Mel Brooks had a famous comedy routine in which he played a character known as the “2,000-year-old man,” who regaled viewers with tales from two millennia. While the famous comedy director/actor/writer isn’t quite that old, he has reached an impressive milestone: He turned 100 on Sunday.
Brooks, best known for directing irreverent films that became comedy classics, including The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs, was born in Brooklyn on June 28, 1926, and his real name was Melvin Kaminsky.
Brooks’s father died young, and his loving mother managed to raise four boys on her own. In Judd Apatow’s recent HBO Max documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man, the beloved comic recalled, “I always felt adored.”
“And I think that, given a lot of love as a child, it was the need to continue it. I never really did feel inferior, though I had every right to, looking at myself in the mirror. But I never did,” he had said.
Brooks served in the US Army during World War II and became a stand-up comic, performing on the Borscht Belt.
He said he got his big break at 14, making an audience in the Catskills laugh after he dropped a prop by mistake, and he told Apatow that he decided, “That’s it. You were meant not for the garment center [where many people from his neighborhood worked] but to make people laugh. Go forth from this place, Melvin, and make people happy, make them laugh, and you’ll get a lot more money than the garment center.”
In the 1950s, Sid Caesar, one of the most popular comedians of his day, hired Brooks to be a writer on the television series Your Show of Shows.
Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, a legendary comedy duo
It was while working on this show that Brooks met the late comedy writer Carl Reiner, the father of director Rob Reiner, who was killed in December.
The elder Reiner and Brooks became friends and were famous for their “The 2,000-Year-Old Man” comedy routine, in which Brooks played that very elderly gentleman and Carl Reiner interviewed him.
In the documentary, Rob Reiner recalled how his father “would push Mel into a corner and that would make Mel explode with creativity and humor,” and that this comedy act was largely improvised.
After writing for Your Show of Shows, Brooks made the leap from the small screen to the big screen, which was rare then, and made a string of movies that reshaped comedies for all time, starting with The Producers.
The movie, which got new life as a Broadway musical several decades later, was about a neurotic accountant (Gene Wilder) who teams up with a con artist (Zero Mostel) to make money by producing a theatrical flop, and they mount a production of an unbelievably tasteless musical called Springtime for Hitler – which becomes a hit.
The film made a star out of Wilder, who appeared in several of Brooks’s other films, including the Western parody Blazing Saddles and the monster-movie satire Young Frankenstein.
AP reported that the American Film Institute named Blazing Saddles the funniest film of all time on Friday to celebrate Brooks’s birthday.
Brooks was married for over 40 years to Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft, until her death. Their son, Max Brooks, is an author, known for the science-fiction/horror novel World War Z, which was made into a movie with Brad Pitt.
The comedy director has been active on X/Twitter in recent years. His profile features a post with a joke video that spoofs the many Star Wars sequels and announces that he has an upcoming movie in the works, a sequel to Spaceballs, his 1987 Star Wars parody, which featured the catchphrase, "May the Schwartz be with you." The film will be called Spaceballs: The New One, and it is expected to be released in 2027.
In an AP interview five years ago, Brooks said he did not think much about death: “I gave up after 60 thinking about it because if I did, I’d be thinking about it all the time. So, I don’t think about it much. When and if it happens, it’s going to be a sad day – for everybody but me. I enjoy living. I’d like to do it as long as I can.”
Brooks told Apatow that he did not care much about sharing his story and his legacy, but that he did care about “little, short, funny-looking Jews who are trepidatious about entering show business… If I can do it, you can do it.”
Mazal tov, Mel – till 2,000 and 20!