OPINION:
FUNNY MAN: MEL BROOKS
By Patrick McGilligan
Harper, $40, 624 pages
Sometimes history hangs by a thread. The history of American comedy certainly did one summer night in 1951 Chicago. During the seasonal break from “Your Show of Shows,” the reigning king of television comedy, Sid Caesar, had taken members of his troupe to the Second City for a two-week run of live theater. When the curtain fell, Caesar liked to hang out and drink with his entourage in his upper-story suite at the Palmer House.
As author Patrick McGilligan reconstructs the scene, “Caesar drank steadily, saying little, as was his custom.” One of his writers “paced the room, repeatedly mentioning favorite nightspots. Caesar didn’t have the same roaming instincts. ’Let’s go somewhere and do something!’ [the young writer] kept insisting. ’Let’s see the night life!’” Finally losing patience, “Caesar shoved open a window, grabbed the smaller man, lifted [him] up by the seat of his pants, and thrust him out into the cool night air, dangling him ’How far do you want to go? Is that far enough?’ he shouted.”
The dangling young writer was Mel Brooks and, fortunately, he responded with a ready quip: “In would be nice. In is good.” Caesar relented, and Mel Brooks lived to quip another day. Those old enough to remember Sid Caesar’s brilliant early television career can appreciate how much his work — more properly, the collective work of his on-stage and back-stage team of inspired comedic talents — provided the perfect apprenticeship for the young Brooks.
Like most of Mr. Brooks’ biggest film hits — “Blazing Saddles” (Western parody), “Young Frankenstein” (horror parody), “High Anxiety” (Hitchcock parody), “Silent Movie” (pre-talkie parody) and “Spaceballs” (sci-fi parody) — Sid Caesar’s comedy was essentially derivative in its approach. Most of it consisted of individual situations or sketches that affectionately parodied famous performers and genres already familiar to the viewing audience.
The success of both men was, of course, made possible by their unique gifts. But it also owed much to the rich frame of references they could draw on: Still living memories of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the American stage, and the essentially fun-loving, optimistic outlook of a booming American audience that had been tempered rather than weakened by the crucibles of the Great Depression and World War II. Today, with an audience lacking such shared rites of passage, many of them living pampered, “padded cell” existences long on creature comforts but short on social interaction, narrower lives have led to narrower comedy.
Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky, had a tough Brooklyn upbringing in a largely — but not narrowly — Jewish community. His father died while he was still a toddler and he was raised in a financially pinched but big-hearted home with a brave and resourceful mother and several supportive older brothers. Just as importantly, through radio and the movies, he drank in a broad, magical world of romance, song, dance and laughter that gave scope to his imagination.
As a World War II Army engineer whose duties sometimes put him in harm’s way, he was also exposed to fellow GIs from all parts of the country. It wasn’t all sweetness and light, but it certainly gave young Mel his first exposure to a wider American audience and a larger sense of belonging even while being “different.” As his biographer recalls, more than a half-century later, “nearing ninety, he’d don his old full-dress uniform with medals for the documentary ’GI Jews,’ reciting his serial number automatically and recalling his World War II service with bittersweet pride.”
While Patrick McGilligan’s biography is a bit over-long on arcane aspects of the business side of show business, and gives perhaps too much weight to some of the potshots that envious contemporaries take at the man who rose to the top of their comedy class, it is a fascinating account of a remarkable life, the title of which could well have been “A Shtick Grows in Brooklyn.”
Like many others, I first fell in love with Mel Brooks’ art through his “2000 Year Old Man” comedy recordings with his old friend Carl Reiner, another veteran of the Sid Caesar era. There were also his own occasional manic appearances on the late David Susskind’s unique and much-missed discussion show, “Open End,” which I once appeared on myself. Susskind, who made his fortune as a producer, was also a highly intelligent and perceptive moderator, and he was the ideal interlocutor to bring out the best in Mel Brooks while he was still largely unknown as a public performer.
Today, Mel Brooks may or may not be the funniest man in the world. He is definitely the funniest 2000 Year Old Man. God bless him for all the joy and laughter he has given us.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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