 Starring: Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman
Director: Mel Brooks
Year Of Release: 1974
Plot: After hitting his boss on the head with a shovel for nearly killing him, Bart is sentenced to death, but gets a reprieve when corrupt politician Hedley Lamarr, makes him their new sheriff of a small town trying to take over. Convinced that the locals will kill Bart because he’s black, and that he’ll then be free to drive the townsfolk from their homes, he doesn’t reckon on quite how wily Bart is, especially with the help of the alcoholic Waco Kid. |
Anyone who’s never seen Blazing Saddles could be forgiven for thinking it’s purely about farting cowboys. The scene with men eating beans and dealing with the results is immensely famous (although doesn’t really tickle my funny bone), largely because it so surprised people when they first saw it. No one had farted in a mainstream Hollywood film before, and so the scene became a classic.
However it’s not just in flatulence that the film was a groundbreaker, as it was also one of the earliest comedies based around tackling racial prejudice. It doesn’t pull many punches either, with a liberal use of the ‘n’ word, and generally making fun of every racial stereotype under the sun. Mel Brooks had already shown he wasn’t afraid to make comedy out of difficult subjects, with his use of Nazis in The Producers, but he took it to far more sophisticated ends in Blazing Saddles.
While the film makes use of every racial stereotype imaginable, it does so in a smart way, with Bart facing constant abuse, but the film ensuring that every time someone does something racist, the comedy doesn’t come at the expense of Bart, but from how stupid it makes the person doing it look. This is more unusual than it might sound, as some comedy about social issues gets its laugh by mining prejudice, before tacking on ‘but isn’t prejudice bad?’ at the end . For example Adam Sandler’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, basically makes cheap gay jokes for two hours, before suggesting this is okay because the main characters realise gay people aren’t evil at the end. The comedy in Chuck & Larry only works by laughing at gay people, not because it skewers homophobia, despite its apparent attempt to say otherwise.
Blazing Saddles is also pretty interesting for the way Bart uses the white character’s racism against them. For example, with a wry smile he’ll stoke the stereotype of black men being obsessed with white women, not because it’s true, but because he knows he can use the fact it’ll get the racist white people riled up, and he can then get his plan to work. In this way the film ensures Bart isn’t merely the victim of racism, but the genuine hero of the piece, who’s able to alter his situation to his own (and other’s) benefit. This by itself was a very unusual thing for a black character in a Hollywood film in 1974.
It was all pretty ballsy for a mid-70s movie, especially as black people rarely got lead roles in Hollywood films, and only serious movies (normally starring Sidney Poitier) dealt head on with issues of race, and even then they normally did so quite politely. Blazing Saddles not only broke ground for being a comedy about race, but also for going for racism’s jugular by utterly ridiculing it.
However in many respects Blazing Saddles is still a bit of a one-off. The reason is quite simple – it’s such a tricky topic to deal with, as most filmmakers would be terrified of the potential backlash. If you get the tone wrong you could easily be faced with anger and protest, as generally racism isn’t seen as a laughing matter. You also need to make sure the film is incredibly funny and genuinely hits its subject hard, or otherwise you might end up with a film that either feels preachy, or promotes the prejudice it’s meant to be against (as with Chuck & Larry).
In many ways it’s a shame, as comedy is a far more powerful tool of social change than many people give it credit for. With serious debate (and serious, socially-minded films) you can certainly sway opinion and get people to see things in different ways, but you still have to treat the other side of the argument seriously. For example, with the intelligent design vs. evolution debate, many scientists refuse to take part in debates with creationists, simply because they feel that by engaging with it, they give it a veneer of credibility it doesn’t deserve. That may be a little snobbish on their part, but it does show that if you’re trying to sway public opinion, serious debate does have its limits, as you’re always in danger of attracting people to the other side, by making it seem like a serious position to take on an issue.
Comedy works differently as it can undermine the opposing view by ridiculing it and making people who hold that opinion seem stupid. The power of this isn’t necessarily that a racist watching Blazing Saddles will suddenly have a road to Damascus moment and realise the way they feel is wrong, but that it says to people who don’t hold racist views that not only are they right to feel that way, but that there’s no need to feel like they have to any respect for people who are racist. Blazing Saddles basically says, why would you think these people are anything but idiots?
It therefore not only confirms non-racist views, but also promotes an environment where it’s harder for racists to be taken seriously. What Blazing Saddles basically attempts to do is to pull the rug out from under racism by turning the foundation on which these views stand into an object of ridicule. It then becomes much more difficult for racism to keep an open foothold if society’s general attitude isn’t just that it’s wrong, but that to hold racist attitudes is utterly ridiculous. How can you defend a viewpoint when the very basis of what you’re arguing makes you seem immediately like a laughing stock?
However, while comedy can be a powerful force (just look at how many people believe it was Tina Fey’s biting impersonations of Sarah Palin on SNL, that turned the Alaskan governor from the potential secret weapon that would hand John McCain the White House, to a liability that pushed support back to Barack Obama), Hollywood is generally terrified of really trying to deal with social issue in comedy. Many people find something like racism a difficult thing to laugh about, whatever the circumstances, and so generally filmmakers (and studios) shy away from dealing with issues as boldly as Blazing Saddles did, because they’re terrified of the backlash.
It’s a shame, because if done properly comedy can be a powerful force for social change and debate, and take the issues to a broader audience than might normally engage with them. Blazing Saddles is probably still the mainstream Hollywood movie that has most successfully pilloried the whole idea of racism, and it’s a real shame that because of the difficulty of dealing with social issues, 35 years on there are still few genuinely successful mainstream films that have even been willing to even try and have half the bite of Mel Brook’s movie. It happens occasionally, but not half as much as it ought to.
TIM ISAAC
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