Here’s to Mel Brooks, the 100-year-old man

At 100 years old today, Mel Brooks stands as a testament to the enormous riches New York City Jewish humour has given the world. His great movies – The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – may have their longueurs. But as a comic, Brooks is unrivalled. His Jewish and goy jokes, frequently rude and sometimes surreal, are brilliant. His vocal and highly physical delivery of those jokes also sets him apart.

Quoting the English writer, caricaturist and wit Max Beerbohm, Ken Tynan, the most celebrated (and notorious) theatre critic of England’s postwar years, wrote in 1978 that the jester ‘must have invention keeping pace with utterance’. Along with his tremendously funny straight man, the late Carl Reiner, Brooks combines invention and utterance to great effect in the duo’s justly famous ‘2000-Year-Old Man’ sketch, first recorded as an LP in 1961 and titled 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.

Listening to Brooks’ familiar but toe-curling denouements to his routines still makes me marvel at his ability to throw audiences into a panic. Just when one is hoping against hope that Brooks won’t have the appalling manners to go somewhere utterly tasteless, he rushes there faster than a speeding bullet, only to finish with an image, a pun or a trick still more gross than the one you’d feared. Aided by his own but also Reiner’s command of timing, Brooks was always adept at travelling by the most direct route possible to the sexual or scatological excess you’d feared.

Following the success of 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, Brooks was asked, with Reiner, to go on The Ed Sullivan Show and other variety slots on US television. However, as he notes in his autobiography, All About Me: My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021), ‘making the records was so much better. When we were asked to do television show appearances together even though we got big laughs it… wasn’t as much fun because we already knew what jokes we were going to do… It was simply not the same joy as doing the 2000 Year Old Man all ad-libbed.’

This is an important point. Brooks mixed great inventiveness with a percussive delivery. Before starting his own act in the Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains, he had been a drummer and a pianist there. Yet his talent for ad-libbing, and for lengthy improvisation, puts him in another league again. He’s up there with John Coltrane, or Jimi Hendrix.

Alfred Hitchcock sent Brooks a crate of champagne for High Anxiety, his 1977 spoof on the Master’s Vertigo. Yet much of Brook’s radio and recording work is more mirthful than his cinema. His ‘Astronaught’ sketch – chewing gum, no grasp of physics, on that same pioneering 1961 LP – sent up NASA mythmaking to sublime effect.

But then Brooks was willing to send up anything. His jokes are ruthless, subversive. As he put it in a 2017 interview, he saw his comedy as ‘really sticking a pin into cliché, bursting the balloons of politically correct behaviour. I love to stick the pins in and explode those phoney-baloney balloons.’

It is good that Mel Brooks has made it to 100. A defiant non-luvvie to this day, he’s still working on lots of projects. If anyone deserves their centenary, he does.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. Follow him on X: @jameswoudhuysen.