Melvin James Brooks (né Kaminsky;[1] born June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies.[2] A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 21 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar's variety show Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954.[3] With Carl Reiner, he created the comedy sketch The 2000 Year Old Man, and together, they released several comedy albums, starting with 2000 Year Old Man in 1960. With Buck Henry, he created the hit television comedy series Get Smart, which starred Don Adams and ran from 1965 to 1970.
Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers (1967). He then rose to prominence becoming one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s with The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety(1977). Later Brooks made History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).[4] A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and earned Brooks three Tony Awards. The project was remade into a musical film in 2005. He wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II (2023).
Brooks was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005. Their son Max Brooks is an actor and author, known for his novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). In 2021, Mel Brooks published his memoir titled All About Me!.[5] Three of his films are included on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of the past 100 years (1900–2000), all of which were ranked in the top 15: Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.[6]
Brooks was born on a tenement kitchen table[7] on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn,[7] to Kate (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky,[8] and grew up in Williamsburg. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland); his mother was from Kyiv, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine).[9][10][11][12] He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie.[13][14] His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney[9] at 34 when Brooks was two years old.[15] He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face."[13][14]
Brooks was a small, sickly boy who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size.[16] At age nine, he saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater.[17] After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else but instead wanted to go into show business.[18]
When Brooks was 14 he gained employment as a pool-side tummler (entertainer) at the Butler Lodge,[19] a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel, where he met 18-year-old Sid Caesar.[7] Brooks kept his guests amused with his crazy antics. In a Playboy interview, he explained that one day he stood at the edge of a diving board wearing a derby and a large alpaca overcoat with two suitcases full of rocks, and then announced: "Business is terrible! I can't go on!" before jumping, fully clothed into the pool.[7][9] He was taught by Buddy Rich (who had also grown up in Williamsburg) how to play the drums, and started to earn money as a musician when he was 14.[20] During his time as a drummer, he was given his first opportunity as a comedian at the age of 16, filling in for an ill MC. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks,[21][22] influenced by his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky.[20] Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in Williamsburg in January 1944[23] and intended to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology.[24][25]
In early 1944, in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford-Binet-type IQ test.[26]He made high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting.[26][27][28] In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the Army.[27] Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the United States Army[20] at the Fort Dix,[26] New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma for basic training and radio operator training.[26][29][30][28] Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment.[26] Brooks says he boarded the SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around February 15, 1945.[26] A reporter for the United States Department of Defense writes that Brooks arrived in France in November 1944, and later to Belgium, serving with the 78th Infantry Division as a forward artillery observer.[27] In December 1944, a short while later, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge.[28][27][31][32] Of his experience there, Brooks noted:
Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.[33]
Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany.[34][35][28] Brooks was tasked with land mine location; defusing was done by a specialist.[26] Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing into a bullhorn, Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!) by American-Jewish singer Al Jolson.[36][37][38] Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit.[39] His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River,[26] later building bridges over the Rhine river.[27] In April 1945, Brooks' unit conducted its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz mountains, Germany.[27]
With the end of the war in Europe, Brooks joined the Special Services as a comic touring Army bases and he was made acting corporal, put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden,[9][28] and performed at Fort Dix.[9] In June 1946, Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal.[28][27]
After the war, Brooks' mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills",[40] where he started working in various Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic at one of the clubs was too sick to perform, Brooks started working as a stand-up comic, telling jokes and doing movie-star impressions. He also began acting in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did some radio work.[20] He eventually worked his way up to the comically aggressive job of tummler at Grossinger's, one of the Borscht Belt's most famous resorts.[20][41]
In the years after the war, Brooks' hero was comedian Sid Caesar. Back in New York, Brooks would slink[42] around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas. Eventually Caesar cracked and paid Brooks a little cash to throw him gags....At 24, Brooks got his break as a full-time writer.[43]
Brooks found more rewarding work behind the scenes, becoming a comedy writer for television. In 1949, his friend Sid Caesar hired him to write jokes for the DuMont/NBC series The Admiral Broadway Revue,[44] paying him, off-the-books, $50 a week. In 1950, Caesar created the innovative variety comedy series Your Show of Shows and hired Brooks as a writer along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and head writer Mel Tolkin.[20] The writing staff proved widely influential.[45] Reiner, as creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, based Morey Amsterdam's character Buddy Sorell on Brooks.[46] Likewise, the film My Favorite Year (1982) is loosely based on Brooks' experiences as a writer on the show including an encounter with the actor Errol Flynn.[47] Neil Simon's play Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) is also loosely based on the production of the show, and the character Ira Stone is based on Brooks.[48][49] Your Show of Shows ended in 1954 when performer Imogene Coca left to host her own show.[50]
Caesar then created Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers (including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart). It ran from 1954 until 1957.[51][52] Brooks told The New York Times, "When I was a fledgling comedy writer working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, our head writer was Mel Tolkin... I really looked up to him. (By the way, I was 5-foot-7 and he was six feet tall.) He was a bona fide intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the traditions of great Russian literature. One day he handed me a book. He said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.' The book was Dead Souls by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I'd never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time... It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be."[53]
Brooks and co-writer Reiner had become close friends and began to casually improvise comedy routines when they were not working. In October 1959, for a Random House book launch of Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One, at Mamma Leone's, Mel Tolkin (standing in for Carl Reiner) and Mel Brooks performed, and it was later recalled by Kenneth Tynan.[54] Reiner played the straight-man interviewer and set Brooks up as anything from a Tibetan monk to an astronaut. As Reiner explained: "In the evening, we'd go to a party and I'd pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be."[20] On one of these occasions, Reiner's suggestion concerned a 2000-year-old man who had witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (who "came in the store but never bought anything"), had been married several hundred times and had "over forty-two thousand children, and not one comes to visit me". At first Brooks and Reiner only performed the routine for friends but, by the late 1950s, it gained a reputation in New York City. Kenneth Tynan saw the comedy duo perform at a party in 1959 and wrote that Brooks "was the most original comic improvisor I had ever seen".[20]
In 1960, Brooks, without his family, moved from New York to Hollywood, returning in 1961.[55] He and Reiner began performing the "2000 Year Old Man" act on The Steve Allen Show. Their performances led to the release of the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks that sold over a million copies in 1961.[20] They eventually expanded their routine with two more albums in 1961 and 1962, a revival in 1973, a 1975 animated TV special, and a reunion album in 1998. At one point, when Brooks had financial and career struggles, the record sales from the 2000 Year Old Man were his chief source of income.[9] Brooks adapted the 2000 Year Old Man character to create the 2500-Year-Old Brewmaster for Ballantine Beer in the 1960s. Interviewed by Dick Cavett in a series of ads, the Brewmaster (in a German accent, as opposed to the 2000 Year Old Man's Yiddish accent) said he was inside the original Trojan horse and "could've used a six-pack of fresh air".[56]
Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical All American which debuted on Broadway in 1962. He wrote the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. It starred Ray Bolger as a southern science professor at a large university who uses the principles of engineering on the college's football team and the team begins to win games. It was directed by Joshua Logan, who script-doctored the second act and added a gay subtext to the plot. It ran for 80 performances and received two Tony Award nominations. The animated short film The Critic (1963), a satire of arty, esoteric cinema, was conceived by Brooks and directed by Ernest Pintoff. Brooks supplied running commentary as the baffled moviegoer trying to make sense of the obscure visuals. It won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film.
With comedy writer Buck Henry, Brooks created a TV comedy show titled Get Smart, about a bumbling James Bond–inspired spy. Brooks said, "I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life... I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first."[57] Starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, the series ran from 1965 until 1970, although Brooks had little involvement after the first season. It was highly rated for most of its production and won seven Emmy Awards,[58] including Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969.
During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry.[59] For several years, Brooks toyed with a bizarre and unconventional idea about a musical comedy of Adolf Hitler.[60] He explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script.[20] He eventually found two producers to fund it, Joseph E. Levine and Sidney Glazier, and made his first feature film, The Producers (1968).[61]
The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes.[62]<