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Mel Brooks Writes It All Down

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My grandfather Arthur Motzkin, a first-generation American Jew, liked to tell stories about his unlikely cameos in world history. When George Washington was crossing the Delaware and took a wrong turn, a voice piped up from the back of the boat: “Never fear! Arty’s here!” The day was saved. I thought about this tale while reading Mel Brooks’s new autobiography, “All About Me!” My grandfather was the same generation as Brooks—both were born in New York in the nineteen-twenties and served in the Second World War—and my grandpa’s running joke was, essentially, the same one that Brooks deploys, with a thousand times the wit, in his comedy routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” and in his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I.” Possibly more than anyone else, Brooks epitomized American Jewish humor in the twentieth century, much of which rested on the idea that it’s funny when a kvetchy Jewish guy shows up where he doesn’t belong, which is most places. Case in point: when Kenneth Tynan profiled Brooks for this magazine, in 1978, the piece was titled “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”

“When you parody something, you move the truth sideways,” Brooks writes in “All About Me!” The book, which comes out this week, covers his ninety-five years of life with a tummler’s panache: his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, his years writing for Sid Caesar, in the fifties, his creation (with Buck Henry) of “Get Smart,” in the sixties, his marriage to Anne Bancroft, and his remarkable run of movies, among them “The Producers” (he won an Oscar for the screenplay), “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.” More recently, he modelled social distancing with his son, the zombie-fiction writer Max Brooks, and began work on the long-awaited “History of the World, Part II,” which will be a Hulu series. When I spoke to him, he was sitting in his den on a bright California day, watching “a great big tan-and-gray owl in one of my cypress trees outside.” In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we talked about comedy, sandwiches, and the truths he’s told sideways.

You’re publishing your autobiography at the age of ninety-five. Wasn’t it a little bit of a risk to wait that long?

I guess so. It wasn’t so incredibly important to me that people know my story. It all happened when my son Max said, “You’re stuck here with the pandemic. Why don’t you write your life story? Just tell the stories in the book that you told me when I was growing up, and you’ll have a big, fat book.” So I said, “O.K., let me think about it.” And then it all came flying back, even being a little kid in Williamsburg. Being run over at eight or nine doing an eagle turn on roller skates. I never saw the car. Luckily, it was a tin lizzie that bounced over my belly. I was very lucky. That would have been the end. I think I said, “Goodbye, cruel world!”

Was there an era of your life you particularly loved revisiting?

Being a kid was the best. People say, “Was it making your first movie? Was it meeting and marrying Anne Bancroft? What was the best time in your life?” I’d say, “I guess [the period] from awareness, at four or five, to age nine.” “What happened at nine?” “Homework.” It took the joy of playing with my little friends away, and I didn’t have the freedom. I remember saying to myself, Uh-oh, they want something back.

Do you feel like, in your career, you returned to that sense of freedom?

Yeah. Gene [Wilder] and I wrote “Young Frankenstein.” Mike Gruskoff was going to be our producer, and Gene was going to star in it as the crazy Dr. Frankenstein. It was all set. We had a big, wonderful meeting at Columbia, and just as we left the meeting, before I closed the door, I said, “This is great! Goodbye! Oh, by the way, if we didn’t tell you before, it’s going to be in black-and-white.” I had an avalanche of Jews in the hall chasing us: “No black-and-white! Everything is in color! Peru just got color!” They said, “That’s going to be a dealbreaker.” Mike and Gene and I shouted back, “Then break the deal! We’re going to make it in black-and-white.” If it was going to be a testament to James Whale and that great 1931 Boris Karloff “Frankenstein,” it had to be in black-and-white.

You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”

That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene.

I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

You write in the book, “My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as being purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor.” What’s the difference?

Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.

You were a drummer when you were a kid. Did drumming teach you anything about comedy?

It did. It has to do with punch lines. It has to do with timing. It has to do with buildup and explosions. For a joke to work, I always needed that rim shot, when one of the drumsticks hits the rim of the snare as well as the center of the drum and gives you that crack, that explosion. It’s the same thing with a joke. A man walks into a grocery store. He says, “I want a half a pound of lox. I want some cream cheese.” And he stops and says, “All your shelves are filled with boxes of salt! Do you sell a lot of salt?” And the grocery man says, “Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt—boy, can he sell salt!” That’s the rim shot.

You write about seeing Ethel Merman in “Anything Goes” on Broadway when you were a kid, and on the way back you say, “I’m going into show business and nothing will stop me.” What was it about Ethel Merman that you loved so much?

Her profound dedication to what she was doing. I don’t think she cared if there was an audience or not. When she was singing “You’re the Top,” she was in her glory. In those days, there were no microphones onstage, and Uncle Joe and I were in the third balcony, a mile away from the stage. I thought it was still a little too loud. The same thing with [Al] Jolson. He was lost in what he was doing, and he was in heaven. With most performers, there’s some little part of them that’s paying attention to the crowd. But being dedicated to the material, lost in what you’re doing—that was Ethel Merman.




My grandfather Arthur Motzkin, a first-generation American Jew, liked to tell stories about his unlikely cameos in world history. When George Washington was crossing the Delaware and took a wrong turn, a voice piped up from the back of the boat: “Never fear! Arty’s here!” The day was saved. I thought about this tale while reading Mel Brooks’s new autobiography, “All About Me!” My grandfather was the same generation as Brooks—both were born in New York in the nineteen-twenties and served in the Second World War—and my grandpa’s running joke was, essentially, the same one that Brooks deploys, with a thousand times the wit, in his comedy routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” and in his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I.” Possibly more than anyone else, Brooks epitomized American Jewish humor in the twentieth century, much of which rested on the idea that it’s funny when a kvetchy Jewish guy shows up where he doesn’t belong, which is most places. Case in point: when Kenneth Tynan profiled Brooks for this magazine, in 1978, the piece was titled “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”

“When you parody something, you move the truth sideways,” Brooks writes in “All About Me!” The book, which comes out this week, covers his ninety-five years of life with a tummler’s panache: his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, his years writing for Sid Caesar, in the fifties, his creation (with Buck Henry) of “Get Smart,” in the sixties, his marriage to Anne Bancroft, and his remarkable run of movies, among them “The Producers” (he won an Oscar for the screenplay), “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and “Spaceballs.” More recently, he modelled social distancing with his son, the zombie-fiction writer Max Brooks, and began work on the long-awaited “History of the World, Part II,” which will be a Hulu series. When I spoke to him, he was sitting in his den on a bright California day, watching “a great big tan-and-gray owl in one of my cypress trees outside.” In our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, we talked about comedy, sandwiches, and the truths he’s told sideways.

You’re publishing your autobiography at the age of ninety-five. Wasn’t it a little bit of a risk to wait that long?

I guess so. It wasn’t so incredibly important to me that people know my story. It all happened when my son Max said, “You’re stuck here with the pandemic. Why don’t you write your life story? Just tell the stories in the book that you told me when I was growing up, and you’ll have a big, fat book.” So I said, “O.K., let me think about it.” And then it all came flying back, even being a little kid in Williamsburg. Being run over at eight or nine doing an eagle turn on roller skates. I never saw the car. Luckily, it was a tin lizzie that bounced over my belly. I was very lucky. That would have been the end. I think I said, “Goodbye, cruel world!”

Was there an era of your life you particularly loved revisiting?

Being a kid was the best. People say, “Was it making your first movie? Was it meeting and marrying Anne Bancroft? What was the best time in your life?” I’d say, “I guess [the period] from awareness, at four or five, to age nine.” “What happened at nine?” “Homework.” It took the joy of playing with my little friends away, and I didn’t have the freedom. I remember saying to myself, Uh-oh, they want something back.

Do you feel like, in your career, you returned to that sense of freedom?

Yeah. Gene [Wilder] and I wrote “Young Frankenstein.” Mike Gruskoff was going to be our producer, and Gene was going to star in it as the crazy Dr. Frankenstein. It was all set. We had a big, wonderful meeting at Columbia, and just as we left the meeting, before I closed the door, I said, “This is great! Goodbye! Oh, by the way, if we didn’t tell you before, it’s going to be in black-and-white.” I had an avalanche of Jews in the hall chasing us: “No black-and-white! Everything is in color! Peru just got color!” They said, “That’s going to be a dealbreaker.” Mike and Gene and I shouted back, “Then break the deal! We’re going to make it in black-and-white.” If it was going to be a testament to James Whale and that great 1931 Boris Karloff “Frankenstein,” it had to be in black-and-white.

You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”

That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene.

I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

You write in the book, “My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as being purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor.” What’s the difference?

Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.

You were a drummer when you were a kid. Did drumming teach you anything about comedy?

It did. It has to do with punch lines. It has to do with timing. It has to do with buildup and explosions. For a joke to work, I always needed that rim shot, when one of the drumsticks hits the rim of the snare as well as the center of the drum and gives you that crack, that explosion. It’s the same thing with a joke. A man walks into a grocery store. He says, “I want a half a pound of lox. I want some cream cheese.” And he stops and says, “All your shelves are filled with boxes of salt! Do you sell a lot of salt?” And the grocery man says, “Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt—boy, can he sell salt!” That’s the rim shot.

You write about seeing Ethel Merman in “Anything Goes” on Broadway when you were a kid, and on the way back you say, “I’m going into show business and nothing will stop me.” What was it about Ethel Merman that you loved so much?

Her profound dedication to what she was doing. I don’t think she cared if there was an audience or not. When she was singing “You’re the Top,” she was in her glory. In those days, there were no microphones onstage, and Uncle Joe and I were in the third balcony, a mile away from the stage. I thought it was still a little too loud. The same thing with [Al] Jolson. He was lost in what he was doing, and he was in heaven. With most performers, there’s some little part of them that’s paying attention to the crowd. But being dedicated to the material, lost in what you’re doing—that was Ethel Merman.

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