Dan Patterson can reel off Mel Brooks stories by rote: how he pursued wife Anne Bancroft (“he wouldn’t give up”), how the support of Peter Sellers turned The Producers from a flop to a hit (“he put an advert in Variety saying everyone needed to watch it”) and how he discovered Gene Wilder (“when he was working in theatre Mel said, ‘You have to be in my film The Producers.”)
For the creator of hit comedy shows including Mock the Week and Whose Line Is it Anyway? Mel was always an inspiration and a comedy hero whose work continues to give joy.
“Mel is just a comedy genius,” says Patterson. “I went to see the new production of The Producers recently and I think it’s the funniest musical ever written. It is such a clever premise – the idea that you’ve got to have something that is going to fail, so you have to have the worst idea, the worst script, the worst director is just brilliant.
“Mel’s comedy is about people, it’s about character, and you see how people change. I prefer the musical even to the film – the songs are brilliant because you learn so much about the characters through them. But Mel is also completely fearless. I love the grandeur of his ideas – you think, ‘I can’t believe he is doing this’ but it works.”
Patterson has only had one personal encounter with Brooks but the star was as wonderful as he hoped.
‘When I was producing The Clive Anderson Show he came on as a guest and was magnificent,’ says Patterson. ‘He did a wine-tasting sketch, which is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I remember Clive made a joke and Mel went: ‘Hey, don’t be funnier than the Jew!’
“No English comedian would ever say something like that, be so fearless. Americans have just confidence and that counts for American Jews too. English Jews have always been about not making a fuss, don’t put your head above the parapet. But American Jews don’t take any sh*t. They are absolutely unashamed about being Jewish and screw you if you don’t like it.”
American Jewish comedy first appeared on film with the Marx Brothers, but the Sid Caesar variety show Your Show of Shows was where it percolated. Mel was in the writers’ room with Woody Allen, Neil Simon, who went on to become an award-winning playwright; Larry Gelbart, who later wrote M*A*S*H, and Mel’s long-term collaborator and best friend Carl Reiner.
“Mel and Carl had a slot on the show called The 2,000 Year old Man and they would ad lib songs about it at parties until someone finally said, ‘You need to make a record of this’ and they did and it became a huge hit,” says Patterson.
That was followed by spy spoof Get Smart, another hit on American television, and then Mel went into films. First came The Producers. “The story is that when he was taking his idea to producers they said, ‘You can’t call the film Springtime for Hitler, no cinema will buy it,’ so on the spot he replied, ‘I’ll call it The Producers if that’s what it will take.’ When he was making it, the producers kept telling him to take things out, but he wouldn’t lose them; he just hoped that the producers didn’t notice that he had kept them in.” Then came several more hits.
“He created a genre which nobody else had done nearly as successfully and that was taking genres and spoofing them. He did Blazing Saddles, which obviously takes on the Western and attacks its racism. And then there was High Anxiety, which is Hitchcock – he got Hitchcock’s permission to spoof him.
“The key was it wasn’t just spoof – it had to have its own heart, its own characters. There was so much Jew in his film – even the Native Americans in Blazing Saddles are speaking Yiddish. What I loved is that everyone was watching Jews and laughing with them and it was OK.’
Mel was at the heart of a golden era for American Jewish humour that can still be seen on television today. “It is very different to British humour and there would be no American comedy without Jews like Mel. Jewish American humour and American humour are the same thing – you can even see it with shows like Friends, where not all the characters are Jewish, but the way they talk is Jewish. It’s obviously neurotic, it’s personal, it’s got warmth, it’s got heart, it’s not peripheral, there are some aggressive one-liners, a certain amount of sarcasm and some gallows, self-deprecating humour.
“Mel is really one of the giants of comedy who is the through line from the Marx Brothers to Curb Your Enthusiasm and I hope he gets to live to 120 and keep on inspiring us.”
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