Mel Brooks just turned 100. And for his centennial birthday, he received the ultimate gift from the American Film Institute. They finally admitted he was right all along.
Back in June of 2000, the AFI released their massive "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list. It was a definitive ranking of the greatest American comedies ever made. Billy Wilder's brilliant 1959 drag-comedy Some Like It Hot took the number one spot. Brooks' anarchic 1974 Western spoof Blazing Saddles landed at number six.
Brooks never let it go. He spent the next 26 years openly kvetching that his movie was vastly superior. He told Vanity Fair in 2016 that while he loved Wilder's film, Blazing Saddles was undeniably the funniest movie ever made.
He was right. You know it. I know it. And as of June 28, 2026, the AFI officially knows it too.
In a totally unprecedented "honorary reorganization," the institute bumped Blazing Saddles up five spots to dethrone Some Like It Hot. AFI President Bob Gazzale released a statement simply saying, "He's right! We're happy to right this wrong as Mel celebrates his centennial. It's good to be the king, and may he live to be a 2,000-year-old man."
This isn't just a polite birthday gesture. It is a massive correction of the historical record. Blazing Saddles isn't just a funny movie. It is a terrifyingly sharp dissection of American mythmaking disguised as a series of fart jokes.
The Absolute Miracle of 1974
You cannot talk about the greatness of Blazing Saddles without talking about the sheer audacity of Mel Brooks in the 1970s. The guy was operating on a completely different frequency.
Consider this. Blazing Saddles hit theaters in February 1974. Ten months later, Brooks released Young Frankenstein. Both movies are universally recognized as masterpieces. Both heavily feature Gene Wilder. Both completely dismantled specific Hollywood genres. Nobody directs two of the greatest comedies in cinematic history in the exact same calendar year. It simply doesn't happen.
The AFI list reflects this dominance. Brooks is the only filmmaker on the entire "100 Laughs" list with three films in the top 15. You have Blazing Saddles at number one, The Producers at number eleven, and Young Frankenstein sitting at number thirteen.
But Saddles is the crown jewel. It is the one that still actively makes executives sweat.
The Executives Who Tried to Kill a Masterpiece
Hollywood loves to pretend they always understood genius. They didn't. Warner Bros. almost buried this movie forever.
When Brooks first screened Blazing Saddles for studio executives in 1974, the room was a morgue. Nobody laughed. The suits sat there in stunned, horrified silence as Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder systematically destroyed every polite convention of 1970s cinema.
The immediate executive feedback was catastrophic. They complained that it was entirely too vulgar for the American public. The prevailing opinion in the room was that they should simply dump the movie, bury the negatives, and take the financial loss rather than suffer the embarrassment of releasing it.
Think about that. The funniest movie of all time was almost written off as a tax casualty because a few guys in suits were afraid of a campfire bean scene.
Studio president John Calley was the only one with any nerve. He decided to quietly open the film in just three cities—New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—as a trial balloon. He figured he would let the public decide. The result was instantaneous. Lines wrapped around the block. The theaters were deafening. People were literally falling out of their chairs. It went on to become the studio's highest-grossing film of the entire summer.
Brooks always knew exactly who he was making this for. He told Playboy years ago that he designed it as an esoteric little picture. He wrote it for the weirdos in the balcony. The radicals. The film nuts. The guys who draw on washroom walls. It just turned out that a massive portion of the American public fit that exact description.
The Myth That You Couldn't Make This Today
If you spend five minutes on the internet, you will find someone claiming that Blazing Saddles "could never be made today."
They are completely missing the point.
People point to the aggressive use of racial slurs and the shocking boundary-pushing jokes as evidence that modern audiences are too sensitive. But that fundamental misunderstanding ignores what the movie is actually doing. Blazing Saddles isn't racist. It is one of the most aggressively anti-racist films ever produced by a major studio.
Brooks and his co-writers—including the legendary Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, and Alan Uger—weaponized the vocabulary of bigots to make the bigots look incredibly stupid. Sheriff Bart, played with effortless, towering cool by Cleavon Little, is the only competent, intelligent person in the entire town of Rock Ridge. Every single racist character in the film is portrayed as an ignorant, easily manipulated buffoon.
You couldn't make Blazing Saddles today because studio executives are terrified of nuance, not because audiences can't handle it. Audiences are desperate for comedies that actually take swings. Whoopi Goldberg has spent years defending the film against modern censorship attempts, correctly pointing out that the comedy works specifically because it forces America to look directly at its own ugly hypocrisy.
The brilliance of Richard Pryor's involvement cannot be overstated. Originally, Brooks wanted Pryor to play the role of Sheriff Bart. The studio flat-out refused, claiming Pryor's erratic reputation and history of drug use made him uninsurable. It was a massive blow. But Pryor stayed on as a writer, and his fingerprints are all over the razor-sharp dialogue. Cleavon Little eventually took the role and delivered a performance so perfectly calibrated that it's impossible to imagine anyone else wearing those Gucci saddlebags.
Structure Versus Absolute Anarchy
Why does Blazing Saddles deserve to beat Some Like It Hot?
It comes down to what you value in comedy. Some Like It Hot is a structural marvel. Billy Wilder built a Swiss watch of a screenplay. Every setup has a perfectly timed payoff. The gender-bending farce escalates logically. It is safe, brilliant, and tightly controlled.
Blazing Saddles is a Molotov cocktail.
It starts as a parody of a Western, mocking the earnestness of movies like High Noon. But by the third act, Brooks gets bored with simply mocking the genre. He decides to mock the entire concept of making a movie.
The final brawl literally breaks out of the Western set. The cowboys crash through a fake wall into a neighboring Warner Bros. soundstage where a flamboyant musical is being filmed. The fight spills into the studio commissary. They literally fight the people eating lunch. Finally, the actors spill out onto the actual streets of Burbank, California. Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder sit in a movie theater and watch the end of the movie they are currently starring in.
Nobody had ever done anything like this. It was a complete deconstruction of Hollywood mythmaking. Brooks ripped the camera back and exposed the ridiculous artificiality of the entire entertainment industry. You can draw a direct line from that chaotic ending to every meta-comedy, fourth-wall-breaking superhero movie, and absurd sketch show of the last fifty years.
The Supporting Cast of Maniacs
You can't examine this movie's legacy without looking at the murderers' row of comedic talent Brooks assembled. It is a masterclass in casting.
Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid is the emotional anchor. Wilder played the washed-up gunslinger with a quiet, tragic sweetness that perfectly counterbalanced the surrounding insanity. His delivery of the line "These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons," remains one of the greatest deadpan moments committed to film.
Harvey Korman plays the corrupt politician Hedley Lamarr. He brings a bizarre, theatrical pompousness to the villain role. He's constantly frustrated by the incompetence of his own henchmen.
And then there is Madeline Kahn.
Kahn earned an Academy Award nomination for playing Lili Von Shtupp. Think about how rare that is. The Academy notoriously hates comedies, and they especially hate vulgar spoofs. But Kahn's performance was so overwhelmingly brilliant that they had no choice. Her musical number, "I'm Tired," is a legendary parody of Marlene Dietrich. She mumbles, she groans, she complains about the exhausting nature of being a sex symbol. It is physical comedy perfection.
Add in Slim Pickens as the clueless lackey Taggart, Alex Karras as the horse-punching brute Mongo, and Brooks himself in multiple roles (including the cross-eyed Governor William J. Le Petomane). There is not a single weak link on the screen.
A Century of Mel Brooks
It is staggering to realize that Mel Brooks is 100 years old and still aggressively creating. He isn't sitting quietly in a retirement home. He is actively producing Spaceballs 2, the long-awaited sequel to his Star Wars parody, scheduled to hit theaters next year.
His career spans seven decades. He got his start in the 1950s writing for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. He dominated the stand-up and recording world with Carl Reiner through their "2,000 Year Old Man" routines. He conquered television with Get Smart. He achieved the ultra-rare EGOT status (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). He even snagged an Academy Honorary Award just a couple of years ago in 2024.
He has nothing left to prove to anyone.
But this AFI list correction clearly mattered to him. Comedy is fiercely subjective. What makes one generation laugh often makes the next generation cringe. The fact that a comedy built on 1974 cultural anxieties still reigns supreme in 2026 is proof of its fundamental structural genius.
Blazing Saddles doesn't survive because of the shock value. Shock value fades after the first viewing. It survives because underneath the vulgarity, the farting, and the chaos, it tells a genuinely compelling story about a marginalized guy outsmarting a corrupt system. It punches up. It always punches up.
What You Need to Do Right Now
Stop reading lists. Stop debating whether or not a joke from 1974 is appropriate for modern sensibilities.
Go find Blazing Saddles. You can stream it on Amazon Prime right now. Put your phone in another room. Turn the volume up. Watch the campfire scene. Watch Gene Wilder explain his tragic backstory. Watch the Tollbooth scene in the middle of the desert.
Watch a 100-year-old comedic genius completely dismantle Hollywood in 93 minutes.
