San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Mel Brooks’ delightfully deranged career
In new memoir, legendary comedian looks at his ‘remarkable life’ in show business
The most provocative comedian of our moment makes a cameo appearance late in Mel Brooks’ voluminous new memoir, “All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business,” and immediately recontextualizes the hero of its previous 384 pages.
Dave Chappelle played a supporting character in Brooks’s 1993 spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” and although the film is one of the director’s middle-grade efforts (it has its partisans), the reference serves as a necessary reminder of Brooks’ seminal role as the comedic agent provocateur of his time.
In one astonishing calendar year — 1974 — Mel Brooks opened with the groundbreaking “Blazing Saddles” and finished it out with the enduring and beloved “Young Frankenstein.” Back then, if you were a movie-addicted 14-yearold boy, you dutifully stood in line with your pals, hoping the box office lady was looking the other way (“Saddles” was R-rated, rare indeed for a comedy) while you eagerly anticipated a chaotic comic cavalcade that gleefully served up racial satire, inappropriate sexual situations, naughty language (sometimes in Yiddish) and, of course, indelibly, bowls full of incendiary beans. To be a Mel Brooks fan at the height of his powers (from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s) was to embrace anarchy at its most artful and to thumb your nose at all the so-called “standards” of your parents’ generation. However, Brooks was a subversive even a mother could love. (Mine certainly did: She took me to see “The Producers” when I was 7.)
Brooks attacks his autobiography with a wholly characteristic lack of modesty. Some fans may feel they’ve heard much of this before; over the years, there have been several biographies, two behind-thescenes books by Brooks himself, numerous documentaries, extensive DVD extras — even a one-man show that Brooks (God bless him, in his 90s!) takes across the country.
Still, for those who maintain their fondness for Brooks, “All About Me!” is an indispensable culmination of his work (copious helpings of legendary dialogue from the films and shows don’t hurt). In “Young Frankenstein,” Gene Wilder’s eponymous character discovers his grandfather’s secret volume: “How I Did It.” Brooks’ own tome is perhaps longer on “What I Did” than on the subtler and more conflicted “How I Did,” and indeed, it begins with a wonderful anecdote about, of all things, young Brooks evading a Brooklyn rampage by Frankenstein’s monster.
Most of the hills and valleys of his prodigious career are accounted for: his sentimental education as a writer for Sid Caesar’s TV shows in the 1950s; his unexpected fame, along with colleague Carl Reiner, on LPS such as “The 2,000 Year Old Man”; his brazen attempt to both write and direct his first movie, “The Producers,” in 1967 (the producer of “The Producers” blithely suggested that Brooks run out and direct a commercial to gain some quick cred); his unexpected hits of the 1970s (“Young Frankenstein” earned 30 times its production budget); one of the greatest comebacks in the annals of pop culture, writing a full score for the megahit Broadway version of “The Producers”; and the galaxy of friends, collaborators and stock-company members who surrendered to Brooks’ unique autocracy of derangement over the decades.
Many memoirs seek to score points off perceived adversaries. Brooks, who has certainly cultivated a healthy ego, does the opposite; there are copious and sincere encomiums to Caesar, Reiner, Wilder, director Susan Stroman (who helmed the Broadway version of “The Producers”) and frequent soundtrack composer John Morris (whose work has never been properly acknowledged), as well as delightful cameos by Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne and Richard Pryor.
Where the book comes up short is in any exploration of doubt, introspection or analysis. Brooks’ career has had its ups and downs, for sure, especially before 1967, when he implies he was panicking to support a new marriage to his adored Anne Bancroft. (A previous marriage — with three children, no less — zips by at the speed of light.) Longtime fans scratch their heads at the clunky, soulless films from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, when Brooks — despite the memorable line in his “Star Wars” takeoff “Spaceballs”: “May the Schwartz be with you!” — turned into an uninspired parody factory. Although he describes the challenges, as an untrained musician, of writing the score for the “The Producers” on Broadway, he claims he had to learn how a stage musical works from the ground up; odd, considering he wrote the books to two Broadway musicals in the early ’60s, one of which, “All American,” was a big, expensive show starring Ray Bolger.
There’s no serious consideration of what his injection of Jewish tropes and Yiddishisms meant to a mainstream audience, back in the days when actors were still changing their names and bobbing their noses to achieve crossover popularity. And how might his trademark anarchism resonate now, with pop culture torn between “anything goes” and cancel culture — anyone want to rerelease “Blazing Saddles” in this moment?
The short answer to these cavils is that such hand-wringing is simply not a part of Brooks’ sunny disposition. Indeed, the book’s most rewarding chapters are its earliest, with Brooks’ accounts of Depression-era Brooklyn and the European front of World War II (and the early days of television, for that matter). This isn’t Clifford Odets or Norman Mailer, but an epic adventure of possibility and positivity. Brooks’ response to any potential calamity seems to have been: “Sure, why not?” Perhaps this was his secret weapon all along. While other comedians of his era — Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Larry David — were neurotic messes, Brooks was essentially, as the 2,000-year-old man put it, “jaunty jolly.”
In mid-october, Hulu announced that Brooks would produce and write a TV sequel to his 1981 film “History of the World, Part I.” As George Bernard Shaw, a comic provocateur of his century, might have put it, Brooks is clearly imbued with the Life Schwartz.
Maslon is the host and producer of the radio program “Broadway to Main Street” on WLIW-FM and the co-author, with Michael Kantor, of the PBS documentary series and book “Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.” He wrote this for
The Washington Post.