Mel Brooks is 95, but the secret of his success is he’s still five, the spoilt Jewish ankle-biter who everyone thinks is marvellous. “I was the centre of a lot of attention, which always felt good,” Brooks says of his childhood. When, in 2001, the musical adaptation of The Producers received “the greatest reviews of any show ever on Broadway” and audiences “were standing on their seats and screaming bravos to the rafters”, Brooks would have expected nothing less. All his life, he has had this need to be surrounded by wit and repartee that “made us collapse and grab our bellies, that knocked us down on the floor and made us spit and laugh so we couldn’t breathe”.
It’s all a bit much, surely? Brooks’s autobiography, unequivocally entitled All About Me!, made me long for some English understatement and reserve, Alan Bennett, say, or Barbara Pym. Mel played the drums as a youngster, and banging and crashing represent his lifelong mode of discourse. He was born in New York in 1926 as Melvin Kaminsky, the family originally from Danzig. His father died of tuberculosis, and Mel and his brothers were brought up in Brooklyn by his hardworking mother, who was so short she could “walk under a coffee table with a high hat on”.
In Brooklyn, everyone was employed in the garment industry, as shipping clerks or pattern makers. Another trade was pickling herring. Young Mel, however, discovering at school a gift for reducing people “to uncontrolled hysteria”, announced: “I am going into showbusiness and nothing will stop me!” Nothing much did, except the Second World War. Brooks fought in Normandy as a corporal. He was a radio operator in the field artillery and also cleared abandoned houses of Nazi booby traps hidden in lavatory cisterns.
There followed summer seasons in the Catskills, as a sort of redcoat, carrying suitcases and jumping fully clothed into swimming pools, crying, “Business is no good! I don’t want to live!” We are told this “always got a huge laugh”. In this milieu, Brooks met a saxophonist who had plans to break into television — Sid Caesar. I’ve tried for years to appreciate what Brooks salutes as “the comic genius of Sid Caesar”, but that Fifties humour as seen in Your Show of Shows and then Caesar’s Hour hasn’t lasted. Brooks tells us about the Jungle Boy character, punching a Buick (“Buick die!”) and Caesar’s garbled foreign accents and spoofs. Nevertheless, 60 million people tuned in, 39 weeks a year, to watch these live TV shows.
Brooks, along with Neil Simon and Woody Allen, became one of Caesar’s chief writers. We are encouraged to believe comedy emerged from a lot of ebullient chaos. There was much “screaming and fighting in the writers’ room . . . It was all creative anger, intense competition.” It’s the kindergarten playpen, with rattles being flung about. Caesar was always punching the wall in frustration. On one occasion, “He picked me up by my collar and my belt and hung me out of the window,” Brooks says. It’s hard to put an amusing spin on such behaviour — and it turns out Caesar was an alcoholic who would pass out face down in his food.
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Not that Brooks was much nicer. “I was angry and ill-tempered most of the time,” he admits. He doesn’t give his first wife a name, but she bore the brunt of this. “I must have been absolute hell to live with” is the extent of what we are told — for Brooks is off telling us instead about the 2,000 Year Old Man, the comedy dialogues with Carl Reiner. “Without bragging, we were sensational.” Again, I find the recordings a strain — Brooks pretending to be a friend of Leonardo da Vinci and a boyfriend of Joan of Arc. Perhaps all this sheer silliness came off only in the postwar period? (The Goon Show, another noisy, gabbling brand of humour, once beloved, is unendurable today.) Nevertheless, “Carl broke up and hit the floor, clutching his belly and laughing like crazy.”
It was Brooks’s dream to make the transition from television into cinema. Even Hollywood, however, found him “too self-assured, cocky and brash”. He tried collaborating with Jerry Lewis, which didn’t come off because they were too similar. “Either I quit or he fired me. I’m not sure which.”
In his own time, however, Brooks began writing The Producers, based on the idea that “you could make more money with a flop than a hit”. Somehow, $941,000 was found for the eight-week shoot. Zero Mostel was cast. Gene Wilder was cast. “He was flattered and honoured that I would choose him.” Peter Sellers loved the Führer jokes and songs (“Springtime for Hitler and Germany,/ Deutschland is happy and gay”) and urged everyone to see what was otherwise a cult movie. In 1969 Brooks won the Oscar for best original screenplay.
All About Me! settles soon enough into being a jaunty romp across Brooks’s career, film by film. There are plenty of quotations from funny scenes to keep fans happy. We hear that when making The Twelve Chairs in Yugoslavia, socialising was impossible because “Tito had the car”. In Blazing Saddles, “racial prejudice is the engine that really drives the film and helps to make it work”, although the best characters are the idiotic frontiersmen, who have seen “the sheriff murdered, crops burned, stores looted, people stampeded and cattle raped”.
My favourite is Young Frankenstein, shot in beautiful black-and-white. I watched it three times in one day when it was released in 1974, lapping up the grandeur of the castle and laboratory set, the impishness of Marty Feldman (“What hump?”) and the horses neighing whenever Frau Blücher is mentioned.
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In truth, the remainder of Brooks’s career, the Broadway version of The Producers aside, has been mediocre and derivative — silent movie spoofs, Hitchcock spoofs and dire Dracula, Star Wars and Robin Hood spoofs. Orson Welles did the narration for the History of the World, Part One so long as Brooks paid in cash his $25,000 Cuban cigars and Beluga caviar bills.
Brooks doesn’t say much about anyone he’s met — he’s such an egomaniac they perhaps don’t quite impinge on his memory. Apart from her assuring him, “I believe in you. You’re talented,” his second wife Anne Bancroft’s appearances are fleeting. I’d have welcomed knowing a tad more about Dom DeLuise, Kenneth Mars, Cloris Leachman and Madeline Khan, Brooks’s repertory company.
“Laughter,” Brooks says, “is a protest scream against death. It is a defence against unhappiness and depression.” I can’t quite see how flatulent cowboys or the Frankenstein monster’s “enormous schwanzstucker” fulfil that philosophy. And when Brooks remarks of his passion for drumming, “I constantly still think in terms of rhythm, which is so important when it comes to comedy timing,” it needs to be said that Brooks is quite bad at comedy timing — he thumps and thumps away rather monotonously and painfully.
You can see, in this book, how it wouldn’t take much for Brooks to be seen as rather grasping, horrible and aggressive, exactly as he is portrayed in Patrick McGilligan’s definitive biography, Funny Man, published in 2019. It’s when Brooks says, in All About Me!, of an appearance on a talk show, “Needless to say, I was great”, that my amused toleration finally ran out.
All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks, Century, 463pp; £16.99
