Laugh, Dammit!
Why so serious?
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My closest friend Mike and I have known each other since 1st Grade. Until we graduated high school, we were pretty much inseparable. Mike was an only child, and I was the oldest of six, so he had a lot more leeway than I did. I was expected to be the responsible third parent, while Mike was free to do a lot more exploring — and his dad was much cooler than mine. As far as my dad was concerned, Mike led me to the person, place and occasion of sin.
Anyway, Mike was always getting me into “situations”. One of those situations was in 8th Grade, when he talked me into getting a fake ID that said we were 18 years old. Did we want to buy booze and cigarettes, or vote? Nope. We wanted to see R-rated movies without a parent or guardian.
We went up the street to an old house, where a woman who looked and sounded exactly like Selma Diamond ran a notary service and made ID cards to order, all laminated and everything. Mike, who’s now an attorney, walked in like John Wayne and ordered his card. Meanwhile, I was nearly defiling myself and shaking like Jell-O in an earthquake. I can’t imagine I looked anywhere near 18. Neither of us were even shaving then, but Mike had nerves of steel, while mine where made of over-cooked noodles. I wasn’t then the outlaw I have become.
I think we paid $5 each, which was a fortune for a couple of grade schoolers in 1974, even though I had a job pulling down $25/week at the time, selling motorcycle tires for my uncle, and pumping gas at my cousin’s Sinclair station.
The cards weren’t even cooled yet when we hit the Alabama cinema, one of those old fading movie palaces. It had a balcony and deco interior, and a pretty decent snack bar. Years later in high school, Mike and I hung out there on Saturday nights to see the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he had permission, I had to sneak out). The place was a neighborhood institution.
The first R-rated movie we saw was The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds. That was the first time I had ever heard adults using cuss words in casual conversation. Oh sure, I learned most of them when my cousin Peter ran over Dad’s foot with a tractor, but that was just a long string of obscenities without syntax. Now I was hearing them used discreetly as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives.
The next movie we saw changed my life.
At the time, I knew almost nothing about the writer/director, but the star I knew as Willie Wonka, from a much tamer, more kid-friendly flick. The movie exploded my horizons. It steered me to the likes of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce. It launched me on a creative odyssey that I am still living out.
That afternoon, I sat in the audience, transfixed by comedy I had never imagined. It lampooned everyone and everything. It fricasseed every racial and ethnic stereotype. It lambasted the Western genre. It grilled Hollywood. It stripped politicians naked and ate lunch off their bellies. It took every cultural sacred cow and poked it, prodded it, tweaked it, spanked it, and sent it away laughing.
It is hard to believe it’s been 50 years since Mel Brooks created the greatest comedy of all time: Blazing Saddles.
These days, I can’t even quote most of the best lines without someone getting their feathers ruffled. I think every racial and ethnic epithet in the English language, and a few in German, are in there. Every Hollywood trope and cultural meme are in there. Every form of comedy, from sight gags and slap stick, to malaprops and double entendre are piled neck deep. I can’t count how many times I’ve watched the film, and yet there’s always something new in it.
The beauty of Blazing Saddles is that at a time when America has forgotten how to laugh at itself, it sits there like a hang nail on Bumbledick ideology. The film is so well crafted that every frame depends on every other frame. One gag can’t be removed, without leaving a yawning hole in the whole. It can’t be dubbed, because the dialogue and the visuals are woven like a fine tapestry, and a dropped stitch would be conspicuous by its absence. It is perhaps more relevant now, than it was in 1974.
Blazing Saddles is such a classic work of comedy that it can’t be vanished, and to banish it would only draw more attention to it. It is subversive in the way Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe poked a finger in the eye of Victorian rigidity. It transcends time and place to speak eternal truths in the most crass of terms.
The film is the quintessential American comedy — irreverent, satirical and just plain loony. From the Old West setting to back lot food fights, from Frankie Laine’s straight rendering of the Western-style theme song to Count Basie’s orchestra playing the outro in the desert, while the hero rides a limo into the sunset, the film encompasses the entire legacy of American comedy and culture. The Vaudeville bloodlines include Mae West, Will Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. No stone is left unmocked, even down to the proliferation of toll roads and hanging horses.
Sitting there with Mike in the Alabama cinema, that 13-year-old kid was shocked, embarrassed, paranoid, and well…tickled to the point of side cramps. There was a entire carnival of possibilities flickering across his eyeballs, even as the corpses of sacred cows piled up at his feet. In an afternoon, that kid understood what Woody Allen so precisely said through the character of Lester, “Comedy is pain plus time.”
These memories came flooding back as I listened to the reviews of Matt Walsh’s new film, Am I Racist? Though it is not yet available in my neck of the woods, it sounds as if this film may be the heir to Blazing Saddles, with a healthy dose of This Is Spinal Tap and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Judging by Walsh’s last film What Is A Woman?, he makes a fine picador in the cultural bullfight.
We desperately need comedy right now, to poke holes in self-inflated balloons (or is that buffoons?).
From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, to Molière’s Tartuffe and Shaw’s Candida, the role of satire has always been to yank society’s corn cobs out of its hindquarters. It gives us the separation needed to turn tragedy into comedy, and breaks the ice that forms around intractable poles.
Humans are absurd creatures, and we tend to let our absurdities congeal into dogma. The satirist lances the boil of dogma and begins the healing process. It is often a painful, and always a messy task, but we can not allow ourselves to become so unyielding that we lose sight of just how ridiculous life truly is.
Sitting with Mike in that cinema 50 years ago, I had an epiphany: no cow is so sacred that it can’t be grilled. Without the release valve of satire, the pressure cooker will explode sooner than later.
I’ll be sending a link to Mike to thank him for that fake ID. Avalanches always begin with a snowball.
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If you haven’t had enough cultural references for one article, then I’ll add one more, because farce and satire go hand-in-hand. Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) is a tour de force of comedy and comedians, perfect for a rousing drinking game of Spot-The-Cameo. I consider this one of Spencer Tracey’s best roles, as well. Sláinte!
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