Mel Brooks: Back in the Saddle Again

At the Citi Performing Arts Center Wang Theatre, Boston, Saturday at 2 p.m.

Tickets: $75-$140, www.citicenter.org

When Mel Brooks’s cowboy movie parody “Blazing Saddles’’ came out in 1974, some critics were dismissive. The filmmaker couldn’t resist stuffing every moment of his movie with gags, puns, and absurd anachronisms, they complained. (“What in the ‘Wide, Wide World of Sports’ is going on here?’’)

Even Roger Ebert, who loved it, called “Blazing Saddles’’ “a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken.’’ With its outrageous premise (centering on an ill-fated plot to drive out the residents of a racist Wild West town by appointing a black sheriff), its coarse racial, ethnic, and sexual jokes, and its ridiculous demolition of the theater’s fourth wall, the movie might be impossible to make today.

Yet it has earned its reputation as a singular Hollywood achievement, in large part because the movie threw that “crazed grabbag’’ of ammunition at some of the country’s best-preserved tropes — about the good guys and the bad guys, power and subservience, and the infallibility of the social order.

On Saturday afternoon, Brooks, who is now 90, will host a special screening of “Blazing Saddles’’ at the Wang Theatre, with an audience Q&A to follow. Before we present a few fun facts about one of the funniest movies of all time, a bit of advice to those who go: Be sure to give the good man a harrumph.

■ Famously, Brooks’s first choice to play the part of Sheriff Bart was Richard Pryor, the comedian who helped write the script. Other well-known performers who were considered for roles included: James Earl Jones (writer Andrew Bergman’s choice for Bart); John Wayne (who turned down an offer to play the Waco Kid, but told Brooks he’d be “first in line’’ to see the film when it came out); Johnny Carson (offered the role of either the Waco Kid or Harvey Korman’s dastardly Attorney General Hedley Lamarr, depending on which account you consult); and Peter Sellers (as Buddy Bizarre, a film director based on the extravagant conceptualist Busby Berkeley).

■ Bergman’s original draft was called “Tex X,’’ an homage to the late activist Malcolm X. Bergman, once called the “Unknown King of Comedy,’’ went on to write “Fletch’’ and “The Freshman,’’ among other films.

■ The team of writers, including Brooks, Pryor, and Bergman, worked together as though they were “in the middle of a drunken fistfight,’’ Brooks has said. He posted a sign in the writers’ room to encourage them: “Please do not write a polite script.’’

■ Brooks’s own main character, the dopey Governor William J. Le Petomane, was named after a wildly popular cabaret performer in turn-of-the-century Paris, who could pass air through his rectum at will. He was known as a “fartiste.’’

■ Brooks summed up his subversive approach to the classic Western in the campfire scene, in which his cowboys shamelessly break wind — a lot of wind. “You can’t eat so many beans without some noise happening there,’’ he said in his own defense.

■ According to Sid Caesar, the early TV star for whom Brooks was a gag writer, the scene in which Mongo (played by the former NFL player Alex Karras) TKOs a horse was drawn from real life. While riding horses with his wife, Caesar once punched her troublesome mount between the eyes, knocking it unconscious.

■ “Blazing Saddles’’ was added to the National Film Registry in 2006. The film “gives a burlesque spin to a classic Hollywood movie genre,’’ as the Library of Congress entry suggests.

■ The late Gene Wilder, who played the Waco Kid, once made a simple assessment of the writing team’s real achievement: “They’ve smashed racism in the face,’’ he said.

■The upcoming animated comedy “Blazing Samurai’’ is being billed as a tribute to “Blazing Saddles,’’ with the voices of Michael Cera, Samuel L. Jackson, George Takei — and Brooks himself.

■ When President Obama paid tribute to Brooks at a White House reception for the Kennedy Center Honorees in 2009, he quoted the comic filmmaker: “Look at Jewish history — unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So [for] every 10 Jews, God designed one to be crazy and amuse the others.’’

■ Putting out a call for a “Frankie Laine-type’’ singer for the movie’s tongue-in-cheek theme song, Brooks was surprised when Laine himself, the crooner who specialized in Western themes (“Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,’’ the TV series “Rawhide’’), offered his services. “We didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a spoof,’’ Brooks would recall.

Mel Brooks: Back in the Saddle Again

At the Citi Performing Arts Center Wang Theatre, Boston, Saturday at 2 p.m. Tickets: $75-$140, www.citicenter.org

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesg sullivan@gmail.com.