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Every few months, some douchebag comes along to make the grand pronouncement that Blazing Saddles could not be made today, for reasons of “woke.”
This is very true, largely because not a whole lot of people would get the Hedy Lamarr references. And heck, I can tell you from personal experience that even the most solid Marlene Dietrich impression doesn’t really do much for anyone these days.
That is not to say that there aren’t certain parts that certain oversensitive types might object to:
But you know what actually couldn’t be made today and not just because of dated references? The abortion episode of “Maude.”
Via Indiewire:
How can we be so sure? Because Lear and his producing team pitched it as part of their “Live in Front of a Studio Audience” series — and they were shut down.
“We did these specials on ABC, these live shows with Jimmy Kimmel, and we were wanting to show the relevance of [Lear’s] shows then and now,” Lear’s former producing partner, Brent Miller, said during a panel discussion at the ATX TV Festival Saturday night. “To your question of, ‘Could ‘Maude’ be done today?’ We tried to do this episode on one of those live specials, and unfortunately it wasn’t green lit. So it kind of answers your question right there: Maybe it’s not able to be on TV today, for whatever reason, but it is something we pursued.”
One thing I notice from these people who expound on things that could or couldn’t be made now is that that practically none of them have an actual story of “See, we tried to do this thing and it would have been amazing, but we weren’t allowed to distribute it because it would have offended people!” It’s always pure speculation. It’s a thing they say in hopes of scaring people into going “Wow! Maybe we have gone too far!” and subsequently being more tolerant of things like racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia (and rape jokes, natch), so that grown ass men don’t have to worry that college students might not laugh at their jokes.
But Norman Lear did try and he did fail, because the real snowflakes are the kinds of people who get het up about abortion and would lose their minds if this 50-year-old sitcom episode were to air on their TV. Or who protest other people taking their own damn kids to drag queen story hours. Or who are weirdly upset that trans people exist and maybe do sponcon for a beer company. Or who freak out every year because store clerks say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”
Or who complain that people on the left “hate half the country” when the policies we support help everyone, including them, and the policies that they support help no one and specifically punish people for belonging to groups that they don’t like. I’m sorry, but yes, if you go around being hateful, people are going to hate you right back.
This situation is very different from a joke simply failing because people have different sensibilities and pop culture references now. What these people would hypothetically be upset about would be a fictional woman deciding whether or not to get a legal medical procedure and making a different decision than they would like. They would be upset about who Maude was as a person and having that kind of person being portrayed on television. It’s not just that they don’t want abortion to exist, it’s that they don’t want people who disagree with them to exist or to be acknowledged as existing.
And yeah, I’m gonna say that’s a hell of a lot more censorious than just “No one laughs at these great racist jokes anymore!”
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