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Mel Brooks Blasts Political Correctness: 'Blazing Saddles' Couldn't Be Made Today
Breitbart's Big Hollywood ^ | May 10, 2014 | John Nolte

Posted on 05/11/2014 4:46:18 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

In an interview with Yahoo News surrounding the 40th anniversary of his comedic masterpiece "Blazing Saddles," co-writer/director Mel Brooks blasted present-day political correctness and says he was "lucky" to have made the film in the days when he still could:

"They can't make that movie today because everybody's so politically correct. You know, the NAACP would stop a great movie that would do such a great service to black people because of the N-word," says Brooks. "You've got to really examine these things and see what's right and what's wrong. Politically correct is absolutely wrong. Because it inhibits the freedom of thought. I'm so lucky that they weren't so strong then and that the people that let things happen on the screen weren't so powerful then. I was very lucky."

In the comment sections and on Twitter, I caught all kinds of entertaining hell (Kos is especially perturbed) for my review of the new 40th Anniversary Bluray of "Blazing Saddles" and for a follow-up piece, both of which stated the obvious: That today's Left has become a bunch of insufferable, joy-killing, censorious, fascist Church Ladies who would never allow "Blazing Saddles" to be made today and that they will someday try to have the film banned.

It looks as though Mr. Brooks agrees with my first point. That's because Mel Brooks is a free-thinking liberal, not a freedom-stifling, controlling, free speech-hating leftist....

(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: blazingsaddles; comedy; hollywood; homosexualagenda; humorlessdems; politicalcorrectness; thoughtcrime
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To: Captain Jack Aubrey

Dave Chapelle made some pretty funny stuff on TV even less than 10 years ago, but realize that there is a double standard in this country.


81 posted on 05/11/2014 6:37:14 AM PDT by catfish1957 (Face it!!!! The government in DC is full of treasonous bastards)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Buying a new widescreen this weekend (old tube tv set died a few days ago & wife unit DEMANDED a new set...I had no choice...honest).

Blazing Saddles will be the first movie I pop in the player...in Blue Ray, if possible.

Classic movie.


82 posted on 05/11/2014 6:42:49 AM PDT by moovova
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To: Rummyfan

What in the wide wide world of sports is a goin’ on here?!?!


83 posted on 05/11/2014 6:52:18 AM PDT by DManA
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To: Varda

And mexican banditos.


84 posted on 05/11/2014 6:53:07 AM PDT by DManA
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

85 posted on 05/11/2014 6:55:32 AM PDT by servo1969
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

They likely wouldn’t let him make The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, Spaceballs, or Robin Hood Men In Tights.

In the final analysis, political correctness is like any other form of fanaticism, precisely because it has an absence of humor. Or really, an inability to laugh.

During the HUAC investigations, one method the investigators used to determine if someone was a fanatical communist was simply to tell a joke. The fanatic would just stare at them, and if pressed, either say that the joke was not funny, or force laughter.

The reason is that the fanatic, of whatever stripe, has a very brittle, closed idea about what the world is. For most people, laughter is an effective defense mechanism against the irrational, but the fanatic just regards it as irrelevant. It cannot fit their mental pattern, so it is just disregarded.

In the early 1970’s an American comedian was permitted to visit closed China shortly after its cultural revolution, to give a stand up comedy routine before some of its elite. But they insisted that all his jokes had to be approved ahead of time.

He decided the most innocuous joke he had was about a cow, so he told it to the political officer in charge of approval. The officer just sat there, stone faced, until the joke was over, then roundly criticized it, for *its* criticism of “one of the people’s cows, that dedicates its life, its milk, and eventually its meat to the cause of the peoples’ revolution!”

Thinking quickly, the comedian then told a bad political joke he had heard about president Nixon. The political officer approved it, after forcing himself to laugh for the better part of a minute, while the comedian sat uncomfortably.

So his entire comedy routine in China was political criticism of American leaders, and he described the wooden and forced laughter of the audiences to be creepy.

This is what life is like under a fanatical regime. So when you consider political correctness, remember that its real purpose has nothing to do with offending others, but that such people *want* a rigidly conforming society that is forced to follow their rules.


86 posted on 05/11/2014 6:55:58 AM PDT by yefragetuwrabrumuy (WoT News: Rantburg.com)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

War on Women (WOW) concerns:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_urvjCXg6c


87 posted on 05/11/2014 6:56:04 AM PDT by DManA
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To: DemforBush
“Baby, please! I am NOT from Havana!”

I finally figured out where that line came from.......It was based on "Superman" from The Godfather Part II, in the scene where Michael finds out Fredo betrayed him.

88 posted on 05/11/2014 6:59:17 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Here's one that would really have the feminazis up in arms:

"Qualifications?"

"Rape ... murder ... arson ... rape."

"You said rape twice."

"I like rape."

89 posted on 05/11/2014 7:00:38 AM PDT by Mr Ramsbotham (Laws against sodomy are honored in the breech.)
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To: catfish1957
Dave Chapelle made some pretty funny stuff on TV even less than 10 years ago, but realize that there is a double standard in this country.

Like this ?


90 posted on 05/11/2014 7:00:59 AM PDT by UCANSEE2 (Lost my tagline on Flight MH370. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
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To: wolf24

“Y’know, Nietzsche says, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’”

“Oh, blow it out out your a—, Howard.”


91 posted on 05/11/2014 7:02:18 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: John W
Loved The Producers for Springtime For Hitler alone.

The original, not the lame remake.

92 posted on 05/11/2014 7:03:17 AM PDT by dfwgator
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To: TomGuy

“Even some of those pre-1990 movies have been edited to reflect the more current PC culture. “

They remade Red Dawn and threw in every race they could, instead of having a bunch of white rural kids in it. It was a terrible remake.


93 posted on 05/11/2014 7:03:31 AM PDT by CodeToad (Arm Up! They Are!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

This thread is authentic FR gibberish....


94 posted on 05/11/2014 7:06:00 AM PDT by GSWarrior
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

But we don’t want the Irish.....


95 posted on 05/11/2014 7:06:19 AM PDT by Darren McCarty (Abortion - legalized murder for convenience)
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To: TomGuy
Many pre-1990 movies could not be made today -- without major overhauls in scripts and characters.

Yet liberals have always complained about those bad old days when...horror of horrors...there were movie censors and certain things could not be shown on screen. Now they're imposing their own censorship, and feel righteous and justified doing it.

96 posted on 05/11/2014 7:10:36 AM PDT by Nea Wood (When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.-Sowell)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Think about what the fascist gay left has already accomplished when it comes to silencing, bullying, and stripping people of their livelihood.

Not totally true. They have in fact been working very hard to find gainful employment for one of their own!

Too bad he's a third string football player.

97 posted on 05/11/2014 7:25:59 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
That today's Left has become a bunch of insufferable, joy-killing, censorious, fascist Church Ladies who would never allow "Blazing Saddles" to be made today and that they will someday try to have the film banned.

The agitators of the 1968 revolution were killjoys. They castrated cartoons and turned Tom & Jerry into cooperative buddies, Yogi's "gang" into ecogoodies, and other boring pablum.

The same vanguard leftists who decried male chauvinist pigs defended Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton.

They turned "rock and roll" into fern bar music in the 1970s.

Hamburgers have been turned into "heart attacks on a plate".

Comic books champion gay heroes at every turn (some editors in chief have even been publicly gay activists).

In the 1970s, "punk rock" (the original incarnation, which celebrated low culture of rock and roll, comix, b-movies, trashy paperbacks, etc.) pushed back against the condescending self-rightousness of politically correct hippies. Then it got co-opted by the Marxist left and politicized into what it originally rose up against.

In the 1980s I saw this crud gaining ground (living in Boston at the time) and by the Clinton 90s everyone was tripping over their tongue trying to use the "new" terms for "mailman" etc.

Then the public pushed back and by the Bush 21st century it had largely become a ridiculed thing of the past. But with the Obama-Clintonista crowd back in power, it's been pushed to the forefront once again.

Forget about Disney ever re-issuing Song of the South...

98 posted on 05/11/2014 7:30:00 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (The new witchhunt: "Do you NOW, . . . or have you EVER , . . supported traditional marriage?")
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To: Old Yeller
He needs to remake Blazing Saddles as an over the top parody of political correctness.

>> Yea, it would be 2 hours on non-stop hammering of white males.

Kind of what Tarantino's Django movie was.

The klan hood scene was even an attempt at trying to play up "Blazing Saddles" type humor.

99 posted on 05/11/2014 7:36:43 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (The new witchhunt: "Do you NOW, . . . or have you EVER , . . supported traditional marriage?")
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To: yefragetuwrabrumuy

There exists a new un-elected “Un-American Activities Committee” among the Left who are purging dissenters from the corporate world. Read my tagline...


100 posted on 05/11/2014 7:40:19 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (The new witchhunt: "Do you NOW, . . . or have you EVER , . . supported traditional marriage?")
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