All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

The writing of this book serves as a kind of confession. You, the readers, will be my confidants. I’m going to tell you all my secrets. Things I’ve never told anybody. Things I don’t want anybody to know! I don’t want you to breathe a word of what you find out in this book. Keep everything under your hat! Wait a minute, wait a minute…that might not work. I’m not in a confessional booth, and a lot of you are probably not priests. This is a book! And this book needs to sell!

Ernst Lubitsch’s smart comedies like Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and Design for Living,

Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.

the owner of the hotel asked me to be a “pool tummler.” The job was simple; the pool tummler wakes up the Jews when they fall asleep around the pool after lunch. He goes around telling jokes, doing impressions, and keeps them amused. He’ll do anything to get the audience on his side. Instead of them drifting off, he keeps them happy and alert and that’s the job.

After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist.

but Bernie (next to me) and Lenny (next to Irving) had been honorably discharged and wear shiny gold lapel buttons sporting a proud eagle, sometimes referred to as “the Ruptured Duck.”

then I grabbed a white duster coat (a long coat that people wore to drive cars in 1893) that Carl used to wear sometimes in sketches. I put on the hat, coat, and a pair of goggles, and I burst into the meeting! I jumped up on the long conference table and yelled: “Lindy landed! He’s in Paris, he made it!” And I hurled my hat out the open window.

About Howie Morris, let me say this—I loved him. He became a dear friend. But before he actually knew me well, I decided to rob him. Let me explain… I figure nature made two different types. One type was little birds, pigeons, white mice, etc. They were victims. They were called prey, and Howie was one of them. The other type nature made was wolves, bears, lions, etc. They were called wild beasts, and I was one of them.

(By the way, many years later Apple Annie turned into a movie called Pocketful of Miracles [1961] with a wonderful performance by Bette Davis.)

Selma Diamond,

Of "Night Court"

I think there is a saying that goes like this: It’s a stormy wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good.

The Critic

Jon Lovett?

I liked Buck Henry a lot, and admired his talent. He would later go on to write The Graduate and Heaven Can Wait.

No one had ever done a show about a CIA agent who was also an imbecile. I decided to be the first. I called it Get Smart, based on the leading character’s name, Maxwell Smart.

Don Adams was absolutely perfect in the leading role. I knew I was going to name the main character Max, because at that point I had named all of my main characters Max. The Producers had Max Bialystock. My father’s name was Max, his grandfather’s name was Max, and later I named my youngest son Max.

Anne wrote and directed her first movie, Fatso (1980),

Because when I said “Action!” he rang the bell and instead of saying “Closing time! Closing time!” he said, “Clogy bibe! Clogy bibe!” “Cut and print it,” I said.

Waco Kid: What did you expect? “Welcome, sonny”? “Make yourself at home.” “Marry my daughter”? You’ve got to remember these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know…Morons.

We added the touch that every time her name is mentioned the horses would whinny and rear up in fear in the background. There was a General Blücher who was the Prussian victor at the Battle of Waterloo, and I just liked the sound of that name. The horses whinny because Frau Blücher is ominous. Even they know how crazy she is. Someone told me, I think incorrectly, that the German word Blücher means “glue” and that when the horses heard the name Blücher they were terrified that they’d end up in a glue factory.

A lot of people don’t realize that without a valley, there is no peak. Without information, there is no joke. You’ve got to set things up.

We were so lucky that the laboratory equipment that was actually used on the original Universal Frankenstein film was still around.

Ron Clark, a dear friend. Ron was a terrific comedy writer who had written for the famous Jackie Gleason TV show and also wrote a play with Sam Bobrick called Norman, Is That You?, which has become a comedy classic.

CHEZ LOBSTER.

I would love to see this clip!

Many years later in 2011, the silent movie The Artist won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Picture. When I met Michel Hazanavicius, the brilliant French director who made the film, I praised his movie, and then I teased him with, “It’s in black and white and it’s silent; who knows, I might have unconsciously shown you the way with Young Frankenstein in black and white and then with my own Silent Movie.”

We’ve all been taught history in school by well-meaning teachers using well-meaning textbooks, but we all know a lot more about human nature than history books tell us.

We had another wonderful robot character in Spaceballs, Dot Matrix. She’s the princess’s female version of C-3PO. Professional mime Lorene Yarnell was in the Dot Matrix outfit on set and was terrific.

He’s described his work as ‘unearthing the truth that is all around us.’ And by illuminating uncomfortable truths—about racism and sexism and anti-Semitism—he’s been called ‘our jester, asking us to see ourselves as we really are, determined that we laugh ourselves sane.’