ALL ABOUT ME! MY REMARKABLE LIFE IN SHOW BUSINESS
MEL BROOKS
Century, 460pp, £16.99
‘Brooks attacks his autobiography with a wholly characteristic lack of modesty,’ wrote Laurence Maslon in the Washington Post. The director cut his teeth on Sid Caesar’s TV comedy show in the 1950s, and enjoyed success with Carl Reiner on the comedy LP The 2,000 Year Old Man, before writing and directing his first movie, The Producers, in 1967. ‘Where the book comes up short is in any exploration of doubt, introspection or analysis... Handwringing is simply not a part of Brooks’s sunny disposition.
‘Indeed, the book’s most rewarding chapters are its earliest, with Brooks’s 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... 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.”’
Geoffrey Macnab, writing in the i newspaper, found the book ‘a frustrating affair’, which ‘begins with promise’ as Brooks ‘evokes his Brooklyn childhood in very lively fashion’, yet ‘strangely, the more success Brooks achieves, the less engaging the autobiography becomes. Once Brooks’s filmmaking career begins in earnest with The Producers, the book turns into a series of self-congratulatory case studies...’ Brooks is ‘an amiable narrator’ and ‘many of his jokes still hit the mark’, but he ‘refuses to look too deeply into his private life’ and ‘we’re left with page after page of ever more enervating and self-serving showbiz anecdotes’.