Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man: Mel Brooks in His 90s

I find it bemusing to imagine Mel Brook's movies being released today. Think about Blazing Saddles. It'd be met with nonstop claims about all sorts of isms and ists with coordinated Twitter attacks to try to hurt Brooks or any company that facilitated it or its release. And of course he is not, nor are his films. In a way it's the same thing that's already happened to Mark Twain and The Adventurers of Huckleberry Fin. It's now been banned in numerous US schools under typically facile implications of isms and ists, because of a certain word.

The thing I find most bewildering though is that people seem to no longer actually care about content or context - it's all about the most incredibly superficial approach to everything. It's interesting that both Mel Brooks with Blazing Saddles, and Twain with Huck Fin, made a point of contrasting the superficiality and nonsensical nature of labels against the strength of character of those being labeled. The slave/prisoner in both tales being one of the only decent and honorable peoples in their respective stories.

Just kind of sad to feel like we're regressing so much and calling it progress.

Mel Brooks features in two Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame) books: No laughing matter and From Coney Island to here. It is amazing to read about how Mario Puzo (of The Godfather), Mel Brooks, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel spent their evenings together, playing cards, eating dinner, watching TV and just ‘shooting some shit’ as friend do. The passages in the book reminded me of impressionist painters gathered in a Parisian cafe talking about where to get cheap turpentine (as depicted in the book ‘Lust for life’). Worth a read! There is also an article where two old friends (Brooks and Heller) meet again:https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1...

Also, in one of the brilliant episodes of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, he pays a visit to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (with Chinese Take-out food) — I highly recommend watching that to get a glimpse of sharp incisive wit in full action at age 90!

Edit: this link is better http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/27/news/ls-23428

It's a great pity that today's generation can't appreciate Brooks' greatest works. Too politically incorrect.

Of course the irony is that Brooks' work was groundbreaking for it's time. He skewered everyone equally, except for bigots who got a double dose. But in today's society, much of it would be considered too raw. It really is a shame, because it teaches us all to laugh at ourselves.

Spaceballs and Blazing Saddles are my favorite movies from him.

Young Frankenstein was written and developed by Gene Wilder. It was definitely not born out of Brooks’ obsession with Mary Shelley’s novel and even Brooks would hardly say so!

This passage resonates especially well with today's times:

Audiences hoping for safe spaces—especially Jewish audiences—can be rudely jostled by Brooks’s wilder moments. The musical number “Springtime for Hitler,” first unleashed in the movie version of The Producers (1968), of course turned Nazism into merry choreography—boys and girls singing and dancing in S.S. uniforms and regalia. The joke was something more than a joke. Those who had seen Broadway shows in the ’50s and ’60s knew how closely Brooks adhered to the shape and sound of Broadway style. The audience for musical comedies was heavily Jewish, so the wit was partially aimed at them and at Jews in general—an audience inclined to feel itself a victim of history.

Lil' old man!

Profiles like this seem to only be published when someone’s pretty near death. (the Leonard Cohen new yorker profile being a good example).

not looking forward to that—Mel Brooks is a national treasure.