing out of a genre that seems to forget the wild West was also a place of blatant racism and ethnic jingoism, open misogyny and unapologetic violence. You can trace pretty much every joke in Brooks’ classic back to such source material.

One of the movie’s best moments features the wily Sheriff Bart, played to perfection by Cleavon Little, dispatching the meatheaded Mongo, played by Alex Karras, with an exploding candygram Looney Tunes style complete with a round of “Merry Go Round Broke Down.” Bart later remarks about his battle, “Mongo was easy. The bitch was inventing the Candy-Gram. Probably won’t even give me credit for it.”

A big reason Blazing Saddles works so well as a parody is Sheriff Bart’s Deadpool-esque awareness to his character and surroundings. He can easily point out the flaws of the average Western to the audience in a charming and disarming way that completely deflates this storied notion of the West as a place where no one spit in public, used demeaning terms for people of other races, and regularly digested beans and coffee with no offending sounds following them. Even Bart falls for the veneer of the whitewashed Western by thinking “once you establish yourself, they got to accept you,” just before a seemingly sweet old lady snaps him back to his reality and the deep-seeded hatred embedded in his time by decades of ignorance and fear.

Even the actors portraying western heroes seem to pine for a day that never was in the first place. Take John Wayne, the first name that jumps to most people’s minds when they think of western film stars. The Duke starred in some true cinematic classics like Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers and True Grit that weren’t just well-told stories but also innovated the technical making of movies and helped mature the Western away from its serial upbringing. He also starred in a lot of Western duds that fall for this idealist version of the old West.

There’s a great scene in Trumbo, the biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who wrote classics like Roman Holiday and The Brave One under pen names because of the Communist scare propagated by famous people and political lightning rods like Wayne, born Marion Morrison. The two Hollywood legends meet outside of one of Wayne’s anti-Commie rallies and an argument ensues. Trumbo, played by Bryan Cranston, reminds Wayne that for all his blustering about the sanctity of preserving his vision for the American way of life and the part he thinks he personally played in fighting World War II, “let’s be clear where you were stationed–on a film set, shooting blanks, wearing makeup.”

The fourth wall scene that serves as the crescendo of Blazing Saddles’ just furthers its narrative about the phoniness of the American Western up until that time. Today, Westerns seem to have course corrected for this film fallacy with dark edges and stories from new perspectives like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Clint Eastwood’s dark Oscar winner Unforgiven and the Coen Brothers’ re-envisioning of Charles Portis’ True Grit with some actual grit.

So who cares if you could or couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today? Trying to argue such a thing ignores the fact that it’s here, still widely available to watch uncut and just as freakin’ funny and strong of a statement about the absurdity of bigotry as the day it first opened in theaters. So just shut up and watch it and feel lucky that you live in a plane of existence where Mel Brooks made Blazing Saddles for all of us to enjoy.