Brooks not only isn't a director—he isn't really a writer, either. He's the cutup in the audience whose manic laughter and unrestrained comments stop the show. Essentially, he is the audience; he's the most cynical and the most appreciative of audiences—nobody laughs harder, nobody gets more derisive. He was perfectly cast in the short "The Critic." His humor is a show-business comment on show business. Mel Brooks is in a special position: his criticism has become a branch of show business—he's a critic from the inside. He isn't expected to be orderly or disciplined; he's the irrepressible critic as clown. His comments aren't censored by the usual caution and sentimentality, but his crazy-man irrepressibility makes him lovable; he can be vicious and get away with it because he's Mel Brooks, who isn't expected to be in control. His unique charm is the surreal freedom of his kibitzer's imagination.

The other side of the coin is that he isn't self-critical. And, as his new picture, "Blazing Saddles," once again demonstrates, he doesn't have the controlling vision that a director needs. It's easy to imagine him on the set, doubled up laughing at the performers and not paying any attention to what he's supposed to be there for. Mel Brooks doesn't think like a director; he's not a planner. He doesn't even do any formal, disciplined routines; he's a genius at spontaneous repartee—which the movies have never yet been able to handle, though television can, and that's where Brooks is peerless. Out of nowhere, he says things that people talk about for decades…. [In "Blazing Saddles," the] story is about a modern black hipster (Cleavon Little) who becomes sheriff in a Western town in the eighteen-sixties—a core idea without much energy in it to start with, a variant of the plot of such movies as "The Paleface," with Bob Hope. (pp. 378-80)

Brooks's humor is intentionally graceless; he seems to fear subtlety as if it were the enemy of all he holds dear—as if it were gentility itself. Brooks has to love the comedy of chaos. He wants to offend, and he also wants to be loved for being offensive. We can share his affection for low-comedy crudeness and the comedy of chaos, but not when he pounds us over the head with strident dumb jokes, and not when we begin to feel uncomfortable for the performers—mugging and smirking and working too hard. Brooks's sense of what's funny has sunk to sour, stale faggot jokes, and insults, and to dirtying up mildewed jokes, as if that would make them fresh. I never imagine I'd think back longingly on Brooks's first film, "The Producers"—but it never sank to this. His second film, "The Twelve Chairs," was bland and pokey, but Brooks himself was funny in it. (p. 380)

Mel Brooks is always looking for laughs—and he's beginning to laugh much more easily than we do. The movie is a rehash of "Hell-zapoppin" and other slapstick burlesques, and it may appeal to those who enjoyed the rehashed humor of "What's Up, Doc?," but it doesn't have the wit that made Mel Brooks a hero. He's become like a gag writer with a joke-book memory who cracks up at every terrible joke he recalls. Most of the gags in "Blazing Saddles" never were very funny, and probably Brooks knows that and thinks that what's funny about those rotten old jokes is how unfunny they are. But as a director he doesn't have enough style to make the unfunny funny. In "Blazing Saddles" he makes the unfunny desperate. (p. 381)