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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GREAT movie. I still laugh every time I watch it.
Good mornin’ ma’am, and isn’t it a loooovely mornin’?
And even more topical now, as it seems like the “common clay” has been spreading.
Mel Brooks wrote, directed and starred in the #1 AND the #4 pictures at the box office that year… Saddles was #1 and Young Frankenstein was #4…
