Mel Brooks, the 2,000-year-old Man, Turns 100

What is your favorite Mel Brooks movie?

That question, posted on Reddit earlier this year, prompted diverse responses:

“Blazing Saddles is absolute perfection. But, honestly, anything Mel made is worth watching.”
“Watching Young Frankenstein with my dad was a kind of common ground. No
matter what disagreements we got into when I was a kid, if it was on, we could always find our way back to a laugh.”
“Mel Brooks is an odd one because he’s a comedic genius, but his jokes teeter between brilliance and something a 12-year-old would write. That being said: Spaceballs.”
“The Producers. The “Springtime For Hitler” sequence is — by a wide margin — the funniest thing I’ve ever seen on a screen. A film by a Jewish director featuring two Jewish leads who played characters who were making money by ridiculing Nazis is an irresistible setup. The fact that the music and choreography is so jolly and … the chorus line forms a swastika while disgusted patrons walk out — it’s just beyond belief. Absolutely the funniest thing I have ever seen.”
“Blazing Saddles/History of the World, Part I/Young Frankenstein/The Producers/High Anxiety in that order.”
“I haven’t seen them all, but I feel like Silent Movie is underrated.”
“[Robin Hood:] Men in Tights makes me laugh every time.”

This response might’ve been the most reasonable: “Unreasonable! I refuse to choose.”

The exchange was timely, ahead of the 100th birthday on June 28 of the legendary screenwriter-director-actor.

In a new HBO documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man, the comedian born Melvin Kaminsky in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, appears plenty vibrant. And get this: Brooks will appear in a film in his second century of life; Spaceballs: The New One, a reprise of his 1987 parody of space films, is due out next year.

Such spoofs are Brooks’s calling cards. Consider: Young Frankenstein (monster movies), Blazing Saddles (westerns), High Anxiety (Alfred Hitchcock’s films) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Silent Movie (no need to explain those, right?).

Brooks’s greatest mockery was 1968’s The Producers, about a Broadway producer and his accountant who plot to stage a tasteless play trivializing the Nazis, thereby defrauding investors in an intentional flop. The plan backfires when audiences take the play as a satire, laugh their heads off and make it a hit.

Brooks “is an acquired taste — or tastelessness,” culture reporter Michael Elkin wrote in Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent when The Producers was revived more than three decades later as a Broadway play. The review went on to state that Brooks’s works achieve “a show business version of baseball’s dazzling double play”: They “showcase his pride in being Jewish” while attracting attention and succeeding at the box office.

It would play to a sold-out St. James Theater for seven years.

“The best way to ridicule something is with comedy. If I make fun, it’s better than standing on a soapbox and saying, ‘Hitler was wrong.’ You can laugh badness away better than you can shout,” Brooks told a U.S. television interviewer then.

In another interview, with British TV host Michael Parkinson in 2004, Brooks said, “It’s all about Hitler. He’s been very good to me. I made a nice living. I think I’m the only Jew that’s profited by all the terrible things he’s done.”

From the September 27, 1974 edition of *The Australian Jewish News (Melbourne)*, the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

After returning from battle in World War II, Brooks wrote for Sid Caesar’s television comedy program,Your Show of Shows. He worked there with fellow writer Carl Reiner, and the two collaborated on five comedy albums featuring Reiner feeding Brooks, playing a 2,000-year-old man, questions about life millennia ago. In the late 1960s, Brooks co-created a TV series, Get Smart, about a bumbling spy; the series ran for five years.

As a film director of his own scripts, Brooks had favorite performers, casting several again and again, like Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn and Gene Wilder. Wilder told TV talk-show host Larry King about meeting Brooks while acting in a play with Anne Bancroft, when Brooks, her boyfriend (and future husband), picked her up after work. That led to Brooks casting Wilder as accountant Leo Bloom in The Producers. Bancroft and Brooks co-starred in his 1983 film To Be or Not to Be and were married 40 years until her death in 2005.

An ad for Mel Brooks’ film, *The Producers*, published in the November 17, 1967 edition of the *Detroit Jewish News*, the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

As a younger person, I enjoyed Brooks’s silly humor, especially on Get Smart, even while not always understanding what Brooks was satirizing. My mother and I traveled to Manhattan’s East Side to see Silent Movie. I went to see History of the World, Part I with an aunt and uncle and was taken aback afterward at being rebuked for enjoying a musical number mocking the Spanish Inquisition.

It was more egregious, the person said, given that we’d just visited our Cousin Rose, who related having escaped Germany with her husband and young son on the eve of World War II.

From the January 7, 1982 edition of *The Australian Jewish Times*, the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

Brooks is the “master of politically incorrect humour,” The Australian Jewish News, stating the obvious, wrote ahead of The Producers’ stage opening in Melbourne in 2004.

From the December 25, 1987 edition of the *Detroit Jewish News*, the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

Brooks’s comedy seemed juvenile but somehow thoughtful. Recently, in an Israeli newspaper’s pop-culture quiz, friends were surprised when I correctly answered this question: “Which actor spoke the only word in Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie?” It was Marcel Marceau shouting “No!” and the joke’s irony was remarkable: Marceau was the world’s most renowned mime.

“His trademark or his signature is dumb comedy and brash comedy and rude comedy,” said Patrick McGilligan, who teaches at Wisconsin’s Marquette University and authored a 2019 biography, Mel Brooks: Funny Man.

“He represents and reflects an entire generation of Jewish comedy and Jewish humor, schtick, Borscht Belt, vaudeville — the great nonsensical comedians, to a great extent,” said McGilligan, who sometimes screens Blazing Saddles in his communications classes. “He kept that tradition alive … and brought [it] to a modern era.”

A cherished possession of retired journalist Lydia Wilen is Brooks’s letter in November 1975, regarding a magazine column of celebrities’ responses to her question about how they relax. He’d answered the phone when she called.

“I like to play stickball on a trampoline. … You never get any hits or have to run the bases,” Brooks told her.

She mailed him the published article. From his Beverly Hills office, Brooks wrote back by hand: “Got your funny letter. Say hello to anyone worth a hello from the Jew. Love, Mel.”

Mel Brooks in 2010, photo by Angela George

“I’m sure you can imagine how surprised I was to get a note from Mel Brooks,” Wilen said recently of the exchange. “Surprised, excited and then thrilled.”

Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].

As a Jewish history buff, I spend a lot of time on JPress (the Historical Jewish Press website), and every day I stumble upon another pearl.

A few days ago, I found in the December 31, 1916 issue of the New York Yiddish newspaper Die Wahrheit, what seemed like one of the craziest start-ups I had ever come across in my life: the National Umbrella Service Inc. Not only did the service look innovative, the advertisement was also pretty creative.

Let’s begin with the comic strip at the top. A Jew leaves his house in the morning (you can see that he’s Jewish, right?) holding a weather report that says “Rain Today,” while outside the sun is shining! “Hah. Another prophet!” says the Jews to himself holding up his umbrella. In the next frame, the smiling sun beats down on the fellow, who says: “Good God! How can I get rid of this umbrella!”

In the next picture, it’s pouring outside, and the forlorn Jew says, “I left my umbrella at home!” And in the last illustration, he cries, “Gevalt! Someone stole my umbrella!”

So, how did this start-up work? For those Yiddish-challenged readers among us, the ad says that: across Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn over 1000 umbrella rental stations have been opened. All one had to do was pay the two dollar per year subscription fee and you could borrow, return, fix or exchange a broken umbrella on the spot at no extra cost!

What a concept! This surely promised an end to shmutzicke umbrellas! (The proper Yiddish word for umbrella, by the way is shirem.) While we’re at it, here’s a funny little Yiddish curse: Zol er aropshlingen a shirem un s’zol zikh im efenen in boykh! – “May he swallow an umbrella and have it open up in his belly!”

So what became of this revolutionary idea? To find out, I consulted the American historical newspaper website Chronicling America, where I found more ads for the National Umbrella Service, such as this rather dry one (for such a wet business, and without even a bit of Jewish humor) in the New York Tribune from December 14, 1916.

The fact that the ads ran for just two weeks—from mid-December until the beginning of January—is more than enough proof that the business never really took off. Indeed, the “Business Troubles” section of the June 14, 1917 issue of The Sun, includes an item about the National Umbrella Service filing for bankruptcy.

But why did this umbrella business collapse? Did others succeed where it failed? If a bike-sharing service can make it, why not an umbrella-sharing one? It seems that the people of China don’t read the Yiddish press, and perhaps that’s why a recent venture of theirs failed in similar fashion: In 2017, the Chinese entrepreneur Zhou Shu Ping from the city of Shenzhen launched an umbrella sharing service in Shenzhen and 11 other cities, but within a few months almost all of the project’s 300,000 umbrellas had been stolen.

Another, more modest, umbrella-sharing service called UMBRACITY, is operating for the time being in Vancouver, Canada, with dozens of smart umbrella rental stations scattered in stores across the city. How does it work? There’s an app: push a button on your smartphone and the umbrella is yours.

There are more—in the city of Aarhus in Denmark, the DripDrop service has over 25 umbrella stations throughout the city. The rather unimaginative slogan is: “Happiness is having an umbrella when it rains”

And there are some somewhat less sophisticated services like this one which opened up a few days ago in the Pasir Ris neighborhood in Singapore, dedicated to the memory of Grandma Sylvia.

In any case, whether you’re renting or you’ve decided to buy, we urge you to always have an umbrella at hand during this rainy season. As they say: Men antloyft fun regn, bagegnt men hogl! – “Run away from rain and you get hail!”

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