All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

If I cut my finger, that’s tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

Comedy vs tragedy

I needed to be kissed for being somebody.

I needed to be kissed for being somebody

BOY! CAN HE SELL SALT!”

Love you, Daddy

one of the greatest performers in history; he was also one of the best audiences.

Great performer and great audience

But I worked hard and conquered my fear of the empty page, which is the journey that all writers have to make.

The fear of the empty page

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

a brilliant mind in panic

Still needing money to date Anne Bancroft in style,

Love this love

Like I said before, Buck was absolutely brilliant. He came up with “the Cone of Silence.” The Cone of Silence was a Plexiglas dome that would descend from the ceiling

Cone of silence

If you want a comedy to last, there’s a secret you must follow: You have to have an engine driving it. In Blazing Saddles, there’s a very serious backstory. Racial prejudice is the engine that really drives the film and helps to make it work.

Timeless comedy needs a timeless true engine

‘Every human being has hundreds of separate people living inside his skin. And the talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living within him.’ And that, I think, is what the arts and the humanities do—they lift up our identities, and make us see ourselves in each other.

Every human has 100s of people in their skin

The famous author of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said, “There are no second acts.”

Are there second acts