In 2002, the American Film Institute surveyed “a blue-ribbon panel of more than 1,500 leaders of the American movie community” and declared Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot” to be the funniest film of all time.
Mel Brooks begs to differ.
The legendary comedy writer and director feels that his consciousness-raising, fourth-wall-breaking, fart-filled Wild West farce “Blazing Saddles” (1974) is the funniest film ever made. He’s challenged the AFI to screen “Blazing Saddles” and “Some Like It Hot” back-to-back and measure the laughs.
That comedic cinematic cage match has yet to be scheduled, but Brooks has a strong case. Now 89 years old and rapidly gaining on his revered “2000 Year Old Man” character, he has been traveling the country hosting (non-competitive) screenings of “Blazing Saddles” at large theaters, braving tornado-level gusts of laughter. He’s in Hartford at The Bushnell at 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 22.
In a phone interview earlier this month, Brooks says that while he has the utmost respect for Billy Wilder — particularly for the range of a director who could make not only “Some Like It Hot” (1959), but darker films such as “Sunset Boulevard” and “Double Indemnity” — he simply feels that “Blazing Saddles” is funnier.
“I’m having a fight,” he says, “and I’m winning it.” The AFI presented Brooks with a lifetime achievement award in 2013.
Certainly Brooks’ 1974 send-up of Western tropes has held up well. “Blazing Saddles” doesn’t just make fun of gunslingers, saloon-keepers and cowpunchers. It satirizes racism, not just in post-Civil War America but in countless Hollywood Westerns. “Blazing Saddles” has a fresh impact in any era (hint, hint) when xenophobia and bigotry come to bear on political and social discourse. Plus it’s got fart jokes, sexy songs and dances, and a guy who keeps banging his head on a window frame.
In the movie, an African-American railroad worker named Bart (played by Cleavon Little), is appointed sheriff of a small town by a scheming politician Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). Lamarr plans to take over the town and sell the land to the railroad once Bart is inevitably assassinated by the racist town folk.
The role of Sheriff Bart was intended for Richard Pryor, but Brooks says “the studio said they wouldn’t insure him. Later he becomes this big movie star, but we couldn’t get him insured.” Pryor ended up with a co-writing credit on the film.
“Richie was an old friend of mine from [Greenwich] Village,” Brooks recalls. “We would see each other at the Village Vanguard, The Bitter End. We were pals. So I called him. I said ‘You don’t have to write anything. You just have to tell me when we can use the N-word and when not to.’ But that didn’t work at all, because he wanted to use it everywhere.”
Brooks credits Pryor with writing all the lines for Mongo, the strong, largely silent, horse-punching character played by Alex Karras.
He quotes one of Karras’ lines from the film: “Mongo only pawn in the game of life,” and acknowledges, “That was Richie” who wrote it.
Will Brooks ever collect all these memories into a book? “I dunno. I tell a lot of stories. Put ’em together, there’s your autobiography.”
You can hear plenty of stories following the “Blazing Saddles” screening, when Brooks comes onstage for a 90-minute question-and-answer session with the audience.
“Half the audience has never seen ‘Blazing Saddles’ before,” he estimates. “Teenagers are coming with their parents.” He hopes that some old friends might be at the Connecticut event, possibly including longtime North Stamford resident Gene Wilder, who plays The Waco Kid (aka Jim) in “Blazing Saddles” and starred as “Fred-er-rish Frahn-ken-steen” in Brooks’ follow-up hit “Young Frankenstein.” Wilder hosted his own “Blazing Saddles” screening in Stamford in 2014.
Mocking Pop Culture
Brooks says Wilder would only do “Young Frankenstein” if the director agreed not to appear in it. After the anachronistic anarchy of “Blazing Saddles” — in which Brooks played both “Governor William J. Le Petomane” and an unnamed “Indian Chief” — Wilder “didn’t want to break the fourth wall again,” the director explains. This led to “Young Frankenstein” being a different sort of style parody.
Later Brooks films included the 1977 Alfred Hitchcock parody “High Anxiety,” for which the Master of Suspense himself contributed a couple of gags.
“Hitchcock sent me six magnums of Chateau Haut Brion 1961,” Brooks recalls with awe, “and a note: ‘Have no anxiety about “High Anxiety.” It’s a wonderful film.'”
Brooks had been lampooning pop culture professionally for decades by then. While working as a writer for Sid Caesar’s landmark TV sketch show “Your Show of Shows,” Brooks wrote a sketch mocking the dramas of Arthur Miller for a revue called “Curtain Going Up” but, he says, “the curtain never went up.” Miller got wind of the routine when it made it into the revue “New Faces of 1952,” and encouraged Brooks to “try your hand at bigger stuff.”
Brooks won an Academy Award in 1963 for kvetching throughout the animated short “The Critic.” In 1965 he and Buck Henry created the spy spoof “Get Smart.” Brooks’ breakthrough feature film was “The Producers” in 1968. In 2001, he adapted “The Producers” for Broadway, where it won a record 12 Tony awards.
Brooks is currently working on bringing his 2007 stage musical adaptation of “Young Frankenstein” to London’s West End.
“We’re cutting it down,” he says of the musical, which ran for 485 performances on Broadway and visited The Bushnell on tour in 2009. “We’ve added three new songs — two funny, one emotional.”
Many Brooks fans don’t realize that “The Producers” wasn’t Brooks’ first Broadway musical. That would be 1957’s “Shinbone Alley,” based on the “Archy & Mehitabel” characters created by newspaper columnist Don Marquis. The show starred Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing.
“Everybody was good, but it was this intimate little show, and it should have been in a small theater,” Brooks says. “But they put us in a Broadway theater that seated 2,800 people.”
That’s about 900 seats less than there are at The Bushnell, where Brooks is appearing Sunday.
The comedy icon says he’s done the “Blazing Saddles” screenings “five or six times.” At his age, he says, “it could be dangerous for an old man to travel, but it’s not too hard to do this once a month.” Then he quickly adds, “I’m doing it twice this month.” He likes seeing the film at large theaters like The Bushnell, and not just because “the audience cheers when I come out.” The filmmaker firmly believes that the smaller-sized cinemas of today, not to mention the phenomenon of “two people watching” a streaming online movie in their bedroom (“Honey! I’ve got to pee! Stall it!”) have stifled big-screen comedies. His movies, Mel Brooks says, were made “for 1,000 people to enjoy together.”
“MEL BROOKS: BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN” featuring a screening of “Blazing Saddles” in its entirety plus a 90-minute “conversation” with Mel Brooks, starts at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 22, at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Tickets are $59.50 to $110. Information: 860-987-5900, bushnell.org.
