“The best comedy is hyperbolic, at once hard-hearted and soft-hearted, just a little bit silly, just a little bit offensive, and as black as hell,” says Howard Jacobson of Mel Brooks, on the JC’s front page today. Brooks, who celebrates his 100th birthday on Sunday, is comedy’s “greatest exponent”, according to our greatest British Jewish author.
Born in 1926 in Brooklyn, to Jewish immigrants from Gdansk and Kyiv, Brooks (originally Kaminsky) grew up in poverty and was inspired to go into showbusiness after seeing Anything Goes at the theatre aged nine. He worked in the Borscht Belt as a teenager, studied drums with jazz musician Buddy Rich, and served in the US army during the Second World War, joining the special services as a comic touring army bases. After the war he worked again in the Borscht Belt as a drummer and pianist, and then started doing stand-up. His career took off in 1949 when his friend Sid Caesar hired him to write jokes for his television show.
For JC columnist Maureen Lipman: “Mel Brooks made being Jewish cool.”
At a Jewish Book Week event in February she and Rob Rinder paid tribute to Brooks. She recalled: “Sid Caesar hired Brooks for the legendary variety programme Your Show of Shows.
"Caesar recognised that while Brooks was ‘a mess’, he was a comedic genius. He protected Brooks from network executives who wanted to fire him for his erratic behaviour. Brooks was the loudest and most disruptive member of the staff. He was often late, would perform wild antics, and constantly fought for Caesar’s attention.
“It was on The Show Of Shows that Brooks met his lifelong best friend, Carl Reiner, with whom he later created the iconic routine The 2,000 Year Old Man. From the time they were both widowed, until Reiner’s death six years ago, they sat having tray suppers together, every night, whilst watching Jeopardy.”
The 2,000 Year Old Man routine showcased Brooks’s amazing ability to improvise (“Robin Hood? “Oh, yeah. Lovely man. Ran around in the forest... He stole from everybody and kept everything.”) as Reiner interviewed him about anyone and everyone in history. The comedy album they made which included the gag sold more than a million copies in 1961.
Six years later came the film The Producers, Brooks’s audacious and controversial comedy about a Jewish duo, Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom, and who put on a musical called Springtime for Hitler hoping for a flop that will make them a fortune thanks to creative accounting – and find themselves with an unwelcome hit on their hands. Andy Nyman, currently starring in The Producers in the West End, says the show – written by Brooks and adapted by him as a stage musical in 2001 – is an “act of amazing Jewish healing, to kind of poke fun at the far-right post-World War Two, and it was extraordinary”.
“Now, this humour feels so important,” says Nyman, paying tribute to Brooks on his 100th birthday.
Nyman feels a responsibility as the “first Jew in Britain to play Max”. He describes it as “a mitzvah”.
“It feels like it’s amazing to honour the heimish heart […] and the Jewishness of the piece. It’s essential to have a piece of Jewish art out there that’s so populist – it’s essential to burst the bubble of the far right.”
“As long as human beings retain the evolutionary capacity to laugh I am fairly confident they will be laughing at The 2,000 Year Old Man,” says playwright and director Patrick Marber. “Happy Birthday to The Godfather of Modern Comedy.”
And actor Henry Goodman quipped: “Laughter is the Me(l) – decine that helps longevity – you’ve made a lot of people very old, and very happy!”
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