This is the best summary I could come up with:

Fifty years ago, Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles to gales of laughter and a mighty roar of flatulence jokes.

But in 1974, he was significantly less well-known, having made a couple of mildly successful comedies (The Twelve Chairs and The Producers) and worked in Sid Caesar’s joke-writer stable for TV.

But his co-screenwriter Richard Pryor insisted he use it — and use it often — consciously putting it the mouths of evil or unthinking characters, so that star Cleavon Little could comically mock or demolish them.

Until, that is, it turns into a spoof of The Blue Angel, as Madeline Kahn’s seductress-for-hire Lili Von Shtupp croons a gloriously off-pitch “I’m Tired” and sets about seducing Sheriff Bart.

Even Busby Berkeley musicals come in for a brief ribbing when a brawl literally breaks the fourth wall and the cast crashes into a dance number on a nearby soundstage.

So on Feb. 7, 1974, the studio opened the film as a test in three cities — NYC, LA, Chicago — considered the most likely to get Brooks’ Borscht Belt sense of humor.

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