Blazing Saddles/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Acceptable Ethnic Targets: Mexican and Arab bandits, though the film also takes Refuge in Audacity.
    • Blacks and East Asians too, to some degree, but then that's part of the joke.
      • References this attitude toward the Irish, although only one character seems to hold the view.
    • Once-Acceptable Targets: Gays (and this is hardly the only Mel Brooks movie for which this is true!). Refuge in Audacity applies.
  • Acceptable Political Targets: Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Acceptable Targets: The joke about small town people being idiots. Of course, it's right they're racist but the joke relies on a direct implication between being foolish and living on a small community.
  • Award Snub: Lampshaded. Hedley did risk that Academy Award nomination after all...
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Line? What is this line you speak of?
    • Let's just say it Crosses the Line so often it might as well be a game of Ping Pong.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: It would take less time to list the scenes that don't qualify.
    • There's about 10 seconds of the movie about 9 minutes in. That's about it.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The goddamn title theme.
    • They wanted someone [[Poor Man's Substitute|"Like Frankie Laine". At the audition, Frankie Laine showed up.
  • Ear Worm: The Theme Tune, Lily Von Sthupps "I'm Tired" and the musical number "The French Mistake"
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: If you don't finish watching Blazing Saddles with Mongo as your favorite character, then you have no sense of humor.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: From the song "I'm Tired", the line "Let's face it. Everything below the waist is kaput!" is not as amusing since Madeline Kahn passed away from ovarian cancer in 1999.
  • Genius Bonus:

Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.
Hedley Lamarr: How?
Taggart: We'll kill the first born male child in every household!
Hedley Lamarr: [after some consideration] Too Jewish.

    • "Mongo! Santa Maria!" Mongo Santamaria was a famous jazz musician.
    • Governor Lepetomane: "Le Petomane" was the stage name of a French entertainer who was famous for being able to fart at will. It's not a coincidence that one of the most famous scenes in this movie is "cowboys farting after eating beans".
    • One would have to be a fan of old American movies to get the following:

Olson Johnson: Our fathers came across the prairie! Fought Indians! Fought drought, fought locusts, fought Dix! Remember when Richard Dix came in here, and tried to take over this town!?

    • Similarly...

"You'd do it for Randolph Scott." Scott was the Western hero for decades, but by the time this movie came out, he'd been retired and out of the public eye for ten years.