Opinion: The right-wing misreading of ‘Blazing Saddles’ is so telling

Opinion by Noah Berlatsky

(CNN) — On social media at least, Mel Brooks’ classic “Blazing Saddles” has become the standard example of a film that supposedly could not be made today because of rampant left-wing political correctness. Rewatching the 1974 film on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, though, what stands out is its cheerfully irreverent antiracism — and its open enthusiasm for insulting and mocking racists.

“Blazing Saddles” is the kind of unreproducible film that doesn’t need a remake. But if it were remade, it almost certainly wouldn’t be the left who would object.

Like most Brooks films, “Blazing Saddles” (whose distributor now shares a parent company with CNN) is as much a collection of vaudeville-esque skits and set pieces as it is a coherent narrative. But to the extent that there’s a plot, the movie is a Western in which nefarious Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) wants to take over the town of Rock Ridge, which is about to become a railroad stop.

Lamarr’s thugs kill Rock Ridge’s sheriff and, when the town petitions Governor William J. Le Petomane (Mel Brooks) for a replacement, Lamarr sends them Bart (Cleavon Little), a Black railroad worker. Hedley figures the good people of Rock Ridge will murder their own sheriff rather than be defended by a Black man. But he didn’t count on sheriff Bart’s wits—or on what a silly movie they’re all in.

The silliness includes an R-rating, and a lot of gags (courtesy in part of co-writer Richard Pryor) which turn on White people saying racial slurs. That’s almost certainly what Mel Brooks was referring to when he was quoted as saying in a 2017 interview that Hollywood would never make the film now because “we have become stupidly politically correct which is the death of comedy.”

Brooks is not a conservative himself, but his argument has been picked up by many on the right. “The movie will probably trigger most 24-year-olds into a coma. It’s like a non-stop barrage of race and sexism jokes that wouldn’t make it into any Hollywood movie today,” Fox News quoted one Twitter user as insisting. Another post claimed the movie showed “we weren’t always so uptight with each other.”

There are a couple of moments in the film that might likely get cut or altered in a remake. Brooks, for example, dons brown makeup to play a Native American leader. Today it seems likely that producers and directors would point out that if you’re going to represent Native Americans on screen, you should probably hire and pay a Native actor, even if the gag is that the Native American is speaking Yiddish.

Most of the rest of the film, though, isn’t indulging in edgy racism like, say, right-wing gutter pundit Charlie Kirk, who attacked Martin Luther King, Jr. on Martin Luther King day this year. Instead, “Blazing Saddles” puts racial slurs in the mouths of people who are clearly marked as the bad guys. In that sense, it’s similar to Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 antiracist Western, “Django Unchained.”

“Blazing Saddles,” though, is I think a lot more aggressive in repudiating, and trolling, the Charlie Kirks of the world than is even “Django Unchained.” “Django” shows its Black hero shooting a lot of White racists. But those White racists are all clearly located in the antebellum, slave-holding past.

Brooks’s film, in contrast, is a lot less grounded in time. It’s ostensibly set in 1874. But by the end, the actors are careening through the fourth wall and onto contemporary Hollywood studio sets, firing guns and throwing pies.

Among the hired thugs that Lamarr recruits to destroy Rock Ridge are a couple of 1920s KKK members in full regalia; Hitler himself shows up, sort of, towards the end of the film. The racism expressed in the movie is in the past, but it keeps spilling out of its chronal constraints and getting smeared on the present, like the pie filling in the climactic battle.

What’s more, Brooks doesn’t just associate racism with vicious murderous bad guys, as Tarantino does. Instead, “Blazing Saddles” presents everyday good White townspeople, as racist — and as irredeemable fools because they are racist.

In one of the film’s most famous scenes, the White folk of Rock Ridge prepare en masse to shoot Bart. But Bart escapes by pretending to be both a ruthless bad Black stereotype and a helpless good deferential Black stereotype at once, putting a gun to his own head and edging away while talking to himself. The White denizens of Rock Ridge confronted with their own doubled prejudices, glitz out like bamboozled robots on Star Trek.  “You are so good,” Bart tells himself when he’s safe, “and they are so stupid!”

Gene Wilder as Bart’s fast-drawing friend Jim, is even more explicit. “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers,” Jim reassures Bart after he’s endured racist insults from a nice White grandma.  “These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”

Wilder delivers that last line with such easy-going deadpan venom that Little, famously, breaks character and cracks up on camera.

In 2024, Charlie Kirk can get a big platform to insult Martin Luther King. But you’re really not supposed to outright say that rural White MAGA voters — the “people of the land” — are deplorable racist dunderheads. You’re supposed to be respectful. But Blazing Saddles,” 50 years ago, said that treating racists with respect is BS — even if those racists look like your grandma, even if those racists live in small towns and hang out in diners.

If a movie like Brooks’ masterpiece were made today, the left would love it. It’s the right who would recognize, slowly and dimly, that they were being insulted, and howl in rage — as, hopefully, they will howl after reading this article. The best way to honor “Blazing Saddles” is to offend some racists.

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