All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

We must have been getting closer to Broadway when I saw the top of the Empire State Building as we passed Thirty-fourth street. (I was just a little disappointed not to see King Kong hanging there.)

They said she could hold a note longer than the Chase National Bank.

My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor. New York humor is not just Jewish humor. It has a certain rhythm. It has a certain intensity and a certain pulse. Lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Mason, and stand-up comedians like me were not simply Jewish. They were New York—there is a big difference.

a Broadway play directed by Orson Welles called Native Son,

there was still the bad luck chance of a U-boat deciding to sink our troopship. So I decided to take my chances sleeping on the top deck. With twenty dollars, I bribed a merchant marine sailor to let me put my sleeping bag under a lifeboat, and he was nice enough to give me some all-weather tarps to cover me against the sea spray. It was rough up on deck, but so much better both smell-wise and torpedo-wise than sleeping down below.

One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we found a case of German Mauser rifles near an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt action. Sure enough, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white ceramic insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about twenty-one dollars when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: “Get back to the base immediately!” When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving rapidly all over the place. My company commander told us that Army communications had been severed. It seems that some telephone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh! I quickly realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. So knowing that we were really not in danger, I gallantly offered to take my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent us off with a salute that connoted something like, “You men are a brave bunch.” We never let on.

Another time was when we satirized the movie High Noon in which Gary Cooper has to face the bad guys all alone after the townspeople desert him. Sid was playing the Gary Cooper sheriff character, and we made a lot of the townspeople deputy sheriffs. To punctuate their quitting, they pinned their badges on Sid’s chest over his own badge. Sid was supposed to have a sponge inside his shirt to protect him from the pins. But in his haste, the dresser forgot to put the sponge in during the quick change. We were amazed at how realistically Sid yowled when one by one they pinned the badges on him.

once took Scotch tape and attached my nose to my cheek, my lower lip to my chin, and an eyebrow to my forehead. I looked cruelly disfigured. I burst into the writers’ room, and Carl immediately nurtured the bit: Carl: How did it happen? Who did that to you? Mel: The Nazis! They did it to me. Threw me in a ditch and did it! Carl: You mean they beat you? Disfigured you? Mel: Oh no. They took Scotch tape and stuck it all over my face.

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

when I was asked to put my own hands and feet in that famous sidewalk cement, I decided that I had been well behaved for such a long time…that I needed to be mischievous again! I arranged to have the prop masters from The Walking Dead TV series build me a sixth finger on my left hand.