Funnyman Mel Brooks' career has spanned eight decades. He's an icon of comedy on both stage
and screen. But alongside his many successes has come failure on both personal and professional
levels. This is his tragic real-life story.
Mel Brooks came into the world on June 28, 1926 as Melvin Kaminsky, the youngest of four
boys born on a kitchen table in his parents' Brooklyn tenement apartment. While many comedians
had terrible childhoods and used comedy as a way to seek attention, Brooks was the opposite.
According to the biography It's Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel
Brooks, he was used to being the baby of the family and constantly showered with love.
Well into adulthood, he felt a need to be at the center of attention at all times.
This attitude is clear in one of Brooks' most famous interviews, for Playboy in 1975. He
rarely answered a question without making a joke, that is, until he was asked about
his father Max Kaminsky, who died of tuberculosis of the kidney when young Melvin was only 2
years old. During the interview, he talked about the intimacy of male relationships in
his movie Blazing Saddles, as he explained,
"I can't tell you what sadness, what pain it is to me never to have known my own father
[...] If only I could look at him, touch his face, see if he had eyebrows! Maybe in having
the male characters in my movies find each other, I'm expressing the longing I feel to
find my father and be close to him."
In that 1975 Playboy interview, Brooks also revealed that he and most of the other Jewish
kids in his neighborhood didn't swim because they would get picked on by other kids. If
they did go to the pool, they had to travel in packs to protect themselves. Even in his
predominantly Jewish neighborhood, he was, in his own words, "scrawny." But he found
another way to make himself valuable. As he put it,
"Why should they let this puny kid hang out with them? I gave them a reason. I became
their jester. Also, they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I'd stick it
in their eye."
Brooks' humor was inspired by feeling marginalized as a Jewish kid in America and by the long-suffering
history of the Jewish people. He often felt that he couldn't get the girl because he wasn't
tall enough or blonde enough. And when it came to the legacy of Jewish mourning, he
wanted to respond to it with laughter instead of tears. As he told Playboy in 1966,
"If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death?"
Mel Brooks and his three older brothers all served in World War II. Brooks himself was
anti-war, but he felt determined to fight because he thought this war was just. He wanted
to defend the Jewish people against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. But ironically,
though Brooks joined the Army to fight anti-Semitism, he often endured that same prejudice from
his fellow soldiers, who would call him by an ethnic slur. During a 2001 appearance on
60 Minutes, he discussed getting even with Hitler, as he explained,
"You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you
match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh
at him, then you're one up on him."
Before Brooks made a career out of making fun of Hitler, he did his best comedy while
serving in the Army. He would play the music of Jewish singer Al Jolson over a loudspeaker
while the Germans played their propaganda.
"At the end of my song, I heard [speaks German]."
"I heard a little, I heard a little applause."
Being a Jewish-American fighter came with an additional potential risk if you ended
up captured. When Brooks' brother Lenny had to bail out of his plane, he took off his
dog tags because they had an "H" for Hebrew on them out of a fear that he could get sent
to the concentration camps.
Brooks got his start in comedy at age 14 by working as a drummer, which led to the decision
to change his last name because Kaminsky was too long to fit in writing on the drum. One
night while playing in the Catskills, he subbed in for another comic who had fallen ill. He
was sweaty and unsteady, but he found a way to make the audience laugh. Then while he
served in World War II, he used his comedic and musical sensibilities to entertain the
troops. It wasn't until the 50s that he got his first steady job in comedy as a writer
on Sid Ceasar's Your Show of Shows. But while it was a plum gig, it also brought with it
a lot of anxiety.
In his 1975 Playboy interview, Brooks described his contributions to the show as full of,
quote, "energy and insanity." He felt tremendous pressure as one of the funniest writers of
the time. When the topic of mental health came up in the interview, he revealed,
"I started having acute anxiety attacks. I used to vomit a lot between parked Plymouths
in midtown Manhattan. Sometimes I'd get so anxiety-stricken I'd have to run, because
I'd be generating too much adrenaline to do anything but run or scream."
Eventually, Brooks sought out therapy, which helped him calm down and grow up.
Mel Brooks met his first wife Florence Baum on Broadway when she was a dancer in the musical
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They married in November 1953 and went on to have three children
together: Stephanie, Nicholas, and Edward. After Your Show of Shows was cancelled, Brooks
continued to work with Sid Caesar on his next show, Caesar's Hour. At this time, he was
more focused on his career and hanging out with his coworkers than he was on spending
time with his family. He had a hard time adjusting to marital life and often worried that he
would embarrass his wife with his boisterous behavior.
After the cancellation of Caesar's Hour in 1957, Brooks endured a long lull in his career,
as he found himself an unemployed husband and father of three. In 1960, wanting to escape
his situation, he moved in with a friend in Los Angeles. Upon his return to New York the
following year, he discovered that Baum was suing him for a legal separation. He later
admitted,
"We married too young."
In 1961, Brooks was newly single and still looking for work when he met actress Anne
Bancroft. She was a two-time Tony Award winner, and he knew how to make her laugh. They got
married in 1964. Soon after, he had a breakout success when he co-created the TV show Get
Smart, which premiered in 1965. But his real dream was to work in film. So he wrote the
screenplay for The Producers, and he knew that he'd have to direct it to keep his vision
intact. But all the major studios laughed at his intention to make a comedy about Hitler.
He eventually secured financing from a producer named Joseph Levine, but the film was ultimately
met with tepid box office numbers and some harsh reviews, although Brooks did win an
Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
In a 2019 interview with USA Today, Brooks discussed some of the least friendly reactions
he received about The Producers. Rabbis wrote letters to him, expressing disappointment
in him as a Jewish person for writing a comedy about Hitler. So Brooks wrote all of them
back to explain his theory about the power of using humor as a means of humiliation.
“Don't be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party.”
Despite winning an Oscar for The Producers, nobody saw Mel Brooks as much of a success
at that point in his career. His next film, 1970's The Twelve Chairs, had an even smaller
budget, and it had to be shot in Yugoslavia. As Brooks recalled to Playboy in 1975,
"When I went to Yugoslavia, my hair was black. When I came back, nine months later, it was
gray."
One time during shooting, he got so angry that he threw his director's chair into the
Adriatic Sea. Afterwards, the entire crew went on strike. According to the cinematographer,
they did so because Yugoslavia was a communist country, and they were unhappy that he threw
the chair because it was technically public property. The Twelve Chairs ultimately wound
up playing at only a few arthouse theaters. Nevertheless, to this day Brooks insists that
it's his favorite film. Afterwards, he began working on the script for Blazing Saddles,
which would go on to become a huge hit and an enduring comedy classic. As he recalled
to Playboy in 1975,
"It was designed as an esoteric little picture [...] I had no idea middle America would see
it."
"Excuse me while I whip this out."
"Ahhh!"
After the twin successes of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, Brooks became
a major power player in Hollywood. But then his career seesawed in the following years.
He enjoyed mild success with his next film, 1976's Silent Movie, but then he had another
flop the next year with the Alfred Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety. He didn't have another
hit until 1981's History of the World, Part I, and then not again after that until Spaceballs
in 1987. Between those two, he was an executive producer on a disastrous sci-fi film called
Solarbabies, which he claimed made him go broke. After the movie's release in 1986,
Brooks was in a dark place because he was in so much debt. As he recalled in an interview
on the podcast How Did This Get Made?,
"I’m practically ready to jump off a roof, you know? I mean a roof like the Empire State
Building, I’m ready to go."
Solarbabies initially had a $5 million budget that eventually grew all the way to $23 million.
Brooks was the one on the hook to find all that extra money, which included taking out
a second mortgage on his home. Ultimately, the film made less than a million dollars
at the box office and was panned by critics.
Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft always seemed like an unlikely Hollywood couple. Nevertheless,
they managed to stay together through thick and thin for over four decades. While they
were dating, she won an Oscar for her portrayal of Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, but
it was her role as Mrs. Robinson in 1967's The Graduate that truly made her an icon.
When Brooks and Bancroft met in 1961, they were both in the process of leaving their
first spouses. Neither of them was yet a household name, but their careers were moving right
along. They had a son named Max in 1972, and they remained happily married until Bancroft
died of uterine cancer in 2005. Max, who would grow up to be a successful writer himself,
spoke about his parents during a 2019 episode of CBS Sunday Morning.
"It was only later when I got out into the world, I realized that most people are not
as animated, and most people were not as funny."
Mel Brooks met his longtime comedy partner Carl Reiner when they were both working on
Your Show of Shows. During that time, they came up with the character of "The 2000 Year
Old Man" as a joke that they would tell each other for fun. Then it became a comedy routine
that they performed at parties, and after that, they recorded the act for five comedy
albums that they produced between 1960 and 1997, even earning them a Grammy in 1998.
In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Reiner recalled of first meeting Brooks,
"I thought, who is this guy? This guy is the funniest single human being on the planet."
"For about two and a half hours, Mel and I ad libbed and cut it down to 47 minutes, and
the 2000-Year-Old Man was born."
Brooks and Reiner's friendship lasted 70 years, longer than either man was married. They vacationed
together with their families and spurred each other on as they both directed some of the
biggest comedy movies of the 70s and 80s. Later in life, they spent almost every day
together at each other's homes watching TV and making jokes. When they couldn't see each
other in person during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, they got on the phone while watching
Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune at the same time. That June, Reiner passed away of natural
causes at the age of 98. As Brooks told The Guardian that year,
"I don't think I've ever had a better friend than Carl."
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