All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business

by Mel Brooks

Comedy made me friends, big friends to protect me from bullies. I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh.

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 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.

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

“Suffice it to say, in his satires and parodies, no cow is sacred, no genre is safe. He mocked the musical—and Hitler—in The Producers, the Western in Blazing Saddles, and the horror film in Young Frankenstein. “But behind all the insanity and absurdity, there’s been a method to Mel’s madness. He’s described his work as ‘unearthing the truth that is all around us.’ And by illuminating uncomfortable truths—about racism and sexism and anti-Semitism—he’s been called ‘our jester, asking us to see ourselves as we really are, determined that we laugh ourselves sane.’ ”

“We are here today to honor the very best of their fields, creators who give every piece of themselves to their craft. As Mel Brooks once said to his writers on Blazing Saddles, which is a great film: ‘Write anything you want, because we’ll never be heard from again. We will all be arrested for this movie.’ Now, to be fair, Mel also said, a little more eloquently, that, ‘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. And today’s honorees each possess a gift for this kind of creative empathy—a gift that allows us to exchange a sense of what’s most important and most profound in us, and to identify with our collective experience as Americans.”