Exact same sort of asshole and arguments as today. He called them blasphemers and tried to cancel them. During the commercial break he would lean in to John Cleese and say "this is great television" with a wink.
Someone asked Mel Brooks the same about Blazing Saddles once.
"Today? You couldn't even make it then!"
We overestimate the effect the this sort of thing has.
I imagine someone reading that line is about to talk about the cancelling of some so-and-so, but in almost all cases that is either just a lot of hot air from Twitter or the so-and-so in question is legitimately and obviously actually a bigot.
it is definitely seems a patterns that alot of people who claim to be "canceled" or complaining about "canceling" are usually very well-off people who usually get thousands of re-tweets/posts and millions of subscribers on youtube or sell-out whenever they make an appearance somewhere...
People who say you can't make movies as offensive (or playing as much with offensiveness, anyway) as Tropic Thunder or Blazing Saddles anymore need to look into some of Lloyd Kaufman's output with Troma... the 2020 Shakespeare's Shitstorm is about as wildly-offensive (but maybe to good purpose? I'm still not sure, LOL) as it gets, and even directly targets the (in the pejorative sense) "woke" crowd (plus, like, a lot of other groups, including stuffy conservatives, big business, and shitty bigots) which is one of the riskiest moves a film could make these days, and that's just one of several risky moves it makes. Like, the movie's basically built of risky, boundary-pushing creative choices relating to very-relevant topics, which... might serve some greater, noble whole? Maybe? I think it's trying to, at least.
Now, a wide-release, mainstream movie, that might be true.
Ben Stiller himself has commented on the blackface in the movie being a satire of blackface in cinema. There would be no problem with a popular director making that kind of movie today.
I would note (and this was true at the time, too) that there are people that would either fail to make the distinction of “satire” or fail to find its invocation in the case of the particular work a convincing excuse.
I suspect there would be more resistance to the same film now, but its well within what could be made.
