Helianthus

Justice and Wheel of Fortune

What do we want?

Appropriate consequences!

When do we want them?

light thats not how the book works

MICROSOFT TEAMS

Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?

Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.

Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.

Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.

His early recreational experiences prepared him for a career as a tummler, amusing Jewish businesspeople on holiday. Yet even then, Brooks offered a tragicomic twist, prefiguring Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by appearing circa 1940 schlepping two suitcases and leaping fully clothed into a swimming pool as a mock gesture of suicidal despair because business was purportedly bad. The young Brooks was flummoxed by school lessons portraying Jews as simultaneously plutocrats and their anarchistic enemies. His 1991 tragicomedy Life Stinks, echoing the Book of Job in the Bible, is perhaps part of his inner investigation of the place of Jews in American society.

Complicating this understanding was antisemitic propaganda during Brooks’ youth. The German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 to denounce President Franklin Roosevelt as a Jew whose real name was “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” and scorn Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” For Brooks, who worshipped Roosevelt, this ethnic stereotyping was all too credible. At 17, he enlisted in the military, and like Don Rickles, another diminutive Jewish comedian who survived combat during World War II, Brooks emerged with an explosive penchant for humor as violence. The savage ridicule of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers was authenticated by early experience against Nazi adversaries in The Battle of the Bulge.

Rather than try to untangle such complexities, Brooks has tended to sum up life’s wisdom in bits of homespun wisdom attributed to his relatives, like “Never run for a bus; There’ll always be another” on the 2000 Year Old Man comedy album.

As a young comedy writer for Sid Caesar, he worked with the head writer Mel Tolkin (born Shmuel Tolchinsky near Odessa, Ukraine) who advised him to read Russian literature, and this acquaintance with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and even the antisemitic Dostoyevsky, made an indelible impression. Comedy in the latter two writers, born of absurd pain, transfixed Brooks, who would go on to adapt a novel by two Ukrainian Jews, Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Feinsilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev) in the 1970 film The Twelve Chairs.

Although not a box office success, Twelve Chairs gave the English Jewish actor Ron Moody one of his few leading roles on film, after starring as the villainous Jew Fagin in the stage musical Oliver! and its screen adaptation in 1968. About Russian anti-Jewish pogroms, Brooks concurred with his friend Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that the violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”

This comic fury was expressed by Brooks to Jewish friends like Howard Morris, a Bronx-born fellow comedian working with Sid Caesar, who was repeatedly mugged by Brooks, once by tying him up and stealing his wallet on a Greenwich Village street, and again in a Central Park rowboat. These ludicrous, yet intensely realized and enacted pranks were part of his persona over the past century.

And critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he has long referred to as “crickets,” were other targets of aggression, as Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan notes. The apotheosis of feedback deriding opinionated filmgoers is Brooks’ narration as a grumpy old Jew kvetching about avant-garde images in the Oscar-winning 1963 short film The Critic, directed by the American Jewish filmmaker Ernest Pintoff. As animated shapes form and reform, Brooks-as-Jewish-spectator concludes: “I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.” With each Jewish cinemagoer being an amateur Freud, the need for most critics is hilariously eliminated.

Similarly, Brooks became his own songwriter in hit musicals, despite lacking any memorable melodic gift. So he borrowed from Brahms the tune for the theme song of Twelve Chairs. The song characteristically expresses a generous life philosophy with the lines “You could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst/ hope for the best, expect the worst.” Mentioning the sentimental bestselling American Jewish author Fannie Hurst was part of Brooks’ all-inclusive optic, writing leading roles for African American performers like Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles, a part eventually played by Cleavon Little. And Brooks’ affectionate recognition, albeit mocking, of gay men in The Producers continued in 1983 with his remake of To Be or Not to Be, in which he interpolated a rescue of Sasha, a flamboyant dresser, from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

Brooks’ equally wide-ranging literary sensibilities are evident in a series of films produced by his Brooksfilms company, a number of them with an Anglophile flavor. Of these, his 1987 production of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, an ode to bibliophilia, offered a plausible Jewish role for his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft.

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