Say, kids, did you know that “Blazing Saddles” is an “open and playful spoof on classic Westerns”? Well, now you do it, thanks to the trigger warning just dragged on the movie by HBO Max, who hired Professor Jacqueline Stewart of the University of Chicago to set things up for everyone who maybe clicked on the Mel Brooks comedy and thought she was in for Swedish drama about the lingonberry harvest.
Stewart informs us that the film contains “racist language and attitudes,” but “Those attitudes are practiced by characters who are explicitly portrayed here as narrow-minded, ignorant bigots. The real and much more enlightened perspective of the film is represented. by the two main characters. “
You do not say that. Stewart’s intro would have to be called “Blazing Obarenessness” because everyone knew, and always has, all of this, for the 46 years that the film was released. Next week, HBO Max will seriously inform us that the musical “Springtime for Hitler” in Brooks ‘”The Producers” should not be performed as a celebration of the Third Reich, and that the number-and-dance number about the Spanish Inquisition in Brooks’ ” History of the World, Part I “is not intended to glorify the practice of disembowing non-Christians.
A few years ago, conservatives were told that worries or stupid campus adventures pointed to speech modification and idea policing, “Relax, these are just college kids. Why do you care?” Less than a decade later, Andrew Sullivan was able to write a column with the title, “We All Live On Campus,” and everyone knew he had just that.
Mocking, unnecessary trigger warnings are posted everywhere, Realtors are afraid to use the term “master bedroom”. But HBO Max seems to think we all live in kindergarten. What kind of melonhead does not realize the purpose of the sloppiness in “Blazing Saddles” is to make the racists look bad? We have not explained this to ourselves unless we have just arrived on this planet from a distant galaxy or attended Oberlin.
When director Mel Brooks introduced a hot young black comic book named Richard Pryor to help clean up the script, Pryor vehemently added more uses of the N-word to make the film sharper and funnier. Pryor may be more responsible than any other person for neutralizing the power of the slur to heal. We would probably all be better off if the word was brought back in the 1970s, when it was largely robbed of its mystical properties. Now that it’s unsayable, it’s scared again.
There’s a reason no comic book’s set ever begins with saying, “The following comments are jokes and I’ll say things facetious sometimes.” No one wants to have the comedy parameters pre-arranged, especially by a humor-challenged professor. HBO Max, who earlier this summer added a similar trigger warning to “Gone with the Wind,” tells her subscribers nothing they don’t already know, but it does give them some useful thumb exercise as they all shake the ship and activate function.
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