Mel Brooks

Melvin James Brooks (né Kaminsky; born June 28, 1926) is an American actor, filmmaker, comedian, and songwriter. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 28 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar's variety show Your Show of Shows (1950–1954). There, he worked with Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Carl Reiner. With Reiner, he co-created the comedy sketch "The 2000 Year Old Man" and released several comedy albums, starting with 2000 Year Old Man in 1960. Brooks received five nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album finally winning in 1999. With Buck Henry, he created the hit satirical spy NBC television comedy series Get Smart (1965–1970).

Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers (1967). He then rose to prominence directing a string of successful comedy films such as The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety (1977). Later, Brooks made History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and earned Brooks three Tony Awards. The project was remade into a musical film in 2005. He wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II (2023).

Brooks was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005; their son Max Brooks is an actor and author. Mel Brooks published the memoir All About Me! in 2021. The American Film Institute ranked three Mel Brooks films among the best comedies of the 20th century.

Early life, family and education

Brooks was born Melvin James Kaminsky (Yiddish: מעלװין דזשיימס קאַמינסקי) on a tenement kitchen table on June 28, 1926, at 515 Powell Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn to Katie (née Brookman; Yiddish: קייט ברוקמאַן קאַמינסקי) and Max Kaminsky (Yiddish: מאַקס קאַמינסקי). He grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on 365 South 3rd Street. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). His parents married in 1916. He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 when Brooks was two years old. He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face."

Brooks was a small, sickly boy, who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size. At age nine, he saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else, but instead wanted to go into show business.

When Brooks was 14, he gained employment as a pool-side tummler (entertainer) at the Butler Lodge, a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel, where he met 18-year-old Sid Caesar. Brooks kept his guests amused with his crazy antics. In a Playboy interview, he explained that one day he stood at the edge of a diving board wearing a derby and a large alpaca overcoat with two suitcases full of rocks, and then announced: "Business is terrible! I can't go on!" before jumping, fully clothed, into the pool.

Brooks was taught by Buddy Rich, who had also grown up in Williamsburg, how to play the drums, and started to earn money as a musician when he was 14. During his time as a drummer, he was given his first opportunity as a comedian at the age of 16, filling in for an ill emcee. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, influenced by his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky. Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in Williamsburg in January 1944 and intended to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology.

1944–1946: World War II service

In early 1944 in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test. He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting. In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army. Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic and radio operator training.

Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. Brooks says he boarded SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around February 15, 1945. A reporter for the United States Department of Defense writes that Brooks arrived in France in November 1944, and later in Belgium, serving with the 78th Infantry Division as a forward artillery observer. In December 1944, a short while later, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. Of his experience there, Brooks noted:

Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.

Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany. Brooks was tasked with land-mine location; defusing was done by a specialist. Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing American-Jewish singer Al Jolson's hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!)" into a bullhorn. Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit. His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River, later building bridges over the Rhine River. In April 1945, Brooks's unit conducted its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains, Germany.

With the end of the war in Europe, Brooks joined the Special Services as a comic touring Army bases, and he was made acting corporal, put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden, and performed at Fort Dix. In June 1946, Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal.

Career

1949–1959: Early work and breakthrough

After the war, Brooks's mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills", where he started working in various Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic at one of the clubs was too sick to perform, Brooks started working as a stand-up comic, telling jokes and doing movie-star impressions. He also began acting in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did some radio work. He eventually worked his way up to the comically aggressive job of tummler at Grossinger's, one of the Borscht Belt's most famous resorts.

In the years after the war, Brooks's hero was comedian Sid Caesar. Back in New York, Brooks would slink around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas. Eventually, Caesar cracked and paid Brooks a little cash to throw him gags....At 24, Brooks got his break as a full-time writer.