These Times

Two teenagers meet ‘Blazing Saddles’

Kirk Ericson | Jun 13, 20240

“Ya know, Nietzsche says, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’ ” — Howard Johnson

“Oh, blow it out your alpaca, Howard.” —Olson Johnson

Note: I’m taking three weeks off of paid labor, so this space will be filled with reruns of some favorite columns. The following ran in the March 23, 2023, edition. Fresh, unfocused-group content returns June 27.

This is a newspaper. It should remain free of profanity inside and outside of quotation marks, so we’ll substitute words when talking about the movie “Blazing Saddles.”

This spoof of Western movies that came out in 1974 has a lot of cussin’ and fightin’ words directed at people based on their skin tint, race, foreignness, physical traits, sexual designs ... just about everything that can be poked at on a human gets poked at.

We’ll substitute an animal’s name, in italics, for the deleted cuss word, and the first letter of the expletive will be the first letter of the animal’s name. You can hunt for the substitute obscenities like you’re looking for Waldo.

Oh ... the German philosopher Nietzsche didn’t make that comment about chaos and order. Like everything in “Blazing Saddles,” director Mel Brooks abuses the historical record, and he fractures the limits of time, space, civility and baked beans.

I arranged for my son Ryan, 18, and his friend, Riona, 19, to be introduced to “Blazing Saddles” at house movie night last week. What would these two emerging adults, who were raised in an era that encouraged them to contemplate being white in America, think about a nearly 50-year-old film that tops the list of “things that couldn’t be made today?”

Ryan and Riona, and their friends share an unusual aspect, and we should hope it’s shared by many their age: They let people fully complete a thought during a conversation. When Riona, Ryan and their friends speak to each other, I often hear, “I’m sorry, did I interrupt you?” and “Were you done?”

It’s this level of sensitivity that we’re submitting to the insensitivity of “Blazing Saddles.”

If you’re unaware of “Blazing Saddles,” the first 40 seconds tell you what’s coming. The movie starts with a long shot of men laying railroad tracks, dressed in Western garb against a dusty, empty, sepia landscape. It’s got all the set pieces of a Western movie.

Riona and Ryan were ready to spot stereotypes. Thirty seconds in, Ryan said, “I’ve noticed the first thing. An Asian guy wearing a rice hat.”

That prompted our first slur, a comment from the white foreman after that same Asian fellow collapsed from heat and exhaustion.

“Dock that cuttlefish’s pay for sleeping on the job,” he said.

That was followed by the railroad laborers breaking into a Cole Porter song, “I Get a Kick Out of You,” a tune more than 60 years ahead of the movie’s 1874 setting.

“I think it’s interesting that a lot of these characters make these racist jokes and the main thing is they’re dumb characters,” Riona said. “That’s kind of the humor here: These people are stupid. But I’m wondering whether their views are going to be proven wrong in the story somehow. Will it just be ‘ha ha’ they’re stupid and racist?”

Richard Pryor was one of the screenwriters. Brooks has talked about his own fear of letting white people use the word nutcracker so wantonly, but Pryor reportedly told him that the movie would work as long as it’s the white, racist characters saying nutcracker. And to Riona’s question, the bad characters do lose in the end.

Two of the movie’s most notable scenes received barely a peep from our 2023 teenagers. The character Mongo punching a horse drew little response. And the bean scene around the campfire only produced this exchange:

“Have you ever read James Joyce’s letters to his wife?” Ryan asked Riona.

“No,” Riona replied.

“All I’ll say is generally fart fetishes are pretty bad,” Ryan replied.

Midway through the movie, Riona noted something.

“I’m liking this friendship.” She was speaking of the connection between Cleavon Little (Sheriff Bart) and Gene Wilder (Jim).

That was a friendship between a black lawman and a white outlaw, two people on opposite sides of the color and the law divide. The moment they met — while Sheriff Bart eyed a hung-over Jim tangled upside down from his bunk in the town’s jail cell — they became friends. They fought together, drank together, bucked each other up, laughed together, consoled each other and rode off into the sunset together. The two of them were one atom of sensibility and calm inside a chaotic and cruel universe.

The biggest laugh from Riona and Ryan came when Bart and Jim trick two people in Ku Klux Klan getups into stealing their outfits. Jim holds Bart by the collar after he draws the Klansmen’s attention. Bart then yells at the KKKers, “Where de white women at?”

Make of that what you will.

Some post-movie questions for Riona and Ryan:

Q: Did you find the movie shocking?

Riona: I wasn’t bothered by it, but I definitely don’t hear the n-word said frequently with the hard R, especially by white people.

Ryan: The movie was entertaining, but I don’t think it’s going to stick with me. There were a couple of jokes that I think were funny, even though they were offensive. One was where they were trying to get the KKK guys and the sheriff said, ‘Where de white women at?’

Q: Any scenes you really liked?

Ryan: The scene where the old woman gives him (the sheriff) the pie and says, ‘Sorry about the up yours.’ Then she comes back 10 seconds later and says, ‘Oh, of course you’ll have the good taste to not mention to anyone that I spoke to you.’ He says, ‘Of course.’

Riona: And he’s so unsurprised, too.

Ryan: I just think the casualness of that interaction is what makes that scene funny.

Q: Did you like the movie?

Ryan: I think it just kind of overstays its welcome. But I also think it’s not entirely mine to say if it’s offensive or not because I’m white. The way it’s used is in a comedic way, it’s comedic, but after the first couple times it got kind of …

Q: Gratuitous?

Riona: Yeah, I think so.

Ryan: The other thing I think got gratuitous was the men-being-horny joke. The governor and the guy walking up on the stage and the scene where the lights go out. I liked the scene with the paddle ball, but the way they used the secretary was a little too much.

Riona: I do think it was kind of weird that there weren’t any young women in the film that weren’t sex workers … any woman who was conventionally attractive was a sex worker … I didn’t feel offended by it as a woman because it felt like such an overt joke that I can’t see how a normal person would interpret this as what woman actually are.

Q: Did you think the movie was funny?

Riona: I think it was slightly funny. Not my sense of humor.

Ryan: Let me look up funny movies on the phone ... I think ‘Borat’ was funny.

Q: Do you think they could make this movie today?

Ryan: There’s a joke going around: If you made ‘Blazing Saddles’ today people would just say, ‘Oh, that’s Blazing Saddles.’