The American Film Institute has named Blazing Saddles the funniest film of all time in honor of Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday.
Previously, AFI listed Some Like It Hot as the funniest movie of all time. Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, a socially conscious Western satire starring Clevon Little and Gene Wilder, had previously been listed as No. 6 on the list.
Brooks said in 2016 that AFI had it wrong.
“I love Some Like It Hot, but we have the funniest movie ever made,” Brooks told Vanity Fair in 2016.
In honor of Brooks’ centennial Sunday, AFI president and chief executive Bob Gazzale agreed with Brooks.
“He’s right!” Gazzale told The Associated Press. “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. Happy birthday, Mel!”
In addition to Blazing Saddles, Brooks made the comedy classics The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and more. Remarkably, both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein came out in the same year, 1974. (Here are all 11 Mel Brooks movies ranked.)
Brooks once said in an interview with Playboy that he never anticipated the widespread popularity of Blazing Saddles:
“It was designed as an esoteric little picture. We wrote it for two weirdos in the balcony,” he said. “For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall — my kind of people.”
Brooks also said for the 40th anniversary Blu-ray release of the film in 2014 that Warner Bros. hesitated to release the film because of its crass humor.
“When we screened it for executives, there were few laughs,” Brooks said in the Blu-ray. He added that Warner Bros. executives opined, “It’s simply too vulgar for the American people. Let’s dump it and take a loss.”
But Brooks said that studio president John Calley decided to open it in three cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — as a trial, and “it became the studio’s top moneymaker that summer.”
Brooks, who was born 100 years and one day ago in Brooklyn, is still going strong: He is producing Spaceball 2, the four-decades-in-the-making sequel to his Star Wars parody. It is due in theaters next year.
The actor-writer-director-producer — who got his start working on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the 1950s — became a household name that decade with his 2,000 Year Old Man comedy routine, created with his longtime friend Carl Reiner.
He has been getting his well-deserved flowers in the lead up to his 100th birthday, including in Judd Apatow’s recent HBO documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!
Main image: Mel Brooks and Robyn Hilton in Blazing Saddles. Warner Bros.
Editor’s Note: Corrects link.