I loved Hogan’s Heroes. Bob Crane and Richard Dawson, so handsome 
For serious push-the-envelope comedic talent, I think that the Smothers Brothers were the best. They got kicked off the air for refusing to bow to the censors. There wasn’t much they wouldn’t take on.
Smothers Brothers were the best.
I loved Hogan’s Heroes (had a crush on Bob Crane. And Richard Dawson. And Robert Clary. ) but my father, who appreciated comedy and subversive humor, steadfastly refused to watch it because he thought it trivialized the war. He was a WWII vet who didn’t see combat but was assigned to transport troops back home.
“Und alvays too soon” B-)
Yup, MAS*H was quite sexist.
I think it could be made today. Some of the jokes would change but the essential ones would remain, from the frontier gibberish to the farting scene to Hedley not Heddy Lamarr, etc. I think the drug jokes would change and some of the racial ones are outdated, but not the one when the workers are asked to sing a traditional song and they break into I Get No Kick From Champagne. I think the tenor of the movie is so bluntly anti-racism of all kinds that it would be taken that way. To me, a key joke is when the townspeople recruit the various worker groups around them and there’s a negotiation in which every racial and ethnic stereotype is run through … and they take them all but not the Irish (and then they of course agree to take the Irish too). That joke, with its historical setting, works today.
BTW, there’s an odd Seinfeld Comics in Cars episode where he arranges to meet Carl Reiner and Carl reveals he eats with Mel every night. So Jerry gets invited and has to pick up deli and they sit at folding TV tables and watch TV as Mel does shtick. The man is always on.
MASH evolved, though. The sexist way Hot Lips was portrayed was worse in the movie, and as the series went on, they changed her and how she was perceived by others; stopped calling her Hot Lips, for instance.
What was lampoon-able about her character was her straight-laced-ness and uber-military bearing–they didn’t need to be sexist to poke fun at that (as for instance it was not necessary in the portrayal of Frank) and they gradually stopped. Didn’t make the show less funny to stop calling her Hot Lips.
Another example–Cuckoo’s Nest as a book is incredibly sexist–with Nurse Ratchet reduced to a pair of huge breasts most of the time. By the time the movie was made, it focused on her mean-ness, not her body. Which was less sexist but no less effective.
To continue to digress to literature, a lot of 50s and 60s lit was more sexist than stuff written before or after–Mailer, Updike, Roth (known in some circles as the “midcentury misogynists”) used women as props–there’s more respect for women as actual people in most 19th century novels than a 100 years later. I read some of these as a teen and kept feeling uncomfortable–it’s great literature, so what’s wrong with me that I feel awful about the women in them; I must be too sensitive. Now I’m more comfortable saying it’s not me; it’s them.
There’s an old story about “Animal House,” that when the studio executives first saw it they were aghast at the scened at the Dexter Lake Club. They thought it might cause incidents in the theaters. The executives and the producers agreed that the producers were to screen the movie for Richard Pryor and if the scene was ok with him, they would release it as is.
Pryor had no problem with it, thought the scene was very funny and the rest, as they say, is history.
Is that the scene where they run into Otis Day and the Knights with their ‘dates?’
That’s the one.
That was one of the funniest scenes in the movie. That’s saying a lot since almost every scene was funny.
Richard Pryor was a main writer on Blazing Saddles.
When we first watched it with OUR kids, they said “Oh. Now we know where you get all your jokes.”
Can’t wait for the Broadway musical version.
I believe that “The Producers” was considered more shocking than “Blazing Saddles”–the sheer nerve of “Springtime For Hitler”.
I was going to mention that, but then even the revival with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick was over a decade ago.
And Brooks only got away with the Producers only because there was no way anybody can confuse it with a pro-Nazi movie given the cast and writers.
Blazing Saddles could be made today, among other things, that Richard Pryor was one of the chief writers on it. The thing with Mel Brooks movies is that the use of racial jokes and such is not mean. If you look at the “Producers”, besides the obvious one of using the Nazis as comedic fodder, the portrayal of the director and his ‘assistant’ were over the top, yet very few gays had problems with it (in large part I suspect because the kind of character being portrayed was like someone they met, least according to gay friends of mine). If you look at blazing saddles, it is poking fun at racial stereotypes and no one is left out of it and Pryor wrote those jokes to make fun of the stereotypes (I saw blazing Saddles in a theater where the audience had a pretty large percentage of blacks, and they howled with the stereotypes being blown out). It is kind of hard to be offended when the humor is more making fun of those who hold the beliefs (my favorite line? Gene Wilder saying “What do you expect of these people, these are simple people, farm folk, people of the earth…you know, morons”). When the producers came out on broadway, there were some in the Jewish community that were upset, but a Rabbi wrote a great article and said that in Jewish tradition, one of the chief forms of dealing with bullies and tyrants was making fun of them, that the tradition of Purim was a classic example of that. More importantly, with so many groups getting it (“Baby, please, I ain’t Cuban”), hard to take it seriously.
One of the biggest ironies is that the guy who played the overseer, Taggert, was horrified at the dialog, having grown up in the Jim Crow south he was horrified at having to say the lines, Brooks and Pryor had to convince him it was alright, that his character was meant to make fun of racists, not cheer them on.
More importantly, the hero of the movie is the suave black Sheriff (an amazing Clevon Little), he is one of the few decent characters in the whole movie.
Yes, yes, yes! I love “midcentury misogynists”–never heard it before. I called them the “Male Menopausal School of Writing,” and would add Saul Bellow to the list.
The club scene with Otis Day and the Knights; “We were just…LEAVING!” And from Blazzing Saddles;"is it troo vaht dey say about you peeple? Ohhh, ohhh…it’s troo, it’s troo!
“Is that the scene where they run into Otis Day and the Knights with their ‘dates?’”
In the PG household, we have been known to say “Do you mind if we dance with yo’ dates?”
“Leaving? What a good idea!”
God, that movie is hysterical. I made my kids watch it before they went off to college.
Conversely, the actor Stephen Tobolowsky was taken aback by the reaction of the extras when filming a scene in “Mississippi Burning”, where his character (the KKK Grand Dragon) is giving a speech. The crowd was responding positively…too positively. The director told him to keep going, it would make for great film.
I adore Mel Brooks. I really don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie from him and done anything other than laugh and laugh very hard.
My Roma heritage is one of the last ones where you can openly ridicule and glamorize it without any real fear of backlash. (I mean really, what other ethnicity can you wear on Halloween without some backlash?) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said in my life “No really, Gypsies are real people. We’re not a Hollywood invention.” I gave up being offended long ago… now I’m somewhere between annoyed and apathetic.
I think people stereotype my generation as being too thin skinned. Maybe it is, but I’m not quite sure why that’s a bad thing.
Personally, I think that if you need to be sexist, homophobic, racist, etc in your comedy then you’re not very funny. It’s lazy humor to me.
Blazing Saddles could certainly be made today. I don’t think it has anything on more recent films like Borat (which, by the way, I thought was terrible and don’t think I laughed once. Did NOT understand the appeal.)