Photo: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File.
Comedian Mel Brooks at 99.
I have seen the great comedian Mel Brooks get very uncomfortable when he couldn’t make people laugh.
He was talking to our teenage group on Fire Island and laughing at a girl who said she was writing her memoirs.
A teenager writing memoirs was to him pretty funny — what life experience does someone that young have to write about? But the teens didn’t laugh because they didn’t have the same perspective. It made him uncomfortable.
A friend’s father who commuted with him on the “Daddy Boat” thought Brooks had a kind of compulsion to make everyone laugh all the time.
For myself, I always thought Brooks’s ‘2000 Year Old Man’ routines were hilarious. Even when I was a kid.
Jake Coyle wrote recently at the Associated Press, “The ‘2000 Year Old Man’ is turning 100. Mel Brooks on Sunday will celebrate his centennial birthday.
“The comedian and filmmaker has been awaiting the milestone. Earlier this year, Judd Apatow titled his retrospective documentary on him: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!
“ ‘I was born to make people laugh,’ Brooks says in the film. ‘So, I do that.’
“Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on June 28, 1926. After serving in the Army during World War II and performing in the Borscht Belt, Sid Caesar hired him as a writer. On his Show of Shows, Brooks met Carl Reiner, who’d remain a lifelong friend and with whom he created the ‘2000 Year Old Man’ sketches.
“Reiner would pepper Brooks’ ancient man with questions about what Jesus was like. ‘Jesus … yes, yes,’ Brooks would answer. ‘Thin lad. Wore sandals. Always walked around with 12 other guys.’
“Brooks went to make classic comedies like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety. It all started, Brooks told The Associated Press in 2021, with his childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“ ‘I wanted to keep the party going. I wanted to keep the happiness and joy and explosions of laughter going into a dour part of our lives, not our childhood anymore,’ Brooks recalled. ‘I was once interviewed and the guy said, “What was the happiest part of your life? Was it winning the Academy Award? Was it marrying Anne Bancroft?” I said no, not at all. It was my childhood. From about 4 or 5 to 9, it was the most exciting, happiest, joyous life that anyone could experience.
“ ‘The guy said, “What happened at 9?” I said, “Homework.” ‘ …
“ ‘I’ve always been proud to say that I make people laugh for a living,’ Brooks said [recently] in a statement. ‘So, knowing that my work will have a home at comedy’s national archive and continue making people laugh leaves me with a deep sense of pride.’
“To mark the occasion of Brooks’ centennial, the American Film Institute on Friday named 1974’s Blazing Saddles the funniest film of all time. It has previously ranked sixth on its list of 100 greatest movies. Brooks’ film displaced Some Like It Hot. …
“Brooks has sometimes made mortality a joke, too. In a 1980s sketch, he created a coin-operated gravestone for himself that played a videotaped message. It began: ‘I was Mel Brooks, one of the funniest little Jews to walk the Earth.’
“When asked in that AP 2021 interview if he thought much about death, Brooks said no. ‘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,’ Brooks said, laughing.
“ ‘I enjoy living,’ he added. ‘I’d like to do it as long as I can.’ ”
More at AP, here, and Fire Island News, here. You can read still more at the New York Times, here.
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