Mel Brooks sort of put the fork in Westerns. They were maybe dying anyway, but after Blazing Saddles they had to change pretty significantly.

He also got everyone to laugh at all the little polite racist themes that were super common in Westerns. He hung a pretty big lamp on that stuff. You couldn’t do it again, because we’d all just laughed at how stupid it was.

As for people who say it’s too offensive for today’s audience, idk that they ever realized they were being laughed at, not with.