11 Shameless 1970s Comedies That Just Don’t Care If You’re Offended

There are lots of curious things about this very ’70s chase movie from the era when CB radio was king: The license plate on the Bandit’s car, the insults, and most of all the initial dialogue between the Bandit (Burt Reynolds) and Frog (Sally Field).

But if you buckle in, relax, and turn off your brain, you’ll find that this movie is incredibly fun — and that the chemistry between Fields and Reynolds feels easygoing and natural, even if none of their exchanges would make it into a modern movie.

Bill Murray’s Tripper Harrison delivers a monologue explaining why Camp Mohawk is “the best darn camp there is” that would be completely unfilmable in 2024. But it’s a high point for 1970s comedies.

He’s sabotaging the competition, which makes it even funnier. “Each camper will stalk and kill his own bear in our private wildlife reserve,” he promises. He’s just getting started.

Murray would soon reunite with Meatballs director Ivan Reitman for Stripes and Ghostbusters.

Subversion is the name of the game for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which tapped into such an appreciative audience that it has stayed in theaters continuously since its release nearly 50 years ago, where people dress (or cross-dress) as their favorite characters. It’s a transgressive masterpiece.

Will it offend squares? Yes! But it may also make them feel safe enough to un-clutch their pearls and replace them with something more fun.

Our all-time favorite comedy manages to combine sweetness and flagrant offense.

“I was born a poor Black child,” Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson explains at the start of this absurdist masterpiece, and it all builds up into a righteous kung-fu takedown at his hideously tacky mansion that features maybe the only time in history it’s been totally OK for a white guy to scream the most offensive of all racial slurs.

No one else could have pulled of the balancing act except for Martin, whose special purpose is to make us all laugh.

What can you expect from a movie whose hero is a fresh-out-of-prison pimp on the warpath (Rudy Ray Moore)?

Dolemite is filled with bad language, various forms of egregious behavior, and the glamorization of Dolemite’s whole criminal lifestyle, so you have to decided early on if you’re going to go along or not.

You might appreciate it more if you start by watching the great 2019 Eddie Murphy film Dolemite Is My Name. Or watch the original first and then watch Dolemite Is My Name to see the legend behind the 1975 film. You really can’t go wrong.

If you have no tolerance for jokes about the Bible, move along: With Life of Brian, Monty Python takes on the ultimate sacred cow, the story of Jesus.

It looks as magnificent as Hollywood’s biggest Biblical epics, which makes its takedown of pomposity all the more subversive and hysterical.

A great many great bits and routines darkly culminate in the deranged cheeriness of the final musical number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

Blazing Saddles is filled dicey language — but uses it to ridicule bigotry. Written by a team that included Richard Pryor, the Mel Brooks classic is very much on the side of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little, above), a Black sheriff trying to bring progress to the Wild West.

The American Film Institute ranks Blazing Saddles as the sixth-funniest movie of all time, behind Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, and Duck Soup.

Brooks disagrees: “I love Some Like It Hot, but we have the funniest movie ever made,” Brooks told Vanity Fair in 2016.

Here are 12 Behind the Scenes stories from the making of Blazing Saddles.

Shockingly, Mel Brooks released Young Frankenstein — co-written with star Gene Wilder (above with Teri Garr) just a few months after Blazing Saddles. Talk about a hot streak.

Many fans prefer Young Frankenstein to Blazing Saddles, and that’s great — humor is subjective. And so is taste. There are lots of double entendres — many of them deftly handled by Garr, and the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” scene makes lots of people uncomfortable. (Brooks and Wilder argued about whether it was funny enough to put in the movie.)

We’re barely scratching the surface of Young Frankenstein, but can offer these behind the scenes stories about the making of one of the greatest 1970s comedies.

Mixing very smart jokes with very gratuitous flesh and racial humor, The Kentucky Fried Movie is the modern-day definition of problematic — but it’s also a perfect time capsule of the freewheeling 1970s.

It spots and skewers genres from kung-fu to Blaxploitation to women-in-prison movies in quick-hit, take-it-or-leave it sketches that are perfect sendups of a whole slew of grindhouse classics.

It’s also an important movie, believe it or not — it was the breakthrough for its director, John Landis, and for its writers, the comedic team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would soon go on to make Airplane.

Here are 13 behind the scenes stories from Kentucky Fried Movie, a still-thrilling example of 1970s comedies at their most goofily subversive.

If you aren’t offended by anything in this John Waters trashterpiece, you may not be offendable: It’s made to push buttons. The film stars Divine as a criminal going by Babs Johnson, who is proudly “the filthiest person alive.” The film’s tagline is “an exercise in poor taste.”

How poor? We can’t even describe it here. But we love John Waters, one of the coolest people alive, and the king of boundary-pushing 1970s comedies.

The last movie Andy Warhol produced seems desperate to out-John Waters John Waters. Directed by Jed Johnson, it focuses on a housewife (Carroll Baker) who enlists people like drifter L.T. (Perry King, also above) to perform reprehensible tasks.

We have a high tolerance for dark comedies, but this is the only movie on this list we had to bail out on.

You might also like this list of Mel Brooks behind the scenes stories in honor of his 98th birthday, including some from 1970s comedies that aren’t on this list

Main image: Kentucky Fried Movie. United Film Distribution Company.

Editor’s Note: Corrects link.