“We should write dangerously,” Mel Brooks told the writers he assembled to create his classic comedy, Blazing Saddles. “That’s what this is all about.”
The writers, including Brooks, Richard Pryor and Andrew Bergman, tried to push the envelope as far as it would stretch. Brooks’ only rule was posted on a wall in large print: FIRST, WE LAUGH. In his memoir, All About Me!, Brooks recalled the only other guidance he gave to his scribes: “Write anything you want. We will never be heard from again. We will all be in jail for making this movie.” If a joke was bizarre or dirty or socially unacceptable, Brooks was all for it — up to a point.
There was one gag he cut from the final version of Blazing Saddles, deeming it “too far,” according to Far Out Magazine. In a movie full of edgy racial jokes and gross-out scatological humor, what joke finally crossed the line?
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The offending bit showed up in the scene when the seductive Lily Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) lures Bart the Black (Cleavon Little) into her lair. “She ad-libbed, ‘Make yourself comfortable, loosen your bullets,’” remembered Brooks. In her Elmer Fudd speaking style, she asked Bart to confirm the rumor that Black men are “gifted.” (That much of the scene exists more or less intact in the final cut below.)
But there’s another version where Von Shtupp’s question in the darkened room is followed by a goofy slobbering sound, with the woman confirming, “It’s true, it’s true.”
“I hate to disillusion you,” Bart corrects her after after a beat. “But you’re sucking on my arm.”
Brooks believed that 1974 audiences weren’t quite ready for his fellatio gag. He slammed on the brakes when he viewed the joke in the editing room. “Okay, too far,” he conceded, leaving the gag on the cutting-room floor. “It was the one time in my life that I said, ‘No, this is a bit much.’”
Brooks confessed that he “was kind of afraid” of keeping one other bit in the movie: The campfire scene. “I had to risk my life and tell the truth. Surely there had to be one little sound from all those beans. But I decided to let the audience hear the real McCoy, no matter what it would cost me,” he wrote in his memoir. “The air was filled with the unmistakable sounds of nonstop flatulence. It was the greatest farting scene in cinematic history.”
Warner Bros. didn’t think so. The studio told Brooks to cut the farting scene, cut the N-words, cut Madeline Kahn’s big musical number. Brooks wrote down all the notes, then threw them in the trash. He’d do what he wanted, like at the film’s premiere at the Avco Embassy theater when he filled the lobby with live cattle. The beasts mooed and pooped and otherwise carried on like live cattle. “It was terrible and wonderful,” he explained.
Despite losing the slurping joke, Blazing Saddles managed to deliver the goods on offensive humor. “The whole movie’s in bad taste,” Brooks told NPR in 2013. “But I like bad taste.”