Inducing Hilarity by Doses of Shock

[Dave Monroe]

>From Rick Lyman, "Introducing Hilarity by Doses of
Shock," New York Times, Friday, December 14th, 2001
...

This article is the 16th in a series of discussions
with noted directors, actors, screenwriters,
cinematographers and others in the film industry. In
each article, a filmmaker selects and discusses a
movie that has personal meaning.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Brian Grazer sat behind the
sleek executive conference table in the headquarters
of Imagine Entertainment, enthusiastically working his
way through a Cobb salad.

"I saw 'Blazing Saddles' when it first came out, and I
thought it was the funniest movie I had ever seen in
my life," Mr. Grazer said. "I just thought it was
gut-splitting, shocking, hysterical. At the time, Mel
Brooks was new to me. I hadn't seen any of his other
movies. And I thought the movie was just the most
extremely funny thing I had ever experienced. Based on
seeing it, I changed the course of my life."

A cassette of this 1974 comedy had been slipped into a
VCR attached to the big-screen television set at one
end of the conference room ...

[...]

"It was the birth of a certain type of comedy that I
call shock comedy," Mr. Grazer said. "The comedies
that preceded it were more gentle and earnest. This
one was aggressive and in your face, and dealing in a
very smart and startling way with the most intense
social issues, from racial bigotry to sexuality. It
was really shocking, and it did everything to wow you
or stir you up or mix you up, to take you off balance,
every single moment. It subverted all of your
expectations....

[...]

"Listen to this language," Mr. Grazer said. "You just
couldn't say this kind of stuff on the screen in those
days. And you certainly couldn't do it today. No way.
This movie was a kind of singular moment where it was
somehow all right ....

[...]

In a way, it was a parody of the whole idea of hipness
as played out against the backdrop of the most
conservative and traditional of movie genres. Just as
black musicians of the early decades of the 20th
century developed their own jargon, to signal one
another that the joke was really on the whites — that
they were bound together in this alternative world of
hipness that the whites all around them were too
square to grasp — so does Mr. Brooks flatter the
audience by making it part of Little's hip world.

[...]

"This is so subversive, so undercutting of the
conventional stakes of movies, especially back in the
early 70's," Mr. Grazer said. "That's one of the main
things this movie taught me, the use of
counterpoint...."

[...]

The anachronisms are everywhere....

[...]

The movie constantly moves back and forth between
fidelity to the tired conventions of traditional
westerns and undercutting them by mixing in ridiculous
and incongruous elements. "It's like there's no
center," Mr. Grazer said. "Brooks is just coming at us
from all sides, from every genre and time period,
mixing together all sorts of tones. The mix is very
absurd and then very serious, until you don't know
where you stand. It's all about the joy of breaking
with conventions, while at the same time nostalgically
embracing them."

[...]

Mr. Brooks comes at the audience from both sides,
goofy lowbrow humor along with smart references to
previous films and established stereotypes. When
Madeline Kahn appears as an initially villainous
seductress, the fact that she is clearly not the blond
bombshell she imagines herself to be is enough to
carry the joke; audiences that are aware that she is a
direct spoof on the dance hall singer played by
Marlene Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again" (1939) can
get an extra jolt of enjoyment. "You don't need to
know that to get the joke, to enjoy the scene," Mr.
Grazer said. "But if you do know that, it adds
something. Throughout the movie, the humor is very
layered that way."

[...]

At the end of the movie, of course, Mel Brooks throws
all logic and convention out the window....

[...]

"It is just amazing, just brilliant," Mr. Grazer said.
"The movie goes completely anarchic. This is where
Brooks throws out all the rules and says: `That's it;
there are no rules anymore. I've covered everything;
I've picked on everybody. Now I'm going to be an
anarchist.'"

[...]

"As I look inside the scenes in this movie, I can see
the rules and the axioms that I've been using to make
myself successful, to be able to produce comedies," he
said. "The use of counterpoint. The layering. Giving
your hero a power. If the context is to see a thing in
a certain way, you suddenly do the opposite thing.
Anytime you're inside a scene in a comedy, you should
do the opposite of what's normal or expected, whether
it's in the casting or in the material."

[...]

"It's O.K. to go against convention," Mr. Grazer said.
"All of your characters don't have to be likable. You
don't have to have movie stars for audiences to
connect. Studio guys are always saying the characters
have to develop; they have to have an arc. But they
don't. They don't. All you have to be is smart about
it. That's what Mel Brooks was. That's my take-away
from this movie after 25 years. You approach a movie
like he did, with complete confidence. He's trusting
you, as an audience, to understand the language of
movies. He's trusting that you know what these
references mean. And his confidence is contagious."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/14/movies/14WATC.html?todaysheadlines

Heavily edited on my part, do note that Grazer's
discussion has far more to do with race than I let him
let on here, but this does have a familiar ring to it.
 The early 70s, perhaps, were "a singular moment" so
far as such cultural productions go, perhaps ...

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