Hacker Cinema
Blazing Saddles
1974 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Mel Brooks
Crafty railroad worker Bart becomes the first Black sheriff of Rock Ridge, a frontier town about to be destroyed in order to make way for a new railroad. Initially, the citizens of Rock Ridge harbor a racial bias toward their new protector. However, they warm to him after realizing that Bart and his perpetually drunk gunfighter friend Jim are their only defense against a wave of thugs sent to rid the town of its population.
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57 comments on Hacker News
Growing up we watched Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Silent Movie almost every week. Happy birthday Mel, thanks for all laughs and grotesque which shaped us.
Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
Camp Legume may be a reference to this scene from the film Blazing Saddles:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VPIP9KXdmO0
It’s a quote from a running joke in the film Blazing Saddles
Quote is from Blazing Saddles.
1:28
https://youtu.be/g2Bp8SqYrnE
He says it many times in the film.
I wouldn't call "Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession" that either. It's more of a "Blazing Saddles" type movie with a cult following due to its catchphrases, but overall, it isn't very good. Even among movies by the same director, some slightly earlier titles like "Kidnapping, Caucasian Style" and "The Diamond Arm" from the late 1960s are much better, and hold up well against Hollywood contemporaries like "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Great Race". I'd even say that cinematically, "The Diamond Arm" is a league above the average Hollywood movie of the era. It was shot really beautifully and has wonderful use of color.
The same phenomenon exists when people talk about the movie Blazing Saddles.
It's transgressive content worked because it was satirizing "wholesome" Wild West shows, holding up a funhouse mirror to their less-obvious absurdities and racist aspects. It was so successful, its targets don't exist anymore.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jzMFoNZeZm0
Somehow this makes me think of Blazing Saddles, where part of the satire is hard to understand for folks who didn't grow up with shows that had to meet the "Television Code", a set of puritanical rules the industry created for itself to avoid other kinds of regulation.
There was an insane glut of cowboy TV shows, and all of them had to comply with those rules, essentially spreading a whitewashed version of history where systemic injustice didn't exist, and the policeman was always a good person... Oh, and couples always had separate beds.
Did something similar exist in the literary world, with long-term echoes?
I hadn't heard that explanation for the novel before, but it makes me think of how Blazing Saddles has already become a bit de-contextualized from what preceded it: A constant TV. show storm--possibly worse than superhero movies today--depicting the "Wild West" as a wholesome and family-friendly place where society was kinda-great for everyone. (Largely due to the television industry regulations and internal standards.)
The movie, in contrast, showed an imperfect Wild West where there was injustice, government corruption, blatant racism, vice, all-round stupidity, etc. It wasn't just transgressive shock value for its own sake.
There was never one culture, but the fragmentation was far more coarse.
I was into D&D, so I was exposed to anime, comics, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, and Tom Lehrer, because those were a certain subculture.
I was never a comic-book nerd, but I could probably name a dozen different series from image comics in the 90s because I was surrounded by people who read them.
I flat out dislike watching Mel Brooks movies, but I can quote about 90% of Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles because that was a part of the vocabulary of that group.
Did Mongo get slagged in their early days because of the unflattering Blazing Saddles movie reference?
Call it whatever you want. Engineers should be able to select their tools on merit, not marketing.
We started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney).
In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
People who say you can't make movies as offensive (or playing as much with offensiveness, anyway) as Tropic Thunder or Blazing Saddles anymore need to look into some of Lloyd Kaufman's output with Troma... the 2020 Shakespeare's Shitstorm is about as wildly-offensive (but maybe to good purpose? I'm still not sure, LOL) as it gets, and even directly targets the (in the pejorative sense) "woke" crowd (plus, like, a lot of other groups, including stuffy conservatives, big business, and shitty bigots) which is one of the riskiest moves a film could make these days, and that's just one of several risky moves it makes. Like, the movie's basically built of risky, boundary-pushing creative choices relating to very-relevant topics, which... might serve some greater, noble whole? Maybe? I think it's trying to, at least.
Now, a wide-release, mainstream movie, that might be true.
> the top grossing films of the era (70s) were no better than the MCU of today.
These are the top films, and second place, for 1970-74
70 Love Story, Airport
71 Fiddler on the Roof, Billy Jack
72 The Godfather, The Poseidon Adventure
73 The Exorcist, The Sting
74 The Towering Inferno, Blazing Saddles
I only stopped because I got bored copying and pasting. I'm not convinced the MCU stuff really compares. And I love all that Marvel stuff! Maybe if they could do a decent soundtrack. .
English.
It was named after "Mongo, an immensely strong, dim-witted, yet philosophical henchman" in the movie "Blazing Saddles" (which is hilarious but would probably get Mel Brooks burned at the stake if he tried to make it today.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles
Anyway, "mongo" is short for "mongoloid" which was a derogatory word for folks with what we now call Down Syndrome, and also racist in re: Mongols. So yeah, not a great choice of name.
This comment reminded me of one of my favorite moments from the movie blazing saddles: https://youtu.be/SbWg-mozGsU
Honestly, I kind of am. I find it ridiculous that people can't tell that something like Airplane! and Blazing Saddles are satires. Needing that much hand holding explains a lot about people today. It's also like how Netflix now has warnings that a show/movie may have smoking in it. Come on, be an adult and learn how to deal with things that make you a bit uncomfortable, that's called life.
There are two black dudes speaking straight Ebonics, and the whitest woman in the world translating for them. Zucker (who is Jewish) would immediately be excommunicated and branded a Hitler for filming this in 2021. One of the funniest scenes in the history of comedy, and the genre is immeasurably diminished by the current inability to film such things. As is the arrival of the sheriff scene from "Blazing Saddles" by Mel Brooks. "Blazing Saddles" is one of the most potent bits of anti-racist satire ever filmed, but there's one problem: the woke mob lacks the sense of humor. So the movie (I kid you not) comes with a "trigger warning" now, specifically for people too dumb to get the meaning of the movie, and what it aims to satirize.
What you're referring to is 'broad comedy' - and that's my point. They don't make them in a big way.
The films listed above are not 'broad comedies' they're comedy/dramas.
I'm not sure of the 'Mel Brooks is not an argument' (link in one of the responses) is a defence at all, because the fact is, he took excessive risks while trying to make a point, risks which would not be made today.
He was Jewish and took on very serious issues with Nazis ... but he definitely was not Black, and Blazing Saddles ... wold be too much for today.
By all accounts, Tropic Thunder would not get made today because of the ostensibly 'blackface' character - I think that's a really good 'threshold' to analyze because while I don't think the character is generally offensive and most wouldn't see it as that - but it's definitely going to be for some, to the point where Execs just couldn't back making the movie. There's going to be guaranteed outrage, and that outrage, if the press decides to amplify it, will kill a film and have all the parties involved running scared with apologies.
The Kids in the Hall (Kevin McDonald) indicated they couldn't make what they made today. They did indicate they got pushback back in the day from some of their bits that mocked religion - particularly from the US - but they still got to make it, which is the point.
Casting for any role which involves 'mixed' anything is a minefield which risks overthrowing a project. The casting of Cleopatra (who was Macedonian), caused controversy by people speaking on behalf of ... Ancient Egyptians? Whom even modern Egyptians could hardly make a claim to?
There's a lot of good talk about having more people from different backgrounds in roles, and especially have them among rank and file production, which is obviously good, but this should be a different theme from say, what jokes are acceptable and not.
Those are different kinds of issues that are getting crossed up in a cacophony of Twitter noise.
HBO, Disney and Netflix are not interested in creative expression, they're inserted in products, broader audiences, and films that speak to their choice narratives. If you listen to some podcasts you can hear the opinions of these executives themselves speak about it. These are not your 'creativity first' type of people.
Cable TV has always allowed for a narrow set of channels that challenged conventions, kind of a 'Late Night Loophole' in which naughty stuff was tolerated. We need this equivalent for streaming sources. We need an 'Adult Swim' version of Netflix that invests heavily in outrageous things.
BS is lampooning a lot of things - corrupt politicians, demagogues, racists, ignorance, religious intolerance, Western movie tropes, cinema tropes in general, and by the end it turns into a total glorious mayhem where everybody gets a pie in the face (in both metaphorical and the most literal sense).
So you'd be tempted to ask - why would Woke Hollywood or their woke twitter mob watchdogs object to lampooning corrupt politicians or racists? And the answer to that is exactly the reason why woke cancel culture is so awful - because the intent does not matter. If something can be taken as offensive by any construction of the most hostile reading of it - and a hostile reading (watching) of Blazing Saddles surely could find a lot of "problematic" things within it - completely ignoring the intent, the context and concentrating only on the form and the worst possible interpretation of it that could be invented - then it's unacceptable and must be destroyed.
That's exactly the crux of the problem and the point of the argument about Blazing Saddles - the problem is that even when you agree on the premises, like racism is bad, corrupt politicians are bad, etc. - if you express it in a manner that may seem to somebody, even in theory, "problematic", you're still the enemy.
> And Blazing Saddles is the poster child for "could not get made today" arguments.
Blazing Saddles was the poster child for that when many of the movies that argument is now made about were made, too.
Because its the kind of movie that could never be made, except that it was. And if there was a Mel Brooks-in-his-prime now, the modern equivalent (which, presumably, Blazing Samurai this year will not be) could get made today.
Looks like the author of the video misses the point by about a mile, taking it in the most literal sense possible. His argument is basically "yes, you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today because it was playing off the contemporary popularity of Western and its tropes, and since that is long gone, repeating it in a literal sense, as a Western parody, would be a no go now, because nobody cares anymore about Westerns". Which as I said, misses the point about a mile - the point is not about recreating the same movie, it's about making the same kind of movie - the movie pushing the boundaries and being as offensive as possible on purpose, the movie highlighting the hot topics not by solemnly lecturing the viewer, but by lampooning the hell out of it. The refutation of this point would be to provide an example of current irreverent offense-to-11 lampooning of current tropes-de-jour. I don't know - Marvel movies? Woke diversity-inclusion drama? Something else?
So the author is right - nobody wants to literally make the same movie today, because the same movie is already have been made! It's however a prime example of being right on technicality and completely wrong on substance - the point is not to make a copy of Blazing Saddles, the point is making that kind of irreverent and boundless satire, which is appropriate in all times and all societies - but I can't see how Woke Hollywood could ever make something like that.
Another argument is "but we don't submit to every woke demand and not everybody is getting cancelled" - of course not! If Hollywood tried to submit to every woke demand and avoid every complaint from twitter mob, no movie would be ever made at all. Of course, there's a lot of complaints that are ignored. That doesn't exclude the fact that there are clear boundaries where Woke Hollywood would never dare to tread. And irreverent no-holds-barred satire of the Blazing Saddles mold is out of these boundaries.
Next argument is "well, there are stand-up comics and they aren't thrown in jail". Yeah, sure, we're not there yet. But we also not where we were when Blazing Saddles was made. We're somewhere in between the one and the other. And we're moving away from the Blazing Saddles.
> Another argument you could advance is that TV and Film have generally been moving away from comedy as a genre
I noticed this for movies and it makes me sad. I asked people around me what's the latest funny, full-on comedy they've seen, and I think the newest one would be "Tropic Thunder" which is 13 years old.
There are still a couple around, but I can't think of an equivalent of "Airplane!" or "Blazing Saddles" for the current generation. The closest one is probably half of "Zoolander", and even that one is almost old enough to drink.
I would guess because Blazing Saddles is so clearly anti-racist in its actual messaging. If it gets pulled for racism it's an unambiguous case of either cognitive dissonance or uninformed judgement.
To add insult to hypothetical injury, racism is weaponized in the film by an upper-class railroad baron to divide the working poor amongst themselves so they don't unite against him. Having the film spark yet another battle along ideological lines among the less well-off of society would be weirdly poetic.
Why Blazing Saddles, and not something like, say, Song of the South? A lot of old movies are ...problematic - I'm just curious why you selected Blazing Saddles as your standard and not anything else that might be on either side of it on a spectrum.
As others pointed out, film degrades over time if not carefully preserved (and there is little reason to believe they cared past giving up on Blazing Saddles 2) and videotape is sometimes reused. They may also not be completely finished past a least-plausible-effort.
Blazing Saddles is my cancel culture canary. When they pull it off of the streaming platforms I’ll consider it a bellwether moment. I’m not defending the film, it is what it is. I find it funny that the cancel mobs haven’t discovered it. Hell, Swiss Family Robinson has a disclaimer you can’t skip on Disney+.
Yes.
If you want a more elaborate answer, then yes there's really no question about it.
Everyone points to the use of racial epithets in Blazing Saddles as a reason that the movie couldn't be made today. Ignoring that Quentin Tarantino regularly makes movies with racial epithets today.
Blazing Saddles is profoundly anti-racist. It shows racism and bigotry in a negative light. The racist characters are boors or villains or both. The black sheriff is the hero and shown to be in the right nearly every time. Why couldn't it be made today?
So a "modern Blazing Saddles" would probably be a super-hero movie then
Mel Brookes got full creative control over Blazing Saddles in an accident of contract. The studio didn't notice and signed. This is why the movie is so good. Mel got to make what he thought was funny.
I've always viewed Tropic Thunder as somewhat of a successor to Blazing Saddles, but I largely agree that it couldn't be recreated today.
The time period in which these movies were made is a lot of what makes them so special. That's not to say that what we'll have next won't be special, but 1974 (and 2008) was a different time.
"Blazing Saddles" is complicated. It's dated, and was dated when it was made. The racist tropes it skewers weren't from 1974, or from the 1880s, but from the 30s and 40s -- as was much of the rest of it. (For example, Hedy Lamarr was 60 years old when the film was made, and had long since retired.) They were familiar enough to be joked about, and distant enough to not be an immediate threat. Today, many of the jokes need explanation, and that explanation can feel more like reviving racism than jeering at it.
It doesn't really poke fun at the racism of the 1970s but is instead immured in it. Parts are cringey and insulting in the way almost any reference to race from the period is. It's a bit like watching original Star Trek: progressive and chauvinist at the same time.
Many people can enjoy the film, including black people. But I'd be leery of white people explaining to black people why they shouldn't be offended by it. It's important and a classic, but I wouldn't recommend it to people.
People make movies for two reasons: art or money. Comedies don't make money. That leaves art. Artists won't remake blazing saddles because it's been done before.
The artistic voices of this generation are making different art.
A friend of mine said his favorite moment in Blazing Saddles was the “beans around the campfire” scene. He’d already seen the movie but this time it was airing on TBS or some other station that edited it for content. It was the same scene but with particular sounds removed. If you remember the scene I’m sure you can guess which sounds. He said the absurdity of it made it funnier than unedited version when you already know what’s happening.
“Three white men sitting around saying the n-word?” My millennial girlfriend made it about five minutes into Blazing Saddles before she refused to watch. It didn’t matter that all three men were buffoons and villains and were being portrayed as such. It reminded me of my parents’ generation not getting that Beavis and Butthead were not role models. But no, I don’t think you can make movies like that today.
> Ooof...some of the liberals you see these days (I consider myself liberal) would be outraged at "Blazing Saddles". I re-watched it recently and wasn't sure if the film would survive today.
I think Blazing Saddles still does OK with audiences, although it would be tough to make it in the first place.
IMO, The History of the World Part 2 has a much tougher time of it. The movie's attitudes towards women don't have any satire to lean on. It just comes across as crass and lecherous.
> Ooof...some of the liberals you see these days (I consider myself liberal) would be outraged at "Blazing Saddles". I re-watched it recently and wasn't sure if the film would survive today.
No it wouldn’t survive today. Too many people would have their feelings hurt and we can’t have that - even if it’s just for laughs. I recently watched it with my 13 year old daughter and I was shocked that she loved it (surprisingly) - after which I explained to her that these kinds of movies can’t be made anymore because too many people would be outraged.
>The roots of Brooks’s anger are surely complex, yet clues are scattered throughout his interviews. “I always felt it was my job to amuse those around me,” Brooks once said. “Don’t ask why.” You don’t need to be a Freudian to see how such a burden could stir up intense resentment, even rage, at an audience.
Several comedians I've come across seem to share this attribute. Robin Williams and Jonathan Waters immediately come to mind. To a lesser extent Martin Short. They seem almost desperate to get a laugh. It can become overbearing to those watching.
>Politically, Brooks was a liberal—or so people assumed after Blazing Saddles.
Ooof...some of the liberals you see these days (I consider myself liberal) would be outraged at "Blazing Saddles". I re-watched it recently and wasn't sure if the film would survive today.
> Blazing Saddles was a comedy. Django is acceptable because it's a drama
That's not at all true; except perhaps for extremely historically-grounded drama (which Django is not), drama tends to get less license than comedy.
> but Mel Brooks' style of humor is no longer socially acceptable
Mel Brooks style of humor was never “socially acceptable”, it’s was always transgressive. It's probably not as commercially acceptable in the mainstream film industry as it once was, but that's more because transgressive video entertainment has other outlets and the mainstream film industry is a more mature and more narrowly-focussed industry than it once was.
> We can take issues like race and anti-semitism deadly seriously, but we aren't allowed to laugh about them anymore.
My experience of currently successful (both live and distributed on major video platforms) stand up and other comedy suggests that, yes, we are very much still allowed to laugh at those things. The particular currently successful forms may not look exactly like Blazing Saddles, but while the latter isn't stale, it's also very firmly grounded in the time it was produced (which seems generally true of Brooks’ comedies).
Well said. I watched Blazing Saddles last night and that film flat out couldn’t be made today.
Believe me I've tried - I love TV and film, but cannot get very far before the obligatory strong, independent and sassy minority group representative appears to deliver their identity politics sermon. No thanks! It's patronising and boring.
Reminder: The Alien franchise managed to have a strong female lead and be one of the best sci-fi series ever, and all without including the barely disguised sociology lectures. Go back and look at films from the 60s-00s - many were able to integrate minority characters/themes etc. with charm and subtlety, and managed to avoid the contemporary subtle as a brick approach. We're at the point where gems like Blazing Saddles could never be made due to the po-faced, finger wagging authoritarianism of the PC establishment.
It seems amazing that you might not know, but in your case, may I recommend the film Blazing Saddles?
These days, it’s usually called the “N-word”.
"It felt anachronistic at the time "
The clergyman in the debate, Malcolm Muggeridge, was raised by super communist secularists around the turn of the last century! There's a link below which is a fantastic reference worth repeating [1].
Hyper secularist ideals are not 'new' - the largest war in history, WW2 was partly based on this (i.e. Germany v. Soviets). (And yes, only partly ... the Germans were super concerned about the Communists at the time, I'm not trying to start a big ideological thing here).
I doubt that secularists have any advantage on real progress, my take is that the Church of the past was simply a calcified institution, as all institutions are when they have more or less absolute authority and try to protect it. Moreover, most people 'outside' such communities tend not to understand them at all ... to the point of bigotry.
And yet we have material prosperity and 'freedoms' - we are more depressed and anxious than ever before.
Our 'national strategies' are fundamentally economic: build more homes, more Starbucks, more IKEA.
We live in a weirdly intolerant era - consider how many movies 'couldn't be made today' - and I'm not talking about 'mean racist movies', rather even films that tried to have fun with the issue. See: 'Blazing Saddles' one of the funniest and most sincerely topical films ever made about race relations. Could never be made in our new utopia.
Reform and progress are essential, but I think we're conflating and confusing a lot of institutions and ideas.
This position hardened for me while visiting the rural areas of a very arab/muslim country with super archaic traditions. We are not as advanced as we think we are.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/
Spaceballs and Blazing Saddles are my favorite movies from him.
I find it bemusing to imagine Mel Brook's movies being released today. Think about Blazing Saddles. It'd be met with nonstop claims about all sorts of isms and ists with coordinated Twitter attacks to try to hurt Brooks or any company that facilitated it or its release. And of course he is not, nor are his films. In a way it's the same thing that's already happened to Mark Twain and The Adventurers of Huckleberry Fin. It's now been banned in numerous US schools under typically facile implications of isms and ists, because of a certain word.
The thing I find most bewildering though is that people seem to no longer actually care about content or context - it's all about the most incredibly superficial approach to everything. It's interesting that both Mel Brooks with Blazing Saddles, and Twain with Huck Fin, made a point of contrasting the superficiality and nonsensical nature of labels against the strength of character of those being labeled. The slave/prisoner in both tales being one of the only decent and honorable peoples in their respective stories.
Just kind of sad to feel like we're regressing so much and calling it progress.
> You can disable this. Google on the use for modifying the hosts file to block your machine's access to Windows Update if you're not sure how to do this.
That's not disabling Windows Update, that's hacking name resolution to prevent the connection itself. That's like saying you can disable Windows Update by not connecting to the internet.
And I'm not even confident that the host file solution will last forever, in future you might have to do it from the router level instead.
> Wait -- I thought you were forced, as a gamer, to use Windows. I don't follow.
If you play PC games you are effectively forced to use the Windows ecosystem. Several of my favorite games are available on macOS/Linux, but it's like watching movies. You might watch Blazing Saddles and Evil Dead 2 on a regular basis, but you're also going to want some variety in there as well.
What the GP is saying though is that Microsoft is holding game franchises as XBox exclusives to try to slow their marketshare bleed. They are taking franchises that were formerly present (if delayed) on Windows such as Halo and using them to sell XBoxes.
Society goes back and forth on what is considered 'right' and 'wrong'. You only need to look at older movies to see how things change.
What was once considered neutral or even progressive is now considered racist/sexist/etc. Watch 'Dumbo', 'Animal House', 'Blazing Saddles', etc. None of those would be filmed today. Yet we still have not cured many of the ills that plagued society in both times.
The left must relent and let conservative voices be heard. In the long run, it will be destructive to the left if they do not.
>Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.
This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.
Put simply, films like Blazing Saddles made fun of racism without necessarily making fun of racists. They showed the institution as silly and absurd without having to look down and mock the people beyond an initial "Well, yeah, they're bumpkins". A modern film would likely lampoon them mercilessly and dehumanize them.
Additionally, the comic talent those films drew from comes from a very different lineage. Folks like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks have a very different frame of reference for how to do comedy, how to pace it, how to deliver it. I find that modern comedians, having come up with the increasing HBOfication and Comedy-Central-style shows, tend towards very similar schticks: generally progressive-leaning (though the non-progressive stuff is awful redneck pandering as well!) inclusionistic near nihilist little screeds on stage. These tend not to lend themselves to being cast as anything other than a reflection of their own brand in a movie.
I won't really make the "Movies are all PC" argument, because that's silly and overused, but I will say that from a pure marketing standpoint it's difficult to sell a movie as thoroughly dirty as say Sleeper or cleverly offensive as Blazing Saddles: audiences are not interested in that sort of comedy anymore in a world of Soul Plane and Larry the Cable Guy and so forth.
> You like Monty Python but not Spaceballs? I find that pretty weird.
DIfferent tastes for different people. I loved Monty Python from the first time I heard it on an audio record to the 10 times I watched each episode on PBS.
However, even as a Mel Brooks fan (Blazing Saddles is an all-time favorite of mine) I found Spaceballs un-funny and boring.
She's the person who tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”
From the author of the article:
I began to suspect that it wasn’t racist but a reflexive critique of white privilege — on our tendency to naïvely imagine ourselves immune from life’s horrors.
Yes. I make Sacco's kind of joke all the time (in private), and it's also meant to be a comment on racism itself. This kind of joke was common in the late 70s and early 80s (see movies like "Blazing Saddles" or Richard Pryor's "Live on Sunset Strip". In those days anyone was allowed to satirize racism that way, black or white. I think it was healthy, because it robbed racism of its power, sort of like saying Voldemort's name. Now... not such much.
> Oh, and movies where it's played for laughs. Blazing Saddles, Django Unchained.
You almost never see this happen in mainstream culture (in fact, the Chappelle show is one of the only notable examples of this and this is precisely one of the main reasons it was considered so edgy and controversial). The two examples you described are 1) from 40 years ago, when culture was a lot more comfortable with usage of the word, and 2) a period piece about American slavery. Usage in the latter movie has nothing to do with the fact that it's "played for laughs", since you could see the same thing in 12 Years A Slave (which came out less than a year later and was very much not a comedy).
These days, I'd bet a very high percentage of n-bombs dropped by white people occur when quoting black comedians, or music. The Chapelle Show alone may well account for a double-digit percentage of it. :-)
Oh, and movies where it's played for laughs. Blazing Saddles, Django Unchained.
It won't be tolerable until we weed out anyone who might say anything that anyone finds slightly offensive. No jokes allowed.
You think laws made to help people get up from the bottom tier should apply to everyone on the bottom tier and not just people of a certain color? Well you're racist.
Your favorite movie is blazing saddles? Well guess what: you're a racist.
/s
I think everyone should be able to use the same water fountain and no one should be able to cut in line solely based on the color of their skin, but on their level of thirstyness.
According to a lot of people on reddit (and HN) I'm a racist. I thought racism was discriminating against someone based on skin color.
The Wild Bunch.
Nevada Smith.
3:10 To Yuma, the original with Glen Ford and the remake with Russel Crowe are both excellent. Original story written by Elmore Leonard.
The Magnificent Seven. Watch it with The Seven Samurai.
Once Upon A Time in the West.
True Grit, original and remake.
Blazing Saddles.
The Naked Prey. Movie takes place in Africa, but it's based on a true story of the American West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colter#Colter.27s_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Prey
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+western+movies&t=canonical
It also makes the NEA look like a joke, severely in need of a budget cut. At a time when cutting budgets is (or at least should be) the number one priority of congress, sticking your head up to say "Hey, who wants some money to make video games?" is a really bad idea.
It's interesting that the only areas of art in which really good stuff is stil produced are the areas of art in which things are done for profit, rather than as part of some scramble for government funding. The United States of America has produced many, many great artists and artworks over the past century, particularly in areas such as film, music and indeed (to a lesser yet increasing extent) video games. But as far as I know, no great work of art has ever been produced by NEA funding. Heck, I doubt that a work of art as compelling as Blazing Saddles has ever been produced by NEA funding.
[A joke that to get would have required seeing the following film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles ]