Credit: Far Out / HBO Max
Tue 18 August 2026 1:30, UK
Having never met a joke he wasn’t willing to tell onscreen, it must have taken something shocking for Mel Brooks to decide that one moment was too risqué and near-the-knuckle to make it onto the big screen.
This is the guy who built his career on going where no other mainstream filmmaker had dared to go before, turning the Nazis into mercilessly mocked punchlines in The Producers, a picture that was as controversial before and during its release as it was after.
Having conquered that frontier in his feature-length debut, there was barely a stone he’d leave unturned. The EGOT-winning centenarian has noted that the one and only thing he’ll never joke about under any circumstances is concentration camps, which is why he hates Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, but anything else? As far as he’s concerned, it’s fair game.
Brooks didn’t go out of his way to court controversy and backlash, but he did have a funny way of finding it. It had a lot to do with casual audiences and studio bosses being completely unprepared for the scattershot gags, skits, and taboo-tackling scenes that he wrote for his films, but one time, even the anarchic icon himself had to pull back and leave a sequence on the cutting room floor.
Needless to say, a lot of the humour in the 1974 masterpiece, Blazing Saddles, has to do with race relations, whether they’re tied to the Old West setting, the America into which the movie was released, or a combination of both. For its creator’s money, it’s the funniest flick that’s ever been made, but not everything he scripted made the final cut.
“The executives didn’t want the farting scene kept in the movie,” Brooks recounted. “They wanted that out. I told them I would get rid of it, but I never touched it. Obviously, that scene, as well as others the executives didn’t like, were kept.” He lied to them about the farts, but he still found himself backing down.
While Blazing Saddles does contain a love scene between Cleavon Little’s Bart and Madeline Kahn’s Lili Von Shtupp, it’s fairly tame, all things considered. The lights go out, you hear her say, “Oh, it’s true, it’s true,” which shouldn’t need to be explained, but originally, the filmmaker went one step further.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“The joke we had written was for Cleavon to then say, ‘Excuse me, ma’am; I hate to disillusion you, but you’re sucking on my arm,’” Brooks revealed. “We had to tone down the racial aspect of that scene. It was too much for its time.” For someone who’s never been shy in going for the comedic jugular of bad taste, it says a lot that the Young Frankenstein mastermind thought he’d gone too far.
You’d have to say he’s right, too: it didn’t add anything to the scene that wasn’t already there, and it feels a little too cheap and tasteless for Blazing Saddles, which was more all-encompassing in its mockery of anyone and everything. Still, it’s not often that the 100-year-old admits he’s crossed a line.
