Long Live Mel Brooks - The Atlantic

If you want to understand Mel Brooks, and I mean really understand him, a good place to start is with Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished masterpiece Dead Souls. This is the 1842 novel that Brooks, at his most sentimental, has returned to again and again and again. If you know even a little bit about Gogol and a little bit about Brooks—each is a brilliant, obsessive, absurdist maximalist in his own way—this connection will make immediate sense.<br>People sometimes call Gogol the father of Russian realism, yet in Dead Souls, especially, he explores the human condition with the unmistakable verve of a comedian—seizing on preposterousnesses hiding in plain sight, piling absurdities atop one another until the tension cannot hold, generally dazzling (and, yes, sometimes confounding) the reader with his originality and playfulness.<br>Brooks came to Gogol in the early 1950s on the recommendation of a mentor, the TV writer Mel Tolkin, while they were both working on the sketch-comedy sensation Your Show of Shows. As Brooks remembers it, in a story he’s told repeatedly, Tolkin urged him toward Dead Souls, saying, “Even though you’re an animal from Brooklyn, I think you have the beginnings of a mind.” (Incidentally, Gogol ends the novel mid-sentence in just the way that Brooks once, in search of a punch line that never came to him, broke off in the middle of a riotously funny monologue and walked out, not just of the room but of the party he was attending.)<br>Tolkin happens to be the mentor who said of Brooks: “Half of Mel’s creativity comes out of fear and anger. He doesn’t perform, he screams.” This was an era in which a still-unknown Brooks would show up late to the writer’s room—a habit that drove his colleagues nuts—and then get the biggest laughs out of them anyway. He was outrageously funny, and had unbelievable range. One minute he’d be doing an impression of a rabbi, and the next he was writhing around on the floor pretending to be a harpooned whale (a Melville reference, naturally). The playwright Neil Simon, also a writer on the show, called Brooks “the most uniquely funny man I’ve ever met.”<br>So Brooks, ever on a quest to prove himself, liked that Tolkin saw him as an intellectual—or at least a could-be intellectual. And it turned out that Brooks liked Gogol too. Over the years he certainly liked telling people how much he liked Gogol, who comes up in interview after interview. When Mel Brooks decides that he likes something, or that he wants something, he really cannot be stopped.<br>I’ve been thinking about Brooks lately because he turns 100 today, a fact that should mostly be understood as indelible proof of a beneficent universe—evidence of how ungodly lucky we all are to have shared, for even one day let alone many decades, the same atmosphere as one of the true greats of our species. Mel Brooks gave us, among other comedic gifts, The Producers; Blazing Saddles; Young Frankenstein; Silent Movie; High Anxiety; Spaceballs; History of the World, Part I; and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You could have been born at any point in time, but here you are, alive when ice cream, antibiotics, and indoor plumbing have all been invented, and Mel Brooks is turning 100. If that isn’t extraordinarily good luck, I don’t know what is.<br>To be funny at all is something of a miracle. No form of writing is more difficult. No genre of art requires more daring. And no one can fake it (though many try). Mel Brooks’s contributions to American comedy are a miracle a few times over, in that he is quite possibly the funniest man who ever lived and yet you can still easily see how it could have gone the other way.<br>Brooks was born on a hot summer day in 1926, in Brooklyn, the youngest of four boys—Irving, Lenny, Bernie, and Mel—raised during the Great Depression by a single mother. (His father died suddenly when Mel was still a toddler.) Brooks, who was born Melvin Kaminsky, remembers his childhood as phenomenally happy, endless days of egg creams at the neighborhood soda fountain and stickball games in the street, an apartment filled with home-cooked meals and the sound of his mother singing along to Irving Berlin, special trips to Coney Island for root beer and hot dogs, and—once his mother returned enough milk bottles to afford them—10-cent double features at the movie house on Friday nights, where he ate salami sandwiches packed from home. “I loved my childhood in Brooklyn,” Brooks recalled in his memoir, All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business. He often thinks of it as the happiest period of his life. Brooks also relished his role as a class clown, terrorizing his teachers and leaving his friends gasping with laughter.<br>Being funny came naturally to him, obviously, but it was also about self-preservation: “Most of the kids in my class were taller than me. I needed a weapon to protect myself. That weapon turned out to be comedy,” Brooks wrote. He took up drumming, quickly learning that playing well, like...