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Mel Brooks directs on the set of the movie “The Producers” with actor Gene Wilder in 1967.
(Sam Falk / The New York Times / Redux)
Movies

Mel Brooks at 100: 8 scenes that define a comedy legend

Josh Rottenberg. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
By Josh Rottenberg
Staff Writer Follow

Mel Brooks turned 100 on Sunday. To the 2000 Year Old Man, that probably wouldn’t seem like a big deal. For the rest of us, it was.

Few filmmakers in Hollywood history have remained this funny — or this relevant — for this long. Brooks’ improbable career, chronicled last year in a two-part HBO documentary, took him from defusing land mines during World War II to writing for Sid Caesar and reinventing movie comedy with hits like “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Spaceballs.” Along the way, he conquered Broadway and became one of the few entertainers to win an EGOT — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.

Gene Wilder, left, and Cleavon Little in the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, "Blazing Saddles."

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AFI names this Mel Brooks movie the funniest of all time, bumping ‘Some Like It Hot’

To mark Brooks’ 100th birthday, the American Film Institute reshuffled its classic comedy rankings, elevating ‘Blazing Saddles’ to the No. 1 spot.

Even at the century mark, Brooks doesn’t seem especially interested in slowing down. A “Spaceballs” sequel is set for release next year. Asked by The Times in 2016, when he was 90, whether retirement held any appeal, Brooks joked, “Well, first of all, I don’t know how to play golf. I could play tennis if it was triples — not doubles. But if there were three on each side, I could cover my spot.”

Every Brooks fan has a favorite scene, and there’s a good chance yours isn’t on this list. That’s OK. We weren’t trying to settle the argument. These aren’t necessarily Brooks’ funniest scenes or his most famous — he didn’t even direct them all. Instead, we’ve highlighted eight moments that show his different sides, whether it’s his fearlessness, his showmanship or the warmth that so often ran beneath the anarchy. No handful of moments could tell the whole story. But these are a good place to start.

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Illustration with stills from "Working Girl”, “There Will Be Blood”, “The Grapes of Wrath, "They Live”, “Do The Right Thing”, and “Team America: World Police”.

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'The Producers' (1967)

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Gene Wilder, from left, Kenneth Mars and Zero Mostel in "The Producers" in 1967.
(Embassy Pictures)
Brooks’ first film left little doubt about the kind of writer-director he intended to be. Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his timid accountant, Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), hatch a scheme to get rich by staging a guaranteed Broadway flop. They think they’ve found it in “Springtime for Hitler,” a deranged ex-Nazi’s musical love letter to the German dictator. Instead, audiences mistake it for brilliant satire and turn it into a smash, destroying the partners’ carefully constructed scam. By daring to make one of history’s greatest monsters the stuff of show tunes, Brooks revealed a comic instinct that would come to define his career: Cut scary people down to size by making them look ridiculous.

'Blazing Saddles' (1974)

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Gene Wilder, left, and Cleavon Little in the 1974 Mel Brooks movie, "Blazing Saddles."
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
For all the chaotic, rapid-fire offensiveness of his comic mayhem, Brooks always chose his targets carefully. Nowhere is that clearer than in the subversive western satire “Blazing Saddles,” one of the two landmark movies he released in 1974. When Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart rides into the all-white town of Rock Ridge, the welcome committee is ready to greet him with open arms — until they get a look at him. Within moments, the smiles disappear and the guns come out. Cornered, Bart points a pistol at his own head and pretends to take himself hostage, using the townspeople’s own sheer stupidity to save his neck. Bart’s skin color is never the joke. The people who can’t see past it are.

'Young Frankenstein' (1974)

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Brooks, right, on the set of the movie "Young Frankenstein."
(Marianna Diamos / Los Angeles Times)
Brooks’ affectionate homage to James Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein” (and also his 1935 “Bride of Frankenstein”) follows Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein as he embraces his notorious family’s mad-scientist legacy and brings a monster (Peter Boyle) to life. At a packed theater, Frederick tries to prove his creation can be accepted by polite society, dressing him in white tie and tails for a rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” For a moment, it looks as though Frederick has actually pulled it off. Then a stage light bursts, the Monster panics and the terrified crowd turns on him. Frankenstein doing Fred Astaire is the kind of idea that has no business working until Brooks makes it seem inevitable.
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'Young Frankenstein' (1974) — yes, another one

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CIRCA 1974: Peter Boyle asks for more food from Gene Hackman in a scene from the movie "Young Frankenstein"
(Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
Gene Hackman’s brief, unbilled cameo as the lonely blind hermit remains one of the movie’s most delightful surprises. Hackman took the role as a favor to Gene Wilder, whom he’d known since studying together at the Actors Studio. Hoping to offer food, wine and friendship to the Monster, the hermit’s every gesture of hospitality ends in disaster — ladling hot soup into his guest’s lap, setting the Monster’s thumb on fire while lighting his cigar and shattering a mug during a toast. Yet he never stops trying. “Where are you going?” he calls out after the monster flees his hut. “I was going to make espresso.” The scene shows a side of Brooks that’s easy to overlook. Even at his most outrageous, he never lost sight of his characters’ humanity.
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'High Anxiety' (1977)

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Comedian and film director Mel Brooks under the Golden Gate Bridge in a scene from his 1977 movie "High Anxiety."
(Janet Fries / Getty Images)
Brooks delivers one of his most grounded and fully realized screen performances as Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, a brilliant but deeply neurotic psychiatrist who suddenly finds himself living inside a Hitchcock thriller. One of the film’s funniest sequences comes with Brooks’ riff on the famous shower scene from “Psycho.” As Thorndyke steps into his hotel room shower, a tightly wound bellboy (played by a young Barry Levinson) arrives with the newspaper he’d requested and repeatedly stabs him with it, screaming, “Here’s your paper!” Brooks was a devoted student of movies and the gag works because everything else — the framing, the editing, the mounting suspense — feels unmistakably Hitchcockian. Alfred himself appreciated the craftsmanship, sending Brooks a case of wine after seeing the film.

'The Elephant Man' (1980)

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John Hurt as John Merrick The Elephant Man (1980)
(Paramount Pictures)
Yes, David Lynch directed “The Elephant Man,” but it might not have existed at all if not for Brooks. After seeing Lynch’s surreal, deeply unsettling “Eraserhead,” Brooks recognized a talent that most of Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out. He championed Lynch to direct the haunting true story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a severely disfigured man struggling to be seen as fully human in Victorian England. Brooks produced the film but insisted his own name stay out of the marketing and opening credits, worried audiences would expect a comedy. Merrick’s heartbreaking declaration (“I am not an animal! I am a human being!”) became the film’s most unforgettable and oft-quoted moment. “The Elephant Man” was the first of several inspired bets by Brooks as a producer, including David Cronenberg’s “The Fly,” that revealed his remarkable eye for original talent.

'History of the World, Part I' (1981)

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Dom DeLuise in a scene from "History of the World Part I" in 1981.
(20th Century Fox)
Brooks’ sprawling comedy careens through thousands of years of civilization, from the Stone Age to the French Revolution, with every era treated as fair game. Early on, Brooks himself appears as Moses, descending from Mount Sinai carrying three stone tablets and proudly announcing that God has given humanity 15 Commandments. Then one tablet slips from his hands and shatters. “Ten!” he quickly corrects himself. “Ten Commandments!” The joke lasts only a few seconds but it captures something defining: If something was too sacred to laugh at, Brooks was probably already writing the punchline.

'Spaceballs' (1987)

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George Wyner, from left, Rick Morains and Mel Brooks in the movie "Spaceballs" in 1987.
(Peter Sorel / MGM)
A decade after “Star Wars” changed Hollywood forever, Brooks set his sights on the franchise it had unleashed. Playing Yogurt (Brooks’ answer to Yoda), he explains where the real power lies: not in some mysterious Force but in merchandising. The parade of “Spaceballs” products that follows — T-shirts, breakfast cereal, lunch boxes, even a flamethrower (“The kids love this one”) — skewers Hollywood’s growing obsession with squeezing every possible dollar out of a hit. Nearly 40 years later, it’s hard to think of a joke that turned out to be more prophetic.
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