The Title says it all… Even my liberal friends laugh at the racial jokes. The movie could never be scripted today in that method. Is it fair to laugh at N word jokes from that movie while understanding that such conduct would be scorned today?
Is it really white people who can get their racist fears out by telling N word jokes through that movie?
In a word no, the movie is actually mocking racism. It is possible some white people like watching it for a safe way to say nigger, anything is possible.
Look here is a specific joke that is famous.
Sheriff:Let me whip this out.
Woman:Screams and faints.
*Sheriff pulls paper from his shirt.
It is making fun of racism through the racist townspeople, or look at it from this point of view does the Sheriff ever do anything that confirms racist belief?
Well, the movie was co-written by Richard Pryor. I always felt it was making fun of people with racist attitudes, not making fun or light of racism itself.
I think the movie could be made today, but it might be hard to get regular commercial backing in the U.S.
Appeal to authority!
OP if you could come back and point out which exact segment of the film you believe is validating racism we could get somewhere. Is Huckleberry Finn racist because of the use of nigger?
Ignore the use of racist language, pay attention to the actions of the black character in both.
He does ask where all the white women are…
My point is that the film doesn’t validate racism. But racist white people laugh at the jokes and seem to be immune from charges of racism had they told similar jokes in a different context.
But not for reals; as a trap because he’s aware of the white fear that women will leave the pasty, soft-handed and soft-bellied white men for tough, muscular, well-hung black men.
Lili Von Shtupp pursued him; he didn’t steal her away from the white men.
If anything Blazing Saddles beats Huckleberry Finn in the fighting racism department. Jim is just as good as some white folks; Bart’s the hero.
Ok I’m sorry then, but your OP was very badly worded and made it seem like you were accusing the film itself of being a safe way to have racist jokes told on screen.
Well yes I agree with you, and have seen similar behavior. I would go even further and posit its likely some large portion of the audience doesn’t even understand the movie’s point. I would not be shocked if this movie was a favorite on Stormfront to be honest.
Some racist people will take any chance they can to publicly validate their views. Actually, this is true for any group of disenfranchised viewholder, not just racists. It doesn’t matter that the source really doesn’t support their view.
On the flip side, the ‘targets’ will also use a film like Blazing Saddles to manufacture outrage and publicity. But the film, as written, is much more anti-racist.
I find that hard to buy as the film puts the racists in extremely bad light and makes them the butt of almost every joke. Can a racist really ignore how stupid his fellow racists are in the film and just get a Beavis & butthead giggle out of the use of some words?
“What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny’? ‘Make yourself at home’? ‘Marry my daughter’? You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… Morons.”
I’ve never seen Blazin’ Saddles so I have no opinion on it.
I have though noticed some racists use Chris Rock’s bit “black people versus niggas” as a licence to continue using the term and claim they’re not really racist. :smack:
Dave Chapelle’s Clayton Bixby skit is one of the clearest and wittiest take downs of racist thought there ever was “when I asked him why he left his wife of 25 years he said because…<comic beat>…she was a nigger lover”.
Yet Chapelle quit his show(which admittedly had become almost a parody of itself) because he said the audience was mostly people who totally misunderstood the point.
That is always a risk when writing about the nutritional value of Irish infants.
Anti-racist to the core. Funny as hell, too.
Racists will always try to claim that they are “just saying what (whatever race/group) says.”
They’re still racists.
A swing and a miss.
Sometimes people laugh at the raciest part and not the part where they are making fun of the raciest. That’s on them though. Blazing Saddles is clearly in the make fun of racist attitudes, but you need to have racist there to make fun of them.
The towns folk even get over their hatred for the Irish!
As I reread the OP, you are right. I butchered that all to hell. 
Anyways, my larger point was that you take an average guy who we will call Andy. Andy doesn’t seem like a racist. He never uses the N word in public or around friends. He, presumably, hates the word and won’t use it.
But when talking about Blazing Saddles, he laughs his ass of quoting from the movie with liberal use of the N word (and I’m using that phrase so as not to be in trouble from the mods). It seems that any other racist jokes would make Andy uncomfortable, but under the mask of merely quoting Blazing Saddles, he is protected.
Yes, the movie makes racists look like fools, but in 2013, a person couldn’t simply make a joke outside of the context of the movie without being accused of racism.
As a side note, I thought that Rock’s bit would be a monumental starting point for a refined discussion of race relations in this country. I was wrong.
Doubtless, some racists miss the point of the movie, and think that it’s sharing their views. This just proves that racists are idiots. Which I think most of us already knew.
Only a moron would miss the in-your-face obvious theme of the movie and attempt to make the same jokes without context. Which only proves that racists are morons.
ETA: yeah, what Chronos said