As the last surviving titan of America’s golden age of comedy reaches his centenary, we celebrate a man who spent eight decades proving that the surest way to defeat a monster is to make a room full of strangers laugh at it
There is a story Mel Brooks likes to tell about The Producers. A woman cornered him in a lift shortly after the film opened in 1968 and told him, with the confidence of the genuinely scandalised, that his movie was vulgar. Brooks smiled at her, the way he has been smiling at hecklers since the Roosevelt administration. “Lady,” he said, “it rose below vulgarity.”
That single line is as good a key as any to the man who turns 100 today. For seventy years Brooks has gone lower, louder and ruder than anyone thought a serious artist should, and somehow kept arriving at something close to grace. He is the only person alive who can claim to have written for Sid Caesar, defused landmines in the Second World War, made an entire cinema sing along to “Springtime for Hitler”, and donated his personal archive to a national museum — and he has done all of it while insisting, with a child’s delight, that he was simply trying to make his friends laugh.
He was born Melvin Kaminsky on 28 June 1926, in the Williamsburg tenements of Brooklyn, the youngest of four boys. His father died when he was two, and the family was poor in the specific, crowded, immigrant-Jewish way that he would spend a lifetime mining for gold. Small, scrappy and noisy, he learned early that a joke could buy you safety, attention and love all at once. He learned the drums from a neighbour — the older brother of the great Buddy Rich — and by fourteen was earning money behind a kit in the Catskills, the borscht-belt resorts that functioned as a finishing school for half the comedians of the century.
Then the war took him. Brooks served as a combat engineer, clearing mines ahead of the advancing American lines in the bitter winter of the Ardennes. It is worth pausing on this, because the comedy that followed is so often misread as mere anarchy. The man who would make audiences roar at goose-stepping chorus girls had personally seen what the people behind that iconography did to the world. His ridicule was never ignorance. It was revenge. “I was the only Jew who ever made a buck off of Hitler,” he once boasted, and the boast contains a whole philosophy: you do not honour a tyrant with your fear, you bury him under your laughter.
Back home, the boy from Brooklyn talked his way into the writers’ room of Your Show of Shows, the live television juggernaut headlined by Sid Caesar in the early 1950s. The room is the stuff of legend now — at one time or another it held Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner and a young Woody Allen, all hollering over one another for the right to land the next gag. It was here that Brooks formed the great creative marriage of his life, with Reiner, and together they improvised “The 2,000 Year Old Man”, a bit in which Reiner solemnly interviewed Brooks as a wheezing two-millennia-old Jew who had known Jesus (“nice boy, thin”) and complained that none of his fifteen hundred children ever called. The records they cut from it became cultural touchstones and won Brooks the first of his many awards.
His move into directing produced one of the most extraordinary creative peaks in film history. The Producers (1968) won him an Academy Award for its screenplay. Then, in a single miraculous year — 1974 — he released both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The first is a western that detonates the entire mythology of the American frontier, including the racism that built it, with a Black sheriff at its centre and a flatulent campfire scene that has outraged and delighted audiences in equal measure for half a century. The second is a black-and-white love letter to the Universal monster movies of his childhood, as tender as it is silly. The American Film Institute would later rank three of his films among the funniest ever made; two of them came out within months of each other.
What followed was an unbroken parade of parody — Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, the Star Wars send-up Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. But it would be a mistake to file Brooks away as merely the man who spoofed things. Under the company Brooksfilms, he quietly produced some of the most serious cinema of his era, knowing full well that no one would buy a ticket to a tragedy “presented by Mel Brooks”. He kept his name off the posters and gave the world David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, the horror of The Fly, and 84 Charing Cross Road, the last of these a gift to his wife.
That wife was Anne Bancroft, the luminous star of The Graduate, whom he pursued with the persistence of a man who knew exactly what he wanted and bribed a television production assistant to find out which restaurant she would be dining at. Their marriage lasted from 1964 until her death in 2005, an unfashionable forty-one years of devotion in an industry not famous for them. He has spoken of her loss as the one subject he cannot turn into a joke. Their son, Max Brooks, became a celebrated author in his own right.
In 2001 Brooks did the improbable and reinvented himself yet again, turning The Producers into a Broadway musical that swept a record twelve Tony Awards and, in the process, completed his EGOT — making him one of a tiny handful of artists to win competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony honours, and the first comedian ever to do it. The accolades have kept coming: the Kennedy Center Honors, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, a BAFTA Fellowship, and at last, in 2024, an honorary Oscar to sit alongside his competitive one.
And here is the part that defies belief. At 100, he is not coasting on tributes. A two-part HBO documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, arrived in January. He has donated thousands of documents and photographs to the National Comedy Center. And he is returning to the screen, reprising the diminutive sage Yogurt in a long-awaited Spaceballs sequel due in 2027 — proof that the schwartz, as it were, is still with him.
Asked for the secret to a century of life, Brooks gave the only answer he was ever going to give. Laughing, he has said, keeps you healthy and happy. He should know better than anyone. For 100 years he has been the proof of his own theory — a Brooklyn kid who looked at a frightening world and decided the bravest, kindest, most defiant thing he could do was to make it laugh.
Happy birthday, 2,000 Year Old Man. May you have a thousand more. I love you!
My World of Interiors 