All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

The story made good sense to me. “Okay,” I said, “open the window. I’ll take a chance.”

When I was only two years old my father died. Max, like so many others at that time, was swept away by tuberculosis.

It was a brushstroke of depression that really never left me, not having a father, another great wellspring source of love that every child is entitled to. My father’s absence caused a lingering frustration in my life. I felt cheated because he never got to enjoy being a proud father.

She was my first comic foil, and enabler, and nurtured my imagination.

Everybody assumed my mother had a Yiddish or Jewish accent, probably because of my being the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner,

Ring-a-levio, Johnny-on-the-pony, kick the can, and, a little later on, stickball and roller hockey.

Uncle Lee also told me a family legend about Grandpa Abraham’s uncle Louie Kaminsky from Minsk. I don’t know whether it was fact or fiction, but it was pretty funny. It seems that Uncle Louie was some kind of a religious zealot.

“Let me amend that. Was I ever arrested? Well…nearly.”

I loved to play stickball.

remember always being funny, but the first time was at Camp Sussex. I was about six years old and whatever the counselors said, I would turn it around.

She was just a kid. She wasn’t married yet.

Parmesan cheese. What a revelation! It didn’t need anything—I salted it with my own tears of joy.

any time I could put five cents together, I would run across the street to Feingold’s candy store and get an egg cream.

“What was the happiest time in your life? Was it making your first movie? Was it winning the Academy Award?” My answer is always, “Being a little kid in Brooklyn. That is…until age nine.”

Wait a minute, are you telling me that all the streets in Williamsburg are signers of the Declaration of Independence?”

I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh.

“Puttin’ on the Ritz” in the persona of Boris Karloff.

Irving turned to Mom and said, “Your mind and your heart are in the right place, Mom, but this kid is special. He’s different. He has something. He’s really bright and

But kids in Brooklyn were inventive. There was no lack of ingenuity. We made our own scooters.

I didn’t have to learn about pathos, loyalty, and a family that stuck together in order to weave that into my stories. I was raised and taught by my own childhood.

as the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner I explained the difference between comedy and tragedy: If I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

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.

Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. 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.

His eyes widened, he swallowed hard and shouted, “Mon dieu! Private Mel?” And I replied, “Petit Henri?” He crushed me in his big bearlike arms. Little Henri was no longer petite.

did a satire of a war picture playing both the good-looking American pilot and the evil-looking German pilot. And the sounds he made were amazing:

He said, “Mel, you don’t live in a hovel. You live under a hovel.”

Sid get big laughs on an interview with the German Professor as a world-famous expert on mountain climbing.

One of the most difficult things to do in comedy is to come up with a good ending to a scene or a sketch. The real struggle is to take a premise, the center of it, and nurture it and blossom it into a punch line.

did probably the funniest sketch ever done on television. It was the now celebrated takeoff of This Is Your Life. In the sketch that we wrote, Carl Reiner as the host of “This Is Your Story”

Our foe is near, our choice is clear, Get outta here, Hooray for fear, We’re done. Run away, Run away, If you run away you’ll live to run away another day!

three children from that marriage. Stefanie, Nicholas, and Edward were always a source of comfort and happiness.

To be clear: Carl Reiner isn’t the best friend I ever had—he’s the best friend anyone ever had.

Carl once said, “A brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to behold.”

was simply not the same joy as doing the 2000 Year Old Man all ad-libbed. The free-form nature of the longer performance pieces allowed a creative exchange that generated far more spontaneous magic.

Many years later one of the last things I got to do with Carl was a voiceover for Pixar’s Toy Story 4 (2019). I have a suspicion that they designed the characters for us, because their names were “Melephant Brooks” and “Carl Reinerocerous.”

Robots (2005). That movie also featured the voices of such talents as Robin Williams, Ewan McGregor, and Halle Berry. The very funny Adam Sandler asked me to play his character Dracula’s vampire father, Vlad, in the Hotel Transylvania movies, which were a lot of fun to record. Vlad is over a

One of my most famous voiceover roles was actually not in an animated movie at all, but as “Mr. Toilet Man” in my friend Amy Heckerling’s comedy Look Who’s Talking Too (1990).

Georgie Mandel,

Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo. As I got to know Joe and Mario, we would trade many stories, and laughs. Joe Heller, who wrote Catch-22

Mario Puzo (the future author of The Godfather) was

leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, “Anne Bancroft! I love you!” She laughed and shouted back, “Who the hell are you?” I said, “I’m Mel Brooks! Nobody you’ve ever heard of!” She said, “Wrong! I’ve got your 2000 Year Old Man record with Carl Reiner. It’s great.”

had onstage that became a really funny HBO special called Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again (2011).

Alfa-Betty Olsen, a friend of mine at the time, to be our recording secretary. She nailed down every thought and every crazy joke and brushstroke of madness we threw out. Nothing escaped her. (Later, when I was doing The Producers she became my right-hand gal and was invaluable in the forging of that script.)

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.

He never played the joke and never shared with the audience that he was aware that what he was doing was funny. It was very real, character-driven comedy.

That axiomatic way of rehearsing stayed with me through all of my movies: fun, insanity, creativity, total chaos during rehearsal, but total discipline during shooting.

“The powers that were” at NBC decided to give Get Smart a shot at another season. From there on, it took off. Sometimes, getting the audience into the habit of watching a new show is just as important as its quality.

Inept idiots will always be fun.

named Dustin Hoffman. He wasn’t famous yet. He actually lived on my block

sneak-preview screening of The Producers at the Cherry Hill Cinema in Cherry Hill, New Jersey,