So the 2,000-year-old man has made it 5 per cent of the way. The rest should be plain sailing.
I agreed to interview him when he was barely 80 on the understanding that he would retell, face to face, his funniest anecdote – the funniest anecdote – ever.
It concerned his years working at the busiest Jewish hotel in the Borscht Belt when he was a teenager.
His job was to fish elderly Jewish men out of the swimming pool with a giant net. Dead elderly Jewish men. Don’t go away. It gets funnier.
The men in question had stepped out onto the pool terrace having enjoyed a meal that was gargantuan even by Catskills standards.
They looked up at the Jewish moon, opened wide their arms, and sang with all the joy of being alive, loving their wives, wearing a tuxedo and remembering what they’d just eaten.
They all sang the same song. Dancing in the Dark. But without exception they began on too high a note. By the time they got to the second verse it was either sing it soprano or have a heart attack and fall into the pool.
Naturally, they fell into the pool. Hence the young Mel Brooks fishing them out with a net.
Not only did Mel Brooks speak this story into my tape-recorder, he sang Dancing in the Dark as the elderly Jews did. How I didn’t fall into my plate of sour cream and blinis I don’t know. But I haven’t dared touch the tape recorder since.
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.
I will have the irrefutable proof of that from its greatest exponent on my tape-recorder for another 1,900 years.
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