Humor In Mel Brooks 'Blazing Saddles'

Blazing Saddles, a film recognized as a classic by many movie lovers, brings many elements of humor to the big screen. The Mel Brooks film has many elements of incongruity humor, and it closely relates to Kant and Kierkegaard’s philosophies on humor. Blazing Saddles is a western comedy based in the late 1800s. It tells the story of a black man that becomes the sheriff, and ultimately the hero of a small town called Rock Ridge. Initially the town has a racial problem with the new sheriff, but they begin to accept him after he saves the town from being destroyed. Blazing Saddles was a box office hit generating 119.6 million dollars and the critics loved it. This is a film with many Oscar and BAFTA nominations, it is also in the OFTA film hall

According to McGill University, Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard believed that the key to humor is a contradiction between expectation and reality. For example, in a journal by Stephan Evans, he states this about Kierkegaard’s theory, “These jokes and situations make it very clear that by "contradiction" really means "incongruity," certainly not logical or formal contradiction. A caricature is said to be comical because of the "contradiction" between likeness and unlikeness which it contains. In a similar way a person who answers a rhetorical question is said to be comical, the contradiction being that he answers a question for which no answer was expected” (Evans, 1987). Kierkegaard also believes that a satire form of comedy is a cause for humor. An example of contradiction being used in Mel Brooks’ film is the scene of the toll booth. In this scene the sheriff builds a toll booth in the middle of the desert to buy some time. There is nothing surrounding the toll booth that would prevent the attackers from going around but instead of doing the simpler thing, they do the unexpected. The each pay the ten cents to pass through. An example of Mel Brooks creating satire was the entire movie. He used pretty much every race/culture and every single one was made fun of. The film Blazing Saddles was filled with many examples of Kierkegaard’s theory on