So they’re finally coming for Blazing Saddles.

The literalist, humourless scolds of the woke mob finally have the Mel Brooks classic in their censorious sights. It was only a matter of time. After all, this is a movie that contains copious utterances of the n-word, and that is always bad, regardless of context, right? So smack a trigger warning on it. Surround it with yellow tape warning off the easily offended. Remind people that they watch this film at their peril.

That is what HBO Max has done. It has soiled its streaming version of Blazing Saddles with a worthy three-minute intro – three minutes! – designed to put the film in its ‘proper social context’. Just as it did with Gone with the Wind a few weeks ago when the world went completely mental and started tearing down statues, defacing war memorials and memory-holing comedy shows from the 2000s. The ‘proper social context’ is graciously provided by Jacqueline Stewart, a professor of media studies at the University of Chicago, and thus cleverer than you and me. She informs us that ‘racist language and attitudes pervade the film’. But that’s okay, everyone, because ‘those attitudes are espoused by characters who are portrayed here as explicitly small-minded, ignorant bigots’. ‘The real, and much more enlightened, perspective is provided by the main characters played by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder’, says Stewart.

If you ever want to see it better download and archive a copy now before it goes down the memory hole.