Not Mel Brooks personally, rather a clip from the filmmaker's 1974 Blazing Saddles. A clip from the movie (which is about an African American sheriff in the old west) was shown by an instructor at a university seminar, and it apparently was not met by laughter. At least one student complained officially to the university, which had to issue an apology and a refund.
Not much detail is provided in the article, so it is hard to say in what context the clip was shown, and how the instructor integrated it in their lecture. I can certainly see how someone could find clips from the movie to be offensive (if presented in the wrong context). But it seems like this could just be another case of someone without a sense of humor (or a grasp of what satire is) just being dumb.
The article raises a couple of other questions: why didn't the person who was offended talk to the instructor about it? Presumably, these are adults - couldn't they act like adults? And what determines whether something is offensive? I'm an assistant for an instructor who has shown documentaries which contain material which could be considered offensive (language, violence), but it doesn't mean that the instructor is promoting such things.
Gene Wilder sums it up here:
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1 comment:
It's great to be liberal until it bites you in the ass.
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