I'm watching "Blazing Saddles" and it's just terrible.

"Up yours, N*gger!"

I saw this when I was about 7, most of it went over my head, but I remember it being really funny.

Clevon Little was beautiful

[quote] Other Mel Brooks films are usually entertaining

Oh wise OP, please give us an example of which you speak. Please be concise and just a little bit less a cunt.

Mel Brooks didn't make it for YOU, chump.

Get your friggin feet off the stage!

You had to be a teenager in a packed movie theater in 1974. Good times.

Its a film for morons!

[quote] Oh wise OP, please give us an example of which you speak.

No!

[quote] Please be concise and just a little bit less a cunt.

No!

Olson Johnson is right!

Harvey Korman was fantastic in his role as Hedley Lamar. He deserved a supporting actor Oscar nomination, at least.

Let’s play chess.

Can't Stan enough for Madeline Kahn. She underserves "I'm So Tired" with a flat face to match her voice and the point of the song. She channels a bit of Gilda with her delivery, but makes it her own. Thanks for the share, R5

Trans ideology in a nutshell

OP is right, it's not nearly as good as Young Frankenstein.

Madeline was expert at parody.

Except OP never said that your fucking troll-ally at R14

Loved, loved LOVED Blazing Saddles. Korman stole the show, but who can forget Dom DeLuise at the end?

Do people still think it's funny? Humor changes.

OP, what age/generation are you? Before we know how to respond to your comment ;-)

Harumph! Harumph!

I was born in 1974. I don't know why I never saw this movie before, because Mel Brooks' movies were on HBO all throughout the 80s and I watched all of them as a kid. I think maybe I was not allowed to watch this one. I don't know if I'd still find Mel Brooks' movies funny today, but this one is awful. I do agree that Cleavon Little was very handsome.

Ah, blow it out your ass, Howard!

r21 it's a hilarious movie. If you don't appreciate that type of humor, you wouldn't get it. I expect if you watched other Mel Brooks films today you'd have a similar reaction to them (except possibly his later stuff like Spaceballs).

"Can't Stan enough for Madeline Kahn. She underserves "I'm So Tired" with a flat face to match her voice and the point of the song. She channels a bit of Gilda with her delivery, but makes it her own."

Do you understand that Kahn's performance is a parody and burlesque of another world-class and singular performer....that is, not Gilda?

I detest Madeleine Kahn and she ruins everything she is in, I have no idea what people ever saw in this pathetic actress.

r25 did she molest you when you were a child? She's amazing.

R25 is on The Junk

You sissy Mary's!

The young, dumb, and full of cum have their place but they just don't get old movie references. Never heard of Marlene Dietrich.

and R24 hasn't grasped how to

[quote] quote

Yes, I got that. But there were glimmers in her performance that reminded me of Gilda. Sorry it distracted me from what a wonderful performance your whore, burlesque Mom gave the previous night in Rock Ridge.

OP - there are a few things at play here. His first 2 big movies Blazing Saddles & Young Frankenstein came out when I was around 11, and I remember my parents and their friends talking about them.

The first issue is that the movie wasn’t made for you OP, it was made for people like Brook’s & my parents who were in their mid 40’s in the mid 70’s. This was a generation who had spent their whole lives immersed in the Hollywood output of the prior 50 years, in the theater and on TV. The genre conventions of the Western were set during the Silent Era in the 20s and the Horror genre was codified in the early 30s.

Both of these genres were quite stale by the late 60s - and Brooks gleeful mocked them with the comedic and cultural sensibilities of the mid 70s. This w as when black / women’s / gay liberation was at the forefront of the cultural discussion (although many disagreed with them) but in general society was questioning the prevailing attitudes about sex, race and America itself that had seemed sacrosanct a decade or so before.

His films are now a half century old themselves - the norms & tropes they transgressed at the time are now pretty much dead and buried. But back in 74 -76 to see a Hollywood movie mocking the things you’d found silly about Hollywood movies for quite awhile was still a thing. You don’t have the same cultural frames of reference.

Another issue that was debated at the time was which was a funnier movie - BS or YF? My dad pretty much hit the nail on the head when he said - whichever one you saw first. Though the genres were different, Brooks used the same comedic toolkit to cut them down to size — they are basically the same movie as far as the humor goes - so the first time you see that sensibility it will be fresher and funnier. From the late 70s on the culture became so drenched with satire & irony it’s hard to realize how much of a fringe viewpoint it has been before.

You grew up in a world where Brooks / Lenny Bruce irreverent take on the status quo was no longer fresh and liberating, but conventional-becoming-stale; so it’s no wonder his films don’t seem all that funny to you.

OP doesn't seem to want anything but attention, as he's done nothing but say the movie is awful, but has not said one word as to why.

I loved Mongo.

What pissed me off is when they showed Blazing Saddles on TV, y'know, TV, with commercials not cable- they took out all the fart jokes but left in every single 'nigger'. Madeline Kahn's song ended up being about 24 seconds long, too.

I saw it in the 70s and thought it was not all that funny.

It's like a bunch of sketches and many try too hard and land flat, and I love Mel Brooks.

"Is it twue what they say about Black Men?"

ZIPPPPPPPPPPPPP!

IT'S TWUE! IT'S TWUE!

I never liked Mel Brooks' films and have mostly steered clear. I did enjoy Young Frankenstein on first viewing when it was initially released, but saw it again a couple years later and it had no appeal.

It always seemed like a very 1970s MAD Magazine adolescent boy humor, acne, masturbation, big tits, and cheap laughs - just not the sort of cheap laughs that had milk coming out if my nose..

His films were fairly inescapable for a while, late night cinema showings, all over TV when there wasn't much choice, and in popular culture references. From that I've seen more of his stuff than I would have liked, and aside from not liking his brand of humor it seemed to date quickly and poorly.

"Sorry it distracted me from what a wonderful performance your whore, burlesque Mom gave the previous night in Rock Ridge."

Ad hominem attacks: the refuge of the ignorant desperate (or is it the desperately ignorant?).

Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were my dad’s favorite movies (RIP)

[quote] She channels a bit of Gilda with her delivery,

Kahn had almost certainly never even heard of Gilda Radner when she made the film.

Gilda Radner did not become famous until SNL premiered in 1975. Prior to that, she was just a Toronto-based improv-group comedienne.

Hey, where da white women at?

We (all my friends and I) were teenagers in the mid 70s and we thought his movies were hilarious. We all watched Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein about a zillion times as kids so we got the humor. Not everyone realized the Indians in BS were speaking Yiddish but once they did, it was funny to them. So while I agree with R31's excellent post for the most part, I disagree with the assertion it was only funny to his parent's generation (and older I presume). Boomers of a certain age and up got it too.

Hey R42 - R31 here - l loved his movies too as a kid - saw Young Frankenstein in the theater with a friend at 13 I think. People from our generation were just a familiar with those Hollywood genres because we did watched endless re-runs of them on TV growing up.

It’s really a whole other cultural sidebar — if you were a 50s 60s / 70s kid —really pre-cable TV — you really grew up in an adult world. The only programming specifically geared to kids was Saturday morning cartoons - even the bugs bunny stuff that ran after school was made at the time to appeal to both kids & adults. There was no Nickelodeon / Disney channel broadcasting crappy kid-centric programming at all hours — we watched crappy old sitcoms and tons of old Hollywood.

In 1976 you had 6 - 10 channels that needed content from 6am to 2am; but there was less than 50 years of sound film and 20 years of TV re-run. So, as you correctly pointed out - by the time you were 12 or so, if you watched a lot of tV you were pretty familiar with at least the broad outlines of popular culture going back to the 30s - and PBS would certainly show a fair amount of silent stuff.

As children had a much broader sense of older sruff than a kid growing up around 2000 - there is so much more content now, and enough kid specific programming that they never had to watch some Abbott & Costello WWII comedy with the Andrew’s Sister on a Sunday afternoon because there was nothing else on except golf. That doesn’t make us better or worse, but we certainly were different.

^^ I obviously made a mistake with the number of TV stations - there were the 3 Networks, PBS & then 1 - 3 local stations that were nothing but Gillian’s Island / Father Knows Best and whatever movie catalogue the parent company had control of - Channel 9 in NYC was a corporate descendant of RKO. So 7 stations - we could never get anything to come in on the UHF dial.

Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were both really funny but I think Young Frankenstein holds up better. I still laugh out loud when I watch it.

I never laughed harder in a theater than I did watching High Anxiety - it came out when I was in High School and I really didn’t get all the Hitchcock references; but Cloris Leachman & Harvey Korman were so unhinged I was literally hysterical.

R44 - I grew up in the NYC area also. We got 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. And I guess you're right. His movies weren't made for our generation, but we still got the jokes (mostly).

It's strange that Airplane still holds up. I can watch it again and again even today and laugh every time. I guess it's a parody of a kind of movie that's still relevant today.