The generation growing up in the 1960s became aware of Mel Brooks’ brand of spoofing through the television series “Get Smart” (1965-1969). He didn’t conceive the popular parody of Cold War spy dramas and wasn’t the producer’s first or second choice as lead writer. “The early candidates declined,” writes Patrick McGilligan. “Brooks was more amenable because he was more available.”
In McGilligan’s biography, Funny Man: Mel Brooks (Harper), the gag writer-turned-director comes across as flawed and egotistical as well funny. Like a stand-up comic, he likes being in the center of the spotlight. In interviews, Brooks glibly took credit for much of “Get Smart’s” success, despite many claims by others to the contrary. He’s the kind of guy who’d claim the cone of silence and the shoe phone whether he earned it or not.
With Funny Man, McGilligan, a Milwaukee film historian whose previous subjects have included Jack Nicholson and Alfred Hitchcock, painstakingly assembled a plausible and fair-minded account. It’s not an authorized biography. Brooks is quoted only from archival interviews and some sources insisted on anonymity. He may be a funny man but he wears bitterness like a comfortable old shirt he refuses to throw away.
Brooks was part of the Jewish wave, Anglicized names or not, that surged across American culture, high and low, in the post-World War II era. McGilligan reconstructs his upbringing in the tenements of New York and his early comedic stints in the Catskills. “Almost from the cradle, it seemed, Melvin could make jokes out of his terror and pratfalls.” Surrounded by vivid characters in a tough society, Brooks’ jokes were his equalizer. In many ways, as McGilligan writes, he retained “a young teenage boy’s sensibility.”
Brooks’ film debut was a hilarious spoof of the Broadway scene he came to know as a script doctor. The Producers (1967) and he went on to make a string of memorable comedies including Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974) and Spaceballs (1987). One of his masterpieces was the darkly humorous remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi comedy To Be or Not to Be (1983).
Perhaps the best description of Brooks, caught on record by McGilligan, came from actor Lewis J. Stadlen. “Something about Mel has always reminded me of a street tough trying to escape the body of an elderly Jewish woman. It’s like he’s holding a knife to your throat and demanding that you eat chicken soup.”
