#WrightWatch: Blazing Saddles
The only joke I laughed out loud to in this was ‘well, that’s about it for this suit’. Probably not correctly remembered.
Let’s add that to the line in His Girl Friday, ‘his father was a snake’. Because I laughed out loud at that, and barely chuckled at the rest.
There’s a great couplet also in Much Ado About Nothing: ‘I see, lady, this gentleman is not in your books/No; and he were, I would burn my study.’ But I gave up halfway through reading it. That play is standard Shakespeare linguistic excellence, a couple of his best characters and some of his dumbest plotting.
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I always say that laughter is an uncommon reaction for me. But my reaction to Black Dynamite, which involved sounds closer to shrieking than laughter, possibly discounts this. Though again, the joy I felt in that movie was the goofiness compounded by the surprisingly good martial arts on display. Michael Jai White can actually fight and I was immediately delighted and furious that Hollywood is not busy giving all the films it can to one of the few people in its system that can actually do martial arts. Seriously, put him in a Fast and the Furious film or something.
All this is to say…I like comedy. So long as it’s well plotted and the jokes are good (and they are good in Blazing Saddles — whether it’s farting or smart jabs like ‘of course, you’ll have the decency not to tell anyone I spoke to you’) I will smile throughout and perhaps more vitally, feel a constant low-key happiness which makes for an excellent headache cure. But I don’t laugh.
That’s fine though. That’s me. And my lack of laughter doesn’t take away from Blazing Saddles’ comedy. I want to write better comedy — what I try for is all seriousness, no levity, and that’s no way to be. I doubt my ability to craft comedic situations: I know by now that the situations I find comedic other people do not. But the writing of Mel Brooks offers another way. The jokes in Blazing Saddles, and the lines above, all come from a place of meaning. They are, in that moment, the best way for that character to express their feelings, or for the writer to state — with perfect economy — the nature of the world. They aren’t dependent on inherent goofiness, like a lot of great comedy which I wouldn’t trust myself to emulate. They just…say what is. . With precise word choice and rhythm.
I can probably have a go at that.
