Mel Brooks

• 1. Introduction

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  Mel Brooks was 14 years old when he climbed onto a diving board at the Butler Lodge, a second-rate hotel in the Borscht Belt. He worked there as a pool-side tummler, an entertainer hired to keep the guests amused. On this day he wore a derby and a large alpaca overcoat and carried two suitcases full of rocks. At the edge of the board, he announced that business was terrible and that he could not go on. Then he jumped, fully clothed, into the pool. He described the stunt years later in an interview with Playboy. It was an early, soggy sign that he would do almost anything for a laugh. Where did a small, sickly boy from Brooklyn find that kind of nerve? What did he do with the anger he said sat underneath his humor? And how did that pool-side clown become a writer and director whose career has spanned more than seven decades?

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• 2. Brooklyn to Battlefield

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  Melvin James Kaminsky was born on a tenement kitchen table at 515 Powell Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on the 28th of June 1926. His parents, Katie and Max Kaminsky, had married in 1916. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig, now Gdańsk in Poland. His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. That city is now in Ukraine. Melvin had three older brothers, Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. He grew up at 365 South 3rd Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

  Max Kaminsky died of tuberculosis of the kidney at the age of 34, when Melvin was two. Brooks later called that loss an outrage and said he might be angry at God or at the world because of it. "I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility," he said. Growing up in Williamsburg, he learned "to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems." The problem he had in mind was a punch in the face.

  The boy was small and sickly, and classmates bullied and teased him over his size. At the age of nine, he saw Anything Goes at the Alvin Theater, with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore in the cast. Afterward he told his uncle that he would not work in the garment district like everyone else. He wanted to be in show business.

  Buddy Rich, a jazz musician about nine years older who had also grown up in Williamsburg, taught Brooks the drums. Brooks earned money as a musician from the age of 14. At 16, he got his first chance as a comedian, filling in for an ill emcee. Sometime in his teens he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, borrowing from his mother's maiden name, Brookman. The change followed a mix-up with the trumpeter Max Kaminsky.

  In January 1944, Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in Williamsburg. He planned to follow his older brother to Brooklyn College and study psychology. The Army had other plans. Early that year he was recruited to sit the Army General Classification Test, an IQ exam. His high scores sent him to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute, where he was taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting.

  Later in 1944, Brooks was drafted. Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army at the Fort Dix induction center in New Jersey. Basic and radio operator training followed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center.

  Accounts of his arrival overseas do not agree. Brooks recalls boarding a ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around the 15th of February 1945. A reporter for the United States Department of Defense instead places him in France in November 1944, and later in Belgium, as a forward artillery observer with the 78th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he moved to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer. With that unit he fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

  Of that experience, Brooks said: "Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me." He added, "I sang all the time." He also said: "Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier."

  Based at Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion cleared booby-trapped buildings and defused land mines as the Allies pushed into Germany. Brooks located the mines. A specialist did the defusing. He has said that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he answered by belting out the Al Jolson hit Toot, Toot, Tootsie into a bullhorn. He also spent time in the stockade after pulling the helmet off an anti-Semitic heckler and smashing him in the head with a mess kit.

  His unit built the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River and later put up bridges across the Rhine. In April 1945, it carried out its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains. When the war in Europe ended, Brooks joined the Special Services as a touring comic on Army bases. He was made an acting corporal and put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden. He was honorably discharged as a corporal in June 1946, after a final round of shows at Fort Dix.

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• 3. The Writers' Room

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  A clerk's job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was waiting for Brooks after the war, arranged by his mother. Instead, he "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills." There he worked in Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic fell ill at one club, Brooks stepped in with jokes and movie-star impressions. He also acted in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, did some radio work, and rose to tummler at Grossinger's, one of the region's most famous resorts.

  Sid Caesar, the comedian Brooks had first met at that pool-side job, was his hero. Back in New York, Brooks would slink around trying to catch Caesar between meetings to pitch him gags. Eventually Caesar gave in and paid him a little cash for jokes. In 1949, Caesar hired him to write for the series The Admiral Broadway Revue, at $50 a week, off the books.

  In 1950, Caesar created the variety series Your Show of Shows and gathered a writing staff that proved enormously influential. Head writer Mel Tolkin led a room that included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Danny Simon, along with Brooks. Reiner later created The Dick Van Dyke Show and modeled Morey Amsterdam's character Buddy Sorell on Brooks. The film My Favorite Year, released in 1982, is loosely based on Brooks's time on the show. Neil Simon's 1993 play Laughter on the 23rd Floor drew on the same experience, and its character Ira Stone is based on Brooks.

  Your Show of Shows ended in 1954, when the performer Imogene Coca left to host her own program. Caesar then built Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers. Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart joined the staff, and the show ran until 1957.

  Mel Tolkin gave Brooks a gift that he still remembers. Brooks told The New York Times that Tolkin, a deeply read admirer of Russian literature, once handed him a copy of Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Tolkin said, "Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind." Brooks found the book both hysterically funny and moving. He still reads it once a year to remind himself what great comic writing can be.

  The job had a darker side. Brooks later admitted to Kenneth Tynan that in the mid-1950s, the stress and humiliation of working with Caesar left him despondent enough to think about suicide thirteen or fourteen times. He said he even had the pills. At one point, his wife Florence had to beg him not to jump from a pedestrian bridge they were crossing in uptown Manhattan. A friendship formed in that same room would carry him through the lean years ahead, because Carl Reiner had begun trading improvised routines with him whenever the two were off the clock.

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• 4. Two Thousand Years Old

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  Carl Reiner described the game he played with Brooks at parties this way: "In the evening, we'd go to a party and I'd pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be." Reiner took the part of a straight-man interviewer and set Brooks up as anything from a Tibetan monk to an astronaut.

  One night Reiner's suggestion was a man who was 2000 years old. This ancient witness had seen the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, who "came in the store, but never bought anything." He had been married several hundred times and had "over forty-two thousand children, and not one comes to visit me." At first, the pair performed the routine only for friends. By the late 1950s, it had a reputation around New York City.

  Kenneth Tynan watched the duo at a party in 1959. He wrote that Brooks was the most original comic improviser he had ever seen. A report in 1973 added that the two had first tried the routine at Norman Lear's home on Fire Island, New York, in the 1950s. Some of those early recordings later supplied one side of the 1973 album 2000 and Thirteen with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.

  In 1960, Brooks moved to Hollywood without his family, and he returned to New York in 1961. Back east, he and Reiner began performing the act on The Steve Allen Show. That exposure led to the album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, which sold over a million copies in 1961. Two more albums followed in 1961 and 1962. A revival came in 1973, an animated television special in 1975, and a reunion album in the late 1990s.

  The act came with a cost. Although the two men were best friends, the routine at times created what was described as nervous tension between them. A New York Times article in 1973 noted that they had not performed the sketch on albums in more than a decade. By then, it reported, both men said the need to perform had faded.

  During his leanest stretch, however, the record sales were Brooks's chief source of income. He also adapted the character into the 2500-Year-Old Brewmaster for Ballantine Beer commercials in the 1960s. Interviewed by Dick Cavett, the Brewmaster spoke with a German accent, not the Yiddish one of the original. He claimed to have been inside the original Trojan horse and said he "could've used a six-pack of fresh air."

  The lean years were real. After earning $5,000 a week on Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, Brooks saw his pay fall to $85 a week as a freelance writer. For five years he had few jobs and lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. His first wife, the dancer Florence Baum, had been in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Broadway. They married in 1953 and had three children. When Brooks came back from Los Angeles in 1961, he found that she had started suing him for a legal separation, and they divorced in 1962. He turned the experience into an autobiographical script called Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud.

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• 5. Springtime for Hitler

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  A reporter at a press conference for the Broadway musical All American asked Brooks what he planned to do next. "Springtime for Hitler," he replied. All American had opened on Broadway in 1962, with a book by Brooks, lyrics by Lee Adams, and music by Charles Strouse. Ray Bolger starred as a southern science professor who applies engineering principles to a college football team, and the team starts winning. Joshua Logan directed and script-doctored the second act. It ran for 80 performances and earned two Tony Award nominations.

  Brooks had a smaller triumph the following year. The animated short film The Critic, from 1963, was his idea, directed by Ernest Pintoff. It satirized the abstract animation of Norman McLaren. Brooks supplied a running commentary as a baffled moviegoer who cannot make sense of the obscure visuals. The short won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

  Television came next. With the writer Buck Henry, Brooks created Get Smart, a comedy about a bumbling spy inspired by James Bond. Brooks said he was tired of sensible situation comedies that distorted life. He wanted a crazy, comic-strip show about something other than a family. "No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first," he said. Don Adams starred as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86. The series ran on NBC from 1965 until 1970, although Brooks had little involvement after the first season. It was highly rated for most of its run and won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969.

  Meanwhile, Brooks kept returning to the joke about Hitler. For several years, he toyed with the idea of a musical comedy about the dictator. He explored it first as a novel and then as a play before he finally wrote a script. Two producers, Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier, agreed to fund it. The result was his first feature film, The Producers.

  The film was so brazen that major studios would not touch it, and many theater owners refused to show it. Brooks eventually found an independent distributor, who released it as a specialized art film. It premiered to a limited audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the 22nd of November 1967, and opened widely in 1968. Peter Sellers championed it so strongly that he paid out of his own pocket for full-page advertisements in Variety and The New York Times.

  At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won Best Original Screenplay for the film, beating Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. The picture also became an underground hit, first on the nationwide college circuit and later through revivals and home video.

  Brooks's love of Russian literature surfaces in the script. In the film, Bialystock refers to Bloom as "Prince Myshkin," a character from Dostoevsky's The Idiot. The name Leo Bloom is a nod to Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce's Ulysses.

  Roger Ebert added The Producers to his list of Great Movies in 2000. He recalled riding in an elevator with Brooks and Anne Bancroft soon after the film opened. A woman recognized Brooks and told him, "your movie is vulgar." Brooks smiled benevolently and answered, "Lady, it rose below vulgarity."

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• 6. Saddles, Monsters, Silence

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  The Twelve Chairs, shot in Yugoslavia on a budget of $1.5 million, followed in 1970. Glazier financed it after the moderate success of The Producers. The film was loosely based on a 1928 Russian novel by Ilf and Petrov about greed in post-revolutionary Russia. Ron Moody, Frank Langella, and Dom DeLuise played three men hunting for diamonds hidden in a set of 12 antique chairs. Brooks cameoed as an alcoholic former serf who "yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear." Reviews were poor, and the film did not make money.

  Brooks then wrote an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer. No studio would buy it, and he believed his career was over. In 1972, the agent David Begelman arranged a deal with Warner Bros. to hire Brooks as a script doctor on an unproduced script called Tex-X. Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman, Norman Steinberg, and Alan Uger were hired with him. Brooks eventually became the director of what turned into Blazing Saddles, released in 1974.

  The cast of Blazing Saddles included Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, Alex Karras, and Brooks himself, with cameos by Dom DeLuise and Count Basie. Brooks and John Morris wrote the music, and the budget was a modest $2.6 million. The film lampoons the Western, with nods to Destry Rides Again, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Noon, and Once Upon a Time in the West. Near the end, a surreal sequence parodies the extravagant musicals of Busby Berkeley.

  Critics were divided, but younger audiences loved it. Blazing Saddles became the second-highest-grossing film of 1974 in the United States, earning $119.5 million in the United States and Canada. It earned three Academy Award nominations, for Madeline Kahn, for film editing, and for an original song. It also won the Writers Guild of America Award for best comedy written directly for the screen. In 2006, the Library of Congress called it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and chose it for the National Film Registry. Brooks described it as "a Jewish western with a black hero." He said it was about love more than anything else, the story of a broken heart being mended.

  Gene Wilder had been cast as the Waco Kid after Gig Young left the part. Wilder accepted only when Brooks agreed that his next film would be a script Wilder had in progress, a spoof of the old Universal Frankenstein films. The two started writing Young Frankenstein once Blazing Saddles finished shooting. They shot it in the spring of 1974 with Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Kenneth Mars, plus a cameo by Gene Hackman. Kenneth Strickfaden, a veteran of the Universal monster films, worked on the effects.

  Brooks's own voice is in the film three times. He supplies a wolf's howl, the voice of Victor Frankenstein, and the sound of a cat. Young Frankenstein grossed $86 million at the domestic box office, the third-highest of 1974, just behind Blazing Saddles. It earned two Academy Award nominations, for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound. It also drew some of the best reviews of Brooks's career. Even Pauline Kael, a notoriously hard-to-please critic, said Brooks "makes a leap up as a director."

  Ron Clark then called Brooks with an audacious idea. He proposed the first feature-length silent comedy in four decades. Silent Movie, from 1976, gave Brooks his first leading role. Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Sid Caesar, and Bernadette Peters starred with him. Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, and Anne Bancroft appeared as themselves. The mime Marcel Marceau spoke the film's only audible line of dialogue, the French word for no. The picture honors silent comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It earned $36 million, less than its two predecessors, and later that year Brooks ranked fifth in a poll of the top money-making stars. Roger Ebert praised it as "not only funny, but fun."

  High Anxiety followed in 1977, a parody of Freudian psychoanalysis and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Brooks wrote it with Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson, and it was the first film he produced himself. It takes aim at Vertigo, Spellbound, Psycho, The Birds, North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder, and Suspicion. Brooks plays Professor Richard H. Thorndyke, nicknamed Harpo, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who suffers from the very condition in the title.

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• 7. Brooksfilms to Broadway

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  By 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were calling Brooks and Woody Allen "the two most successful comedy directors in the world today" and "America's two funniest filmmakers." That year Brooks produced The Elephant Man, a drama directed by David Lynch. He knew that a poster reading "Mel Brooks presents The Elephant Man" would make audiences expect a comedy. So he set up a company called Brooksfilms. It went on to produce serious films such as Frances in 1982, The Fly in 1986, and 84 Charing Cross Road in 1987, starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. Brooks had tried for years to buy the rights to that last film for his wife. Brooksfilms also made comedies, including Fatso, directed by Bancroft in 1980, and My Favorite Year, directed by Richard Benjamin.

  In 1981, Brooks joked that the only genres he had not spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles. He then wrote, produced, and directed History of the World, Part I, a tongue-in-cheek tour of human culture from the Dawn of Man to the French Revolution. Orson Welles narrated. It earned $31 million and drew mixed reviews. Pauline Kael, long a critic of Brooks, said that viewers either get stuck thinking about the bad taste or let themselves laugh at the obscenity.

  A remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be came out in 1983. Brooks produced and starred in it, but Alan Johnson directed. The cast included Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Tim Matheson, Jose Ferrer, and Christopher Lloyd. The film made headlines with a controversial song, To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap), which satirized German society in the 1940s, with Brooks playing Hitler.

  Spaceballs, from 1987, spoofed science fiction, chiefly Star Wars. Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, Joan Rivers, Dom DeLuise, and Brooks were in the cast. Television went less well. In 1989, Brooks and co-executive producer Alan Spencer launched the sitcom The Nutt House on NBC, with Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman. The network aired only five of the eleven episodes produced before canceling it.

  The 1990s brought Life Stinks in 1991, Robin Hood: Men in Tights in 1993, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It in 1995. Life Stinks failed with critics and audiences. It is the only film Brooks directed that is neither a parody nor a film about other films or theater. Men in Tights was his second Robin Hood spoof, after the 1975 television series When Things Were Rotten, which lasted only 13 episodes. He made it in answer to the 1991 hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and revived dialogue from his earlier work.

  In 2001, Brooks brought The Producers to Broadway as a musical, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised it for turning potential overblown camp into a warmer place where affection outweighs irony. The show won 12 Tony Awards, breaking the record of 10 that Hello, Dolly! had held for 37 years. A film version of the musical followed in 2005, with Lane, Broderick, Gary Beach, and Roger Bart repeating their stage roles, joined by Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell.

  Brooks began composing the score for a stage version of Young Frankenstein in early April 2006, calling the film perhaps the best he ever made. It premiered at the Paramount Theater in Seattle in the summer of 2007 and opened on Broadway at the Lyric Theater on the 11th of October 2007. Reviews were mixed. A cartoon sequel, Spaceballs: The Animated Series, premiered on G4 on the 21st of September 2008. In the finale of Young Frankenstein, the full company sings "next year, Blazing Saddles." In 2010, Brooks confirmed that musical could be finished within a year, though no creative team or plan has been announced.

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• 8. Honors and Home

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  Brooks met the actress Anne Bancroft at a rehearsal for the Perry Como Variety Show in 1961. They married on the 5th of August 1964 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau and stayed together for 41 years, until her death in 2005. Their son, Max Brooks, was born in 1972 and became an actor and author. In 2010, Brooks called Bancroft "the guiding force" behind his work on stage versions of The Producers and Young Frankenstein. Of their first meeting he said, "From that day, until her death... we were glued together." He has not remarried. In 2023, he said that once you are married to Anne Bancroft, others do not seem appealing.

  Brooks is one of 28 entertainers to win an EGOT, the set of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. His Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay, came in 1968 for The Producers. His first Emmy came in 1967, for writing on a Sid Caesar special, and he later won three more, in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Those three were for guest acting as Uncle Phil on Mad About You. In 2001, he won three Tonys for The Producers, for Best Musical, Best Original Musical Score, and Best Book of a Musical.

  His Grammy took longer. After five nominations for Best Comedy Album, he finally won in 1999 for the Best Spoken Comedy Album The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000, recorded with Carl Reiner. Two more Grammys came in 2002, for the cast album of The Producers and for the DVD Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks. He also won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for Young Frankenstein.

  In a 2005 Channel 4 poll to find the comedian's comedian, fellow comedians and comedy insiders voted him No. 50 among the top 50 comedy acts ever. The American Film Institute placed three of his films on its list of the best American comedies. Blazing Saddles ranks sixth, The Producers eleventh, and Young Frankenstein thirteenth.

  The formal honors came in a long run. In December 2009, he was one of five recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, DC. In April 2010, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard. A biography in the American Masters series premiered on PBS in May 2013, and in June 2013 the American Film Institute gave him its Life Achievement Award. In 2014, he left handprints and footprints at the TCL Chinese Theatre, wearing a prosthetic finger, so his left hand has six fingers in the concrete. The British Film Institute Fellowship arrived in March 2015, the National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

  He has also spoken about his Jewish identity. "I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish," he said, explaining that his bond is with the people and his pride in a tribe that survived so many misfortunes. He told NPR's Terry Gross in 2021 that he loves being a Jew and loves Jewish humor.

  At the age of 95, in 2021, Brooks published a memoir. On the 18th of October 2021, it was announced that he would write and produce History of the World, Part II, a Hulu follow-up to his 1981 film. The series arrived in 2023, and Brooks earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for voicing its narrator. In June 2025, he announced a sequel, Spaceballs: The New One, targeted for release in 2027. That same month came word that he would executive-produce Very Young Frankenstein, a television project for FX. In January 2026, an HBO documentary about him reached streaming on HBO Max, its title calling him the 99 Year Old Man.

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