One of the great canards of the culture wars is that you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. But the idea that you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today is not about any of that. The Producers is a classic work of shock humor, and was received with the degree of sniffiness typical of such. But Brooks uses humor as a weapon, and nothing about Springtime for Hitler is as arbitrary as that. Which brings us back to Blazing Saddles, Brooks’s 1974 satirical western.