Mel Brooks he’s a sophisticated guy. He has collected luxury French wines and has even done a tasting on The Johnny Carson Show. it refers to dead soulsby Nikolai Gogol. He was married for 40 years to the icon of elegance, Anna Bancroft. He was Cary Grant’s favorite lunch companion, the finest man who ever lived.
But in the new Hulu series, The mad history of the world, part twoyou can still find all of Mel Brooks’ signature comedic styles: penis, vomit and fart jokes.
“I like fart jokes,” she said, in a Zoom from her home in Santa Monica, California. “They add a little ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the comedy. A touch of sophistication for the smarter audience helps the show move forward.”
After all, with the percussive bonfire scene from his 1974 comedy classic follies in the Westin which cowboys sit down to eat beans and blow gas, brought flatulence into the history of cinema.
The 96-year-old comedy legend preferred to meet over Zoom because he was wary of Covid. Strangers love to hug him and say, “Mel, I love you!” he said, adding, “I’m white.”
The man behind wacky and hilarious movies like The producers, young frankenstein, SOS: there’s a madman in space, The Anxieties of Dr. Mel Brooks, The Mad, Mad Adventures of Robin Hood AND The mad history of the world, part oneas well as the hit TV spy comedy Agent 86she no longer lives in an age where she can have “absolutely no restrictions on any subject,” as she put it in writing follies in the West. And she has lost the two loves of his life, Bancroft and Carl Reiner. But Mel Brooks is still a fireball.
With nearly a century of living history, Brooks sneaks up on his famous character, the 2,000-year-old man. But his taste for comedy remains as gleefully immature as ever. He has a keen insight into world history, greed and self-righteousness. He knows who the bad guys are and what’s at stake, yet he’s not afraid of the mundane.
Max Brooks, his son with Bancroft, said his father’s mantra is, “If you’re going to go up the tower, ring the bell.”
“Believe that if you’re going to make a work of art, don’t play it safe, don’t be careful, don’t pander to a certain group to gain their favor.”
Mel Brooks continues to mock Hitler. The new show has a skit called Hitler on Ice, featuring three TV commentators lashing out at a Führer who skates on ice and falls. One snorts: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you put concentration camps in people’s countries, on ice you better be flawless.”
comedy as a weapon
Brooks’ parents were immigrants, his mother from Ukraine and his father from Germany. His father died of tuberculosis when Brooks was 2; there was no money to send him to a sanatorium, says Max Brooks. When the boy, born Melvin Kaminsky, needed amalgam fillings for his teeth that would cost a dollar each, her mother couldn’t afford them, so she had to let the dentist get them out for half price.
He fought in the US Army against the Nazis and had to deal with the anti-Semitism of some of his comrades. He said he felt as if Errol Flynn was being trained in cavalry charges with horses and sabers. He was a corporal, a combat engineer who defused landmines and cleared booby-trapped buildings in France and Germany. (I was in the German town of Baumholder on Victory in Europe Day.) His three brothers also fought in the war and one of them, Lenny, a pilot, ended up in a Nazi prison camp for 19 months, where he had to pretend not to be Jewish.
“I was on a naval vessel and paid a sailor $50 to let me sleep under a lifeboat in case we were torpedoed,” Brooks recalled. “The smells were terrible, 500 guys on a ship. It was 16 or 17 days from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Le Havre, France, weaving and trying not to get torpedoed.”
Brooks, who was sometimes bullied as a child, learned to use comedy as a weapon. When its musical version of The producers in 2001, with a singing, dancing, twirling Hitler, “a burly guy burst into the aisle saying, ‘How dare you have Hitler? How dare you have the swastika? I was in WWII risking my life, and you do this on stage?’ I told him, ‘I was in WWII and I didn’t see you there.
Source: Clarin
