Blazing Saddles Week

Last week marked the 45th anniversary of the classic comedy Blazing Saddles.

That film was revered like a Golden Calf in the Stroock household, where Mel Brooks was worshipped like Set or Kek.

We first saw Blazing Saddles when were seven or eight. It must have been among the first movies our father ever rented.

Our dad always said he busted out laughing at the first line of dialogue, 'Dock that chink a day's pay for napping on the job.'

Our grandfather said he felt bad for laughing so hard in the theatre until he saw  a black man sitting in front of him laughing even harder. We had wondered about that ourselves until college, when we met a black student who loved the film and laughed at all the same lines as us. For all the talk of Blazing Saddles being a Mel Brooks film, Richard Prior was a co-writer. For all the Jewish humor therein we suspect Blazing Saddles was also a window into how black people dealt with racism.