Mel Brooks: American cinema’s king of the spoof- DON'T PUBLISH
As despotic King Louis of France in his 1981 parody History of the World: Part 1, Mel Brooks momentarily takes advantage of a buxom French courtesan, turns to the camera and in his thick New York accent, smirks, “It’s good to be the king.” This brief scene and casual one-liner became somewhat emblematic for the American comedian and filmmaker (he even went on to craft a proto-rap song with that title) who has died at the grand old age of __.
It summarises much of the Brooks house style: self-conscious, good-natured, bad taste in a spoof setting, always beseeching audience affections. Being vulgar never came at the expense of being loved; something that Brooks, as an unassailable National Treasure of American comedy, and recipient of multiple prestigious awards (he’s one of just 21 competitive EGOT – Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, Tony – winners) achieved decades ago.
Go back 50 years, to early 1975, and there’s a strong case for Brooks being not just Hollywood’s king of comedy, but arguably its reigning golden boy. Two 1974 releases, February’s Blazing Saddles, a riotous send-up of the western, and December’s Young Frankenstein, a witty homage to 1930s black-and-white horror films, became respectively the second and fourth highest-grossing domestic releases that year. Both garnered multiple Oscar nominations and other major industry prizes. And both, while sharing creative collaborators, reflected different sensibilities of Brooks’ then-wide comedic appeal.
Blazing Saddles, centred on a Black sheriff in a redneck town, was chaotic fun, shattering the fourth wall (its climax features the heroes watching the end of their own movie) and taboos alike, the cowboys’ campfire beans farting scene a genuinely gleeful shocker. Young Frankenstein, meanwhile, co-written with its star Gene Wilder, displayed a more refined artistic backdrop on which to hang his slapstick, puns and vaudeville. Added to his earlier debut feature as director, 1967’s The Producers, with its outrageous plot of a pair of Broadway wannabes scheming to profit from a flop musical about Hitler, and Brooks’ penchant for risqué riffing on industry staples was clear. Although initially deemed too risky by the major studios for its offensive premise, Brooks’s daring produced a hit, winning a best original screenplay Academy Award and setting the foundations of his career.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926, the youngest of four brothers in a family of European Jewish immigrants, and losing his father aged just two, young, small, often sickly Melvin James Kaminsky was determined to get into showbusiness. World War II, when he was stationed in Europe towards the end of the conflict aged 18, was but a temporary diversion. After an honourable army discharge in 1946, Brooks followed a tried-and-tested route for burgeoning Jewish comics, gaining performance experience in various Borscht Belt and Castkills resorts and clubs, reconnecting with his older pal Sid Caesar, who was already making a name for himself in New York and on radio and television. Through sheer persistence and chutzpah, in 1950 Brooks (renamed after his mother’s maiden name of Brookman) was hired as a writer by Caesar on his new TV variety show Your Show of Shows.
The show became a phenomenon, still cited as one of TV’s early comedy classics and its revolving writers room (and that of its successor, Caesar’s Hour) included such fellow future greats as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. Brooks’s reputation as a combative, antic but reliably hilarious presence was formed here and his great friendship with Reiner provided both men with another hit. Initially, their improvised routine, The 2000-Year-Old Man – Reiner playing the straight-laced interviewer to Brooks’ ancient, kvetching witness to major historical events from Jesus Christ onwards – was performed in person for friends. Its popularity grew to such an extent that 1961’s album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks sold over a million copies.
Brooks was such a livewire performer and restless idea generator that numerous other stage and screen collaborative projects came and went before his solo success with The Producers. Even in his late 1960s and 1970s heyday, failures (second feature The Twelve Chairs, 1970); cancelled comic Robin Hood TV series When Things Were Rotten, 1975) vied with other successes (Oscar-winning animated short The Critic, 1963; award-winning spy spoof Get Smart, 1965 to 1969, created with Buck Henry). Brooks didn’t necessarily write, much less helm all these, but his name was beginning to develop a certain brand cachet the ambitious artist was quick to exploit.
That said, post-1975, even Brooks’ most ardent admirers would struggle to deny the overall gradual decline in quality and popularity of his later movie directorial output. Spoofs of silent cinema (Silent Movie, 1976), Hitchcock (High Anxiety, 1977), epics (History of the World: Part 1, 1981), sci-fi blockbusters (Spaceballs, 1987), Preston Sturges-esque social comedy (Life Stinks, 1991), Robin Hood (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993) and vampires (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995), all have, to varying degrees, inspired moments (Moses dropping the 15 Commandments tablets in History of the World), lines (mime Marcel Marceau’s “Non!” in otherwise dialogue-free Silent Movie) or comedic performances (Madeline Kahn in High Anxiety, Rick Moranis in Spaceballs). But not one stands alongside Brooks’s earlier critical and commercial high points.
As well as being a consummate entertainer and self-promoter, Brooks was a savvy businessman and used his production company, Brooksfilms, to branch out into very different material to his own comedies. He was highly involved in these projects, fighting for the relatively unknown, untested David Lynch to direct prestige studio pic The Elephant Man (1980) (famously branding him “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”) and helping set up other successes like Richard Benjamin’s My Favourite Year (1982), a madcap tribute to Your Show of Shows; David Cronenberg’s visceral reimagining of The Fly (1986); and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), starring Anthony Hopkins and Brooks’ wife, the acclaimed actor Anne Bancroft, best known as Mrs Robinson from The Graduate (1967).
Bancroft and Brooks married in 1964 (he was previously married to Broadway dancer Florence Baum) and their marriage was considered one of Hollywood’s strongest unions. They regularly supported each other’s projects though only co-starred as leads onscreen once, in the 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s classic To Be or Not to Be (1942) and remained devoted until Bancroft’s death in 2005. Their son Max went on to write World War Z (2006), the basis for the apocalyptic zombie movie starring Brad Pitt.
If Brooks’ movie directing career effectively ended in 1995, he continued to thrive in other creative fields. He won his first Grammy for best spoken comedy in 1999 for the updated routine The 2000-Year-Old Man in the Year 2000, again with Carl Reiner. From 1997 to 1999 he won his second, third and fourth Emmys (his first came for co-writing a 1967 Sid Caesar Special) for outstanding guest actor in hit sitcom Mad About You. But by far his biggest latter-day success came with his stage musical adaptation of The Producers.
Brooks had been trying for a hit musical since the early 1960s. Indeed, almost every film he made contains at least one song and dance extravaganza and, building on The Producers’ infamous ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number, he wrote music and lyrics for another batch of flamboyant, up-tempo showstoppers. The results were rave reviews, spectacular box-office and a record 12 Tony awards, including three for Brooks, completing his EGOT card. The Producers went on to be profitably staged around the world and a less lucrative movie version of the musical, featuring original Broadway stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, came out in 2005.
The role of elder statesman suited Brooks well. He could always be counted on for voluble interviews, talk show appearances or awards acceptance speeches, and continued to be bestowed with prestigious accolades: a Kennedy Center Honour (2009); an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award (2013); a National Medal of Arts (2016). Any previous controversies over ruthless business deals, lawsuits, or claiming credit beyond his actual input on group endeavours faded away, as did criticisms of the lesser films and the more dated humour, particularly his clichéd depictions of homosexuality.
The reputation of his genuinely great works continued to flourish (Blazing Saddles’ bold ridiculing of racism still resonates today), not least with revised versions like the stage musicals of The Producers and, later, Young Frankenstein. And the Brooks back catalogue continued to provide new spinoffs, such as a Spaceballs animated series and proposed sequel, and announced TV series follow-up, History of the World, Part 2. His autobiography All About Me!, released at age 95, was a one-man celebration of, well, himself, but his multiple generations of fans, fellow comedians and otherwise, venerated him even more.
Not only did Mel Brooks outlast the vast majority of his contemporaries, he out-worked them too. By taking familiar tropes and genres and injecting them with goofy, sometimes ribald, but always affable humour, he created work that, at its best, has perennial comedy value. It cemented his enduring reputation as an irrepressible, anarchic but ultimately lovable popular entertainer to the very end. It was, indeed, good to be the king.