Mel Brooks turns 100: The idiot from the shtetl

But for Brooks, comedy was never just entertainment. When Reiner is asked which means of transportation have helped him move forward in his lifetime, he answers without batting an eye: “Mostly fear.”

This Sunday, the comic universal genius Mel Brooks celebrates his 100th birthday. It is no exaggeration to say that he experienced the best decades of the American entertainment industry. Brooks was there when making jokes as a Jewish artist wasn’t considered natural (and career-enhancing per se).

From Jewish stand-up comedian to nonsense expert in Hollywood

In the 1960s, when Jewish humor became an integral part of American comedy, he was one of the most influential figures. And in the 1970s, Brooks made the exaggerated, biting slapstick that the Marx Brothers had once opened the doors to his trademark in Hollywood with parodies like “The Wild Wild West” and “Frankenstein Junior.”

The eternal neurotic Woody Allen served as his counterpart during these years, but Brooks’ humor is no less existentialist. “Laughter is a cry of protest against death, against the long farewell,” he writes in his memoirs “All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business”, which was published five years ago. Also in the two-part documentary “The 99 Year Old Man!” by Judd Apatow, another Brooks heir, his memoirs are permeated by an underlying melancholy.

At 100 years old you are automatically a survivor. Mel Brooks was the last of his kind to outlast all his companions: the show legend Sid Caesar, with whom he learned the trade in the 1950s, his former comedy partner Carl Reiner, his favorite actor Gene Wilder, with whom he celebrated his greatest successes. And of course his wife Anne Bancroft, who died in 2005, with whom he appeared in front of the camera in the 1983 Lubitsch remake “To Be or Not to Be,” among other things.

Brooks’ career path was not predetermined from birth. Born in 1926 as Melvin Kaminsky in New York’s working-class neighborhood of Williamsburg, his American shtetl, the youngest of four children lost his father to tuberculosis at an early age. In his autobiography he describes his childhood as happy and loving, but with occasional bouts of depression due to his father’s early death.

He initially tried his hand at being a musician, but was drafted into the army during the Second World War and was on the front line in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. During these years he first felt the anti-Semitism of his compatriots; among other things, he was entrusted with the dangerous mission of mine defusing.

Back in the USA he joins the Writer’s Room of Sid Caesar’s stage shows, where he soon joins Neil Simon and Woody Allen. According to legend – i.e. Brooks’ memoirs – the notoriously drunk Caesar once pushed him over the balustrade of his hotel room while holding him by the collar because the newcomer complained about the accommodation. He later turned this near-death experience into comedy gold.

But Mel Brooks made himself unforgettable in 1968 with his directorial debut “Spring for Hitler” (originally “The Producers”) about a desolate theater troupe whose planned stage flop – a musical revue about the Gröfaz – turns out to be a surprise success because the audience celebrates the brazen Nazi homage as satire. With his song and dance number “Springtime for Hitler,” later updated in borderline depravity as “Hitler Rap” in “To Be or Not to Be,” Brooks also found the comedy formula for his Hollywood career: a mixture of stupid humor and bizarre musical numbers. Accordingly, “The Producers” became a Broadway hit at the beginning of the millennium.

Farting cowboys, meaningless puns, a tap-dancing alien

Farting cowboys, a grimacing Marty Feldman, inspired, meaningless puns that the German dubbed versions often capitulated to, visual nonsense gags, a tap-dancing alien in the “Star Wars” rip-off “Space Balls” (1987), Jewish astronauts (in “The Crazy History of the World”, 1981) and a silent film homage (“Silent Movie”, 1976), in in which the only sentence is spoken by the world-famous mime artist Marcel Marceau: everything fits into Brooks’ humor repertoire.

He proves that he is also a film fan with his Hitchcock homage “Höhenkoller” in 1977, for which he got the okay from the “Master of Suspense” himself. The comedy became the blueprint for so-called genre spoofs, which enjoyed growing popularity from the early 1980s with the success of the disaster film satire “The Incredible Journey in a Crazy Plane”. In a way, Brooks is also the forefather of the “Scary Movie” films, the sixth part of which is currently in cinemas. And next year, on the 40th anniversary, the sequel to the space film “Space Balls” (director: Josh Greenbaum) is coming up.

But not everyone was fans. Hedy Lamarr sued Brooks in the 1970s because the name of the corrupt governor in “The Wild Wild West,” the antagonist of the black cowboy Bart played by Cleavon Little, was an unmistakable allusion to the name of the Hollywood star. That was a long time ago. In “The 99 Year Old Man!” tells Ben Stiller that without Brooks’ preparatory work, his fashion farce “Zoolander” would have been unthinkable.

Even though Brooks’ brutal sense of humor hasn’t aged particularly well over the years, America loves his humor veteran well into old age. In 2016, Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts, and two years ago the Academy honored him with an honorary Oscar.

His legacy: six fingers adorn his handprint in the concrete of the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. Mel Brooks, the eternal goofball of American comedy, secretly had a prosthetic little finger stuck on at the ceremony. Unfortunately, a second middle finger didn’t fit physiognomically.