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Blazing Saddles gets Trigger Warning. Thoughts?


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Surely the impact for those offended by the trigger is not as great as the impact on those people of colour who are impacted by the racist language? 

The trigger's an irritant for some, the racist language a lot more than that for those affected

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This is a touchy topic in this country and likely in many countries. We are not going to solve it here.

Some people are offended by the n-word, whether or not it is used by a black or white person. Our thoughts here on our lowly Jazz discussion board are not going to change that. Companies that offer things like movies or music or even something as odd as Bud Light, need to understand that some of the things they do will upset some subset of their consumers.

MAX adding a disclaimer that Blazing Saddles uses racist language covers their ass somewhat and for that, I really can't blame them one bit. The last thing they need is to lose more subscribers. They're not doing that great financially as it is.

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2 hours ago, rostasi said:

For my 400th radio show, I've excerpted a half-hour from my very first show.
The show was about Independence Day and has a couple of skits that are
parodies on America's treatment of Native Americans. The first broadcast
didn't raise any concerns, but it is now almost 8 years later - and people
seem to bristle even more without a care or understanding of parody.
How people will react to Firesign Theatre or Stan Freberg these days
makes me wonder if there's room for parody anymore, but now it's
potentially spilling into socio-politico areas that most of us aren't
here to discuss.

One of my retirement projects has been binge watching as many 1950s/60s TV Westerns as I can find. The two I'm doing right now are Rawhide & Gunsmoke, and both take a surprisingly nuanced of the post-Civil War landscape of Native Americans and their attempts to deal with "the White Man" and the behavior of same. Both Matt Dillon and Pete Nolan understand what's going on and are often quite candid about it. They're not exactly flawless characters, but they're hardly fodder for the current insistence on some quarters on Greatness either. 

Not sure if THOSE shows could get made today, not like this. 

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3 hours ago, rostasi said:

How people will react to Firesign Theatre or Stan Freberg these days makes me wonder if there's room for parody anymore...

My wife has been in public/community radio for her entire career, and things are getting very "conservative" - and moderators, that's a lower-case "c" conservative, to clarify - in terms of what is allowed on the radio.  Ironically, these kinds of public/community stations were created decades ago specifically to escape the rigid guidelines of what was permissible on commercial radio.  One of her counterparts at another public/community station told her that National Lampoon, Monty Python, and Firesign Theatre were all banned from his station.

Every year on her annual Christmas show, Ms. TTK plays a version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and every year, someone calls to complain.  In the meantime, that same station hosted a Rolling Stones tribute event, in which various bands played such enlightened tunes as "Brown Sugar" and "Stupid Girl," which must be more offensive to some than Loesser's standard.

So, the point is, everyone at these stations seems willing to find a sacrificial lamb to demonstrate their adherence to "principles of community," but they have zero formal guidelines about where the lines are drawn.  No one would dare to ban the Stones, because the aging hippies would all have strokes. 

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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9 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

My wife has been in public/community radio for her entire career, and things are getting very "conservative" - and moderators, that's a lower-case "c" conservative, to clarify - in terms of what is allowed on the radio.

Don't call it "conservative" - call it "progressive."

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2 hours ago, mjzee said:

Don't call it "conservative" - call it "progressive."

He pointed out that it's lowercase, so he's correct.

As for our station, it's a Pacifica station, and therefore
very progressive with a large number in the community
leaning our way. In other words, they "get" it.

Edited by rostasi
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If any comedy from previous eras needs trigger warnings, surely Blazing Saddles is it.

It was offensive in the 1970s when it came out. It was offensive in the 1990s when I first watched it. It is definitely still offensive now. 

If trigger warnings are for any purpose at all, then it is for films like Blazing Saddles.

What's impressive is that, despite being so offensive, Blazing Saddles has not gone the way of Baby Its Cold Outside, Love Actually, Manhattan, etc. etc. and become a cultural touchstone standing in for the perceived wrongs of yesteryear for the portion of the cultural commentariat that likes that sort of thing.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I remember when it first came out, they were all upset about the character Mongo's name, because they said it was making fun of mongoloid people. i wonder how                   Mongo Santamaria felt? Now they're doing this? I once got banned for a week from a music forum for jokingly using the name Commie Martyrs High School" from the Firesign Theater  Porgie Tirebiter album. I tried to tell the Moderator that it was from a comedy album, and not some political statement, but the jerk wouldn't listen to me!

Now even public radio isn't going to play any Firesign Theater albums on the air? That stuff got me through high school!

I was just reading a book on Donald Fagen, and he was being interviewed in some magazine about some radio station refusing to play the song "Janie Runaway" as the focus track for their Two Against Nature album promotion. The interviewer rightly asked him if it was due to decency or family values concern, but Fagen answered it was because the song had a sax solo, and the station had a policy of only playing songs with guitar solos! LOL!  This was in 2000, and Fagen said they didn't care about seedy lyrics at that time, in fact they loved it. The moral climate of the country was such that you could talk about screwing your grandmother, and they wouldn't mind it, as long as it had a guitar solo in it.

So I think we can say that the moral/political climate of the country has radically changed since then.

 

 

Edited by sgcim
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On 2/26/2024 at 8:11 PM, sgcim said:

Now even public radio isn't going to play any Firesign Theater albums on the air?

Really? Where did you hear this?
Maybe the anti-science folks will go after More Science High?
I start my show on Wednesday night with "Temporarily Humboldt County."

Edited by rostasi
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Next up are trigger warnings for the Three Stooges shorts due to the excessive violence.

 

11 hours ago, sgcim said:

I remember when it first came out, they were all upset about the character Mongo's name, because they said it was making fun of mongoloid people. i wonder how                   Mongo Santamaria felt? Now they're doing this? I once got banned for a week from a music forum for jokingly using the name Commie Martyrs High School" from the Firesign Theater  Porgie Tirebiter album. I tried to tell the Moderator that it was from a comedy album, and not some political statement, but the jerk wouldn't listen to me!

Now even public radio isn't going to play any Firesign Theater albums on the air? That stuff got me through high school!

I was just reading a book on Donald Fagen, and he was being interviewed in some magazine about some radio station refusing to play the song "Janie Runaway" as the focus track for their Two Against Nature album promotion. The interviewer rightly asked him if it was due to decency or family values concern, but Fagen answered it was because the song had a sax solo, and the station had a policy of only playing songs with guitar solos! LOL!  This was in 2000, and Fagen said they didn't care about seedy lyrics at that time, in fact they loved it. The moral climate of the country was such that you could talk about screwing your grandmother, and they wouldn't mind it, as long as it had a guitar solo in it.

So I think we can say that the moral/political climate of the country has radically changed since then.

 

 

I remember having to edit an interview with a European jazz artist that I aired on my radio show because his answer to my query about how he discovered a vocalist unfamiliar to me who was on his new CD: "I was sitting on the toilet and I heard her on the radio in my daughter's bedroom." 

I guess that I should of aired it without mentioning it to the PD and station manager.

Edited by Ken Dryden
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12 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I imagine Monty Python will be next. They'll excise the "Spot The Loony" sketch because loony is offensive. And you can't make fun of a man with 3 buttocks because that is making fun of someone with a handicap. And forget about the argument sketch!

I guess you haven't heard that John Cleese is working on a musical version of Life of Brian and has been told in no uncertain terms that the scene featuring Eric Idle's desire to be a woman named Loretta and to have children is absolutely unacceptable today.

God bless John Cleese for telling them all to piss off.

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5 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

Next up are trigger warnings for the Three Stooges shorts due to the excessive violence.

 

I remember having to edit an interview with a European jazz artist that I aired on my radio show because his answer to my query about how he discovered a vocalist unfamiliar to me who was on his new CD: "I was sitting on the toilet and I heard her on the radio in my daughter's bedroom." 

I guess that I should of aired it without mentioning it to the PD and station manager.

Yeah, like they wouldn't show the bedroom on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Bedrooms and toilets didn't exist for some people.

16 hours ago, rostasi said:

Really? Where did you hear this?
Maybe the anti-science folks will go after Morse Science High?
I start my show on Wednesday night with "Temporarily Humboldt County."

TTK mentioned it. I always thought it was More Science HS. They were so great. I clicked on your Mash-a-Clown link. I'm gonna have to listen to your radio show. Canada seems like it might be the last sane place in the world!!!

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14 minutes ago, sgcim said:

Yeah, like they wouldn't show the bedroom on the Dick Van Dyke Show. Bedrooms and toilets didn't exist for some people.

 

If I remember correctly, the Dick Van Dyke Show featured a bedroom with separate beds or twin beds.   

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On 2/27/2024 at 1:20 PM, sgcim said:

TTK mentioned it. I always thought it was More Science HS. They were so great. I clicked on your Mash-a-Clown link. I'm gonna have to listen to your radio show. Canada seems like it might be the last sane place in the world!!!

Yes! You're correct! Heard it in my brain, then typed it wrong.
They've been so much a part of my life since the 60s and've
bought, I think, just about everything that's ever been commercially
available from them: audio, video, texts, t-shirts, bumper stickers ...
even down to my 20 year old license plate holder.

TTK mentioned one community station. That's not necessarily NPR.
But, yes, it's true about the ideas behind community radio.
One of the first people I got to work for and with (I was still in high school),
was the pioneer of community radio himself, Lorenzo Milam, and that idea
of freedom of the airwaves was the constant motivating force for him.

The station that airs my show is in Silver City, New Mexico.

Canada, tho having some wonderful aspects to it, still has
the same problems with their approach to the pandemic
that we unfortunately have, so there's that form of insanity,
but as for insanity/sq.kilometer, it's at a much lower level.

 

Edited by rostasi
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