Release Year: 1974

Genre: Comedy, Western

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Mel Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, Richard Pryor, Alan Uger

Stars: Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little, Slim Pickens

Once you become a big-time movie director, you kinda get to do whatever you want with the stuff you film. But few moviemakers go as crazy with this freedom as Mel Brooks, who can make uber-deep observations about racism in America even while we watch a cross-eyed governor playing with a paddleball.

More specifically, Brooks uses his movie Blazing Saddles to go right after nearly every racist stereotype and Western film cliché you can possibly think of. And when he's done with all that, you might still be wondering if he's going to smack you with a rubber chicken.

Seriously.

Set in the Wild West, Blazing Saddles tells the unlikely story of how a black railroad worker named Bart becomes the sheriff of a small desert town called Rock Ridge. Little does he know that he's only been put in this position because a government stooge named Hedley Lamarr wants to demolish the town to make way for a new railroad. Contrary to Hedley's expectations, though, Bart does a great job as sheriff and foils all of the man's diabolical schemes to destroy the town. 

And if that weren't good enough, Bart caps off his shining career as Sheriff of Rock Ridge by shooting Hedley Lamarr in the groin.

Just for good measure.

Although it's considered a classic comedy today, Blazing Saddles got some mixed reviews when it first came out in 1974. Some critics didn't like the fact that the movie suffered from a sort of ADHD, with director Mel Brooks including every gag he could possibly think of. Critic Roger Ebert called the movie "crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken."

His words. Not ours.

If you watch the movie all the way to its insane ending, you're likely to agree with Ebert on this one. Just saying.

But that's not totally a bad thing. In the end, Blazing Saddles would become one of the most important comedies of the twentieth century, getting itself three Oscar nominations and the #6 spot in The American Film Institute's 100 Years…100 Laughs list.

Take that, everyone who's lower than #6.

We're going to go out on a limb and say that The United States has an uncomfortable history when it comes to race: 

• Slavery, anyone?
• Or, uh, killing of indigenous people by white colonizers?
• And can't forget stuff like basic enslavement of Chinese people to build the American railroad system.

And being...himself...director Mel Brooks plays it all for laughs. 

Does he have your attention yet?

Mel Brooks' philosophy in Blazing Saddles is basically this: we'll fight racism way better if we just declare an open season on using racial slurs and stereotypes so much that there's just no ignoring the horrible parts of American history. And what better way to go after the stereotypes than to go after the greatest celebration of white American manhood ever—the Western film.

This movie might come across as one huge ROTFL romp, but when you study the film closely, you see that it's pretty much undermining everything a traditional American culture believes in, like white men and uh… more white men.

At the end of the day, Blazing Saddles is a comedy made by a Jewish director using a black main character to make fun of pretty much every white value America has ever had. But how does he get away with it, you ask? By trashing everything else along with it.

There is seriously nothing in this movie that is out-of-bounds for Brooks' satire and endless slapstick comedy. And whenever the movie might get a little too heady for some people, Brooks is also fine with throwing a lot of fart jokes in for good measure.

Put it all together and you've got yourself a great lesson for how to use comedy to make people think.