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Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100

The director of The Producers hits his century as a uniquely beloved entertainer who embodies his conviction that ‘comedy is the opposite of death’

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.”

‘Blazing Saddles’ Named Funniest Film Of All Time By AFI In Honor Of Mel Brooks’ 100th Birthday — Do You Agree?

Mel Brooks turns 100 years old today, so in honor of that, the American Film Institute (AFI) has decided to officially change the order of their signature AFI’s “100 Years…100 Laughs” list, thereby in what AFI terms as an “honorary” reorganization of the list, moving Brooks’ 1974 western spoof Blazing Saddles from 6th place to 1st and proclaiming it “the funniest film of all time.” It replaces at the top, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, which AFI notes in its release that Brooks “has long kvetched that his film is far funnier than Some Like It Hot.”

“He’s right!” said Bob Gazzale, AFI President and CEO. “We’re happy to right this wrong as Melcelebrates his centennial. It’s good to be the king, and may he live to be a 2,000 year old man.Happy birthday, Mel!”

Long Live Mel Brooks

Happy 100th birthday to the funniest man who’s ever lived.

If you want to understand Mel Brooks, and I mean really understand him, a good place to start is with Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished masterpiece Dead Souls. This is the 1842 novel that Brooks, at his most sentimental, has returned to again and again and again. If you know even a little bit about Gogol and a little bit about Brooks—each is a brilliant, obsessive, absurdist maximalist in his own way—this connection will make immediate sense.

People sometimes call Gogol the father of Russian realism, yet in Dead Souls, especially, he explores the human condition with the unmistakable verve of a comedian—seizing on preposterousnesses hiding in plain sight, piling absurdities atop one another until the tension cannot hold, generally dazzling (and, yes, sometimes confounding) the reader with his originality and playfulness.

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