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.

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 may not feel good when it happens, but it will always sharpen your mind.

Fort Sill is in the southwest corner of Oklahoma. It’s cold, it’s flat, and it’s windy. If you ever have a chance, don’t go there.

Funny little anecdote: When I was getting my insurance physical for my first film, The Producers, the nurse who was looking into my ears said, “Mr. Brooks, I’ve seen a lot of inner ears in my life, but I’ve never seen any so yellow! Did you have jaundice or some disease or anything when you were a kid?” I said, “No, no. That yellow is not a disease. It’s called Camels. When I was in basic training in the Army, I shoved Camel cigarettes in my ears to shut out the noise, and believe it or not, they really worked!” I was discharged in 1946 and this was in 1966. Twenty years later my ears were still bright yellow from the Camels. Well, I guess that’s a small price to pay for not losing my hearing.

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.

As I look back at Get Smart, if I had to do it again now, I would have maybe trimmed a few jokes, but would have basically kept it the same. It holds up because we were having fun with inept idiots. Inept idiots will always be fun. I’m very proud of the bold wit we laced through the pilot script and the other scripts I wrote. We never condescended to the lowest common denominator with the goal of getting the best ratings—the standard network concept of the lower the brain level of the script, the more people were going to watch it. We never gave in to that. Buck and I decided that it was only what made us laugh, and that would also make the world laugh. In the end, I think we were right.