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Did the last humorist die yesterday?

Blazing Saddles was a movie that still defies categorization. In 1974, movies in America were highly regulated, and there were all kinds of seemingly artificial limits placed on what you could and could not see, or say, for people of all kinds of age groups. OK, normal people recognize that foul language, violence, and nudity are not appropriate for young people, but the censors then went far beyond these basic limits.

Somehow, Blazing Saddles made all kinds of end-runs around the film censors, without showing any naked bodies or using four-letter words, while still carrying a very adult social theme. One word in particular that is used throughout the movie is “The N Word“, and it is used to great effect in stabbing racism against blacks straight in the eye. And that’s the beauty of good art. Left to function properly without censorship or outside meddling, good art maximally tells its story and makes its best point.

Blazing Saddles may be funny, but it also addressed racism straight on in a way that has never been done since. And it moved the discussion about race relations farther ahead than all of the serious blather about feewings ever could. You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, though, because of the censorship, and so you’d never benefit from its valuable message.

This subject of censorship and free speech has been brought to the fore by (among other direct assaults on free speech) recent revelations that PC Woke book publishers are going through existing books by Roald Dahl and other authors and actually, unbelievably, incredibly, re-writing them to fit today’s snowflake boo-boo word fearing man-child.

It seems that today’s censors and book burners are the same people who are publishing books, and they have taken it upon themselves to be like the scientifically illiterate church censors of old re-writing Galileo’s scientific theories. They are destroying important art in the name of protecting people. These same people today would never have allowed Blazing Saddles to be released, because of the “hurtful” boo boo words nonsense.

This is civilization-destroying stuff, because when the people who publish the books are also burning the original books and then re-writing the books, you really end up with, in effect, no books worthy of being called books. Real books of original creative content carry real messages and real information, real insights, not artificially dumbed-down, white washed, or filtered content that misses the entire purpose and point of the author’s original work.

Yesterday a man named Norman Steinberg died, at the age of 83. He was the humor-filled screenwriter for Blazing Saddles, among other funny and powerful message movies. I wonder if he died of old age or of a broken heart, because he surely must have been America’s last humorist. Today’s censors say that no one is allowed to say or depict certain things (except for pedophilia, or cross-dressing, or biologically impossible and socially implausible gay/trans/etc beings which all seems all the rage among the Left), because somewhere in the universe a person’s feewings will be hurt.

Today’s censors don’t mind hurting the feelings of religiously observant Christians, Muslims and Jews, the people who keep modern society functioning, but God help you if you hurt the feelings of some pathetic 20-year-old weenie college kid somewhere. Burn that book!

You couldn’t build America today with all of the outrageous and useless regulations (which I had a direct hand in when I worked at USEPA in Washington, DC) weighing down our nation, and you couldn’t film or write Blazing Saddles today, because of all of the censorious book-burning crap coming out of Hollywood and from the supposed caretakers and curators of American culture.

Rest in peace, Mr. Steinberg. Wherever you are now, I hope you have been able to travel across artificial boundaries and achieve your highest and best abilities and purpose. Lord knows, you couldn’t do any of that here on earth today.

Today’s cultural censors would never approve this silly poster because of the gun (“guns are bad”), the rope (supposed violence), the horse (supposed animal abuse) etc

My Confession

I have a confession to make. Maybe in the grand scheme of confessions or public admissions this is not too significant. But for me, wow, the burden I am shedding by admitting this here is just tremendous. Pardon me while I take a deep breath.

My confession is that …gosh, it is tough to say this…I really enjoy Rob Schneider movies.

This is probably (hopefully) not quite as risky as admitting to watching risque movies, but it comes close, because the subjects addressed head-on in Rob Schneider movies are wide open, no-holds-barred. A gaping chasm separates his movies from the standard Hollywood affairs, and admitting to watching them, maybe sometimes on repeat, carries some social stigma.

Rob Schneider movies are not alone in the low brow humor category. They are waaay better quality than Adam Sandler or Chris Kataan movies, and probably an even toss-up with Will Ferrell’s productions.

In the genre of man-child-not-grown-up, Rob Schneider plays the idiot savant better than anyone. Adam Sandler has “goofy” and “well-intentioned-moron” down better than anyone, but we know what is coming every time. Jim Carrey has in fact actually lost his mind to a bad case of TDS and now actually mugs and over-acts in public not on purpose but as his own personal habit. When he was just acting, Jim Carrey was funny; now he is scary. But Jim Carrey is not alone in ruining well-intentioned humor with politics. Will Ferrell also has become infected with the funny-man-not-funny disease by seriously involving himself in politics, for which he is ill-suited, and so now when he appears in public it is difficult to tell if he is serious but kidding, or plain foolish but serious. Ferrell’s pre-politics Talladega Nights was top shelf damned funny, and while I am in the process of opening my life’s weak points to public scrutiny here, I might as well tell the readers that my wife and I took our two small girls to see Talladega Nights when it opened. In a former church turned into a theatre, in Galeton, PA, when our girls were really, really small. Viv and I laughed a lot, and the two tiny infants fell asleep, or so we thought, until many years later.

And now on second thought hindsight, that one movie night may account for how the one kid turned out….I suppose a movie like that could really warp a young mind…guess she wasn’t asleep after all.

So anyhow, if you are looking for lightness-beyond-levity, easy-watching, seriously-not-serious, entertaining-without-pretense, slight raunch with a straight no-PC-here face, then Rob Schneider movies are for you. The high brow of the low brow. Especially Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. And as you can imagine, I am hoping as many people as possible will watch them, so I am not feeling totally alone, like I felt when caught looking at Ladies Home Journal bra ads when I was twelve in the super market magazine aisle. It would be nice to have someone on the couch next to me, enjoying the same movie as me. Instead of hitting me with a shoe and cussing me out about it.

Select scenes from Talladega Nights 1, 2, 3, 4.

Select scenes from Rob Schneider movies 1, 2, 3.