We Were Talking About This Back in February

February 11th, to be exact, I noted that four days earlier had been the 45th anniversary of the release of Blazing Saddles, noting "it's regularly referred to as the greatest movie that couldn't be made today."  Today, thanks to a tip from 357 Magnum, we learn the SJWs have started to make their moves to make the movie Go Away forever.

Now, four decades after it was released, the film has come under fire by social justice warriors because of its portrayal of white racism as comedy. Indeed, it’s hysterically funny.

PJ Media is on the story.  Anybody who has seen the movie knows it's satire that finds its humor in making fun of every racist trope there is.  The problem is that Blazing Saddles is satire and satire requires a functioning sense of humor, which isn't compatible with a constant desire to be offended at everything imaginable.

This was self-evident when feminist Cathy Areu weighed in on the film:

Displaying the stunning ignorance that propels so many of the politically correct, the shockingly far-left Areu complained that "auf wiedersehen" is “a Nazi joke.” She added, “Nothing is funny about the Nazis.” (Brooks’ musical “The Producers” — the Tony-winningest Broadway show of all time — blitzkriegs that claim.)

As Buddy Bizarre (Dom DeLuise) shouts into a megaphone late in “Blazing Saddles:”

“WRONG!”

"Auf wiedersehen" is German for “goodbye.” It’s as Nazi as the words tag (day), wasser (water), or straße (street). Amid his myriad atrocities, Adolf Hitler surely uttered tag, Wasser, und Straße. Would Areu now make those words verboten?

Likewise, while I don't know beyond a shadow of a doubt, I'm pretty sure that at some point in his childhood, little Adolph said, "Ich liebe dich Mama" or "I love you Mama".   Do we ban that because Hitler said it? 

Back in February, I borrowed a quote from the Hollywood Reporter; they republished parts of their original, 1974 review of Blazing Saddles.  I think it's worth it to see the movie through 1974 eyes. 

The Hollywood Reporter celebrated the occasion by republishing its original review of Blazing Saddles. Here is an excerpt:

The screenplay by Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger (from a story by Bergman) is totally irreverent, never passing up a chance to point up a cliche and sparing nothing or no one along the way. The language is definitely R-rated but it never becomes offensive. In fact, the incongruous pairing of the language and the characters accounts for a great deal of the boisterous humor.

Brooks' fast-paced direction is a masterpiece of comedy detail, filled with delightful and perfectly timed sight gags. The predominant style is one of the extremely broad burlesque but the film is also packed with more subtle touches, especially in Morey Hoffman's clever set decoration and in Peter Wooley's production design.

The line about "sparing nothing or no one along the way" is key. Blazing Saddles seems to send up almost everything. And it does it brilliantly. The humor employed is filled with what today would be known as triggers for the emotionally weak, politically correct, Social Justice Warrior crowd.

Ethnic jokes abound. There is enough juvenile sexual humor to keep a thousand generations of pubescent boys entertained. The movie also has the most memorable fart joke scene ever.

As PJ Media's Stephen Kruiser said back in February, 

It's almost sickening to think of the fact that we've gone from a society capable of creating and supporting something as masterful as Blazing Saddles to one filled with humorless youth who would protest it to death before it could get released in just forty-five years.

A humorless society that seeks to make words criminally offensive is a society in severe decline. Hopefully, we're just in a phase from which we'll soon emerge.