All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

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.

Don’t give them what they expect! Give them what they don’t know and what they don’t expect and maybe you’ll get an even bigger explosion of laughter.

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.

I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you. Failure may not feel good when it happens, but it will always sharpen your mind.

It’s a stormy wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good.

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

But who, you ask, is Mel Brooks? He probably often wonders, himself. Whoever he is he is very funny. And like Carl, he spent ten years with Sid Caesar. But not on camera. Mel is basically a writer; if this album becomes a stepping-stone to a performing career no one, I am sure, will be more surprised than Mr. Brooks.

The only requirement for a Mel Brooks film is that you come in ready to laugh.

And I can also honestly say that 1974 was a much better year for Mel Brooks than it was for Richard Nixon.

Our prop department found the pigeon wrangler who actually trained the birds for The Birds, and they got fifty or sixty trained pigeons to fly on cue.