Recently, my wife and I have enjoyed something akin to a Mel Brooks retrospective. Not the later stuff when his work lost any of its earlier subtlety and Mel (oh dear!) began to appear in his own movies; the brilliantly inventive sometimes pantomimic earlier stuff. Finest of all in my view being The Producers with its unashamedly theatrical script and larger than life performances. However, I suppose the two movies that really captured the comic zeitgeist and tickled the funny-bone of the seventies and my generation were Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. These two were probably the Anchorman and Dodgeball of their day. I saw them together and in various double-bills across London as a student and later - VHS being nothing more than a twinkle in someone's eye at the time and DVD was far-far-away in fairyland.
My son (weaned on The Producers and Young Frankenstein) showed the 'wind-breaking' clip from Blazing Saddles to some friends of his recently who had never seen it before. "You mean to say they'd never seen ..." I heard myself begin to cry-out. I had reached an A E Matthews crossroads in my life!
I just watched the farting scene from Blazing Saddles myself a minute ago and although I've probably seen the thing a dozen or more times it still makes me laugh - see what you think -
at the moment when Dr F arrives in Transylvania and meets Egor (Igor actually) for the first time -