Mel Brooks on the Edge
In 1950 the sociologist Robert E. Park introduced the concept of the “marginal man” into academia. What he meant was “a cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place.” A classic example: the Jew almost anywhere—“the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint.” In other words, a man wise because he’s in his surroundings but not ofthem.
Odd though it may sound, Mel Brooks is the marginal man. At least, that seems to be the central argument of James Robert Parish’s entertaining new biography, It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (Wiley, 336 pages, $25.95). But don’t worry. Parish, a former entertainment reporter, isn’t particularly interested in sociology. Nonetheless his book subtly portrays Brooks’s humor as deriving from a perpetual sense of isolation and estrangement. As Brooks himself once explained, “My feeling comes from the feeling that, as a Jew, and as a person, you don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. It comes from a realization that even though you’re better and smarter, you’ll never belong.”
In a breezy and sympathetic volume we follow Brooks from his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn to his early days as a writer for the television comedian Sid Caesar. The class clown in elementary school, he was raised in a working-class, and sometimes working-poor, family. His father died young, and with his mother and two older brothers, he came to know deprivation and hard work intimately.
As a teenager he worked odd jobs at resorts in the Catskills, the Jewish Riviera of the day, and was occasionally allowed to perform for the guests. In those early years his humor was limited to cheap antics like lewd facial twitches and noisy entrances where he’d scream, “Los mir aroys!” (Yiddish for “Let me out!”). In short, he wasn’t funny.
After Army service during World War II, during which he saw action in France and Belgium, he returned to New York, matriculated at City College, skipped most of his classes, and, much to the chagrin of his mother, who thought he should learn a trade, began haunting third-rate theaters. His brief work for a theater impresario named Benjamin Kutler, a seedy character who conned elderly widows out of money, would later inspire one of his most successful films.
He eventually attached himself to Sid Caesar, who later recalled, “Ever since I had worked in the Catskills, I had considered Mel to be sort of a groupie. . . . He loved comics and obviously wanted to be one himself. . . . He was funny and ingenious and he liked my type of humor, so he hung around me.” “Hung around” was charitable. Without any experience in television or professional comedy, Brooks stalked the TV studio where Caesar’s first show, Admiral Broadway Review, was filmed, suffering abuse and ejection at the hands of guards who knew better than to let the scrappy, five-foot-four wannabe through the door.
Eventually Caesar took mercy on his would-be protégé, put him on staff at $50 a week (Caesar initially paid the sum out of his own pocket, and it would be well over a year before Brooks got writing credit), and began what soon blossomed into a legendary collaboration. Brooks was, after all, a very funny man, and for both Admiral Broadway Review and the subsequent Your Show of Shows, he provided Caesar with some of his best gags. By the time Caesar’s career began its downward spiral, in the late 1950s, Brooks was earning $87,000 a year, a staggering sum in those days.
The end of Caesar’s television career coincided with the dissolution of Brooks’s first marriage. It’s not clear what he can possibly have been thinking when, single and temporarily broke, he decided to court Anne Bancroft, the strikingly beautiful film and stage actress who had won a Tony for her lead role in The Miracle Worker. He virtually stalked Bancroft, and as with Caesar, it worked. By 1963 he was living in her brownstone on West 11th Street in New York. “People think we’re an unlikely couple,” she explained. “Wrong: We’re perfect. He’s terribly funny all the time. I’m not above competing, and at first maybe I would try to top him. Now, I’d rather just sit back, laugh, and enjoy, you know? Maybe ’cause I discovered early, I couldn’t. . . . I get excited when I hear his key in the door. It’s like, ‘Ooh! The party’s going to start!’”
Parish takes readers through Brooks’s successes in the 1960s, first with his marriage to Bancroft, then with his series of “2000 Year Old Man” comedy records, co-created and recorded with a fellow Sid Caesar veteran, Carl Reiner, and finally with his 1968 movie hit The Producers. But it’s the 1970s that are the high-water mark of Brooks’s career. In a string of comedies—Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), and History of the World, Part I (1981)—he secured his reputation as a top American funnyman. He indulged in crude racial humor and scatology and poked fun at legendary artists (Alfred Hitchcock, Mary Shelley) and art forms (silent film). He took on social taboos with enthusiastic abandon—as only a marginal man, in all his estrangement, could.
The final chapters of Parish’s book constitute something of an anticlimax. Brooks’s career drifted in the 1980s and ’90s but returned to prominence a few years ago with the stage and film revivals of The Producers. Anne Bancroft’s death in 2005 took a heavy emotional toll, though in public he refused to shed tears. “If any of you are grieving,” he told guests at her memorial service, “keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear it.”
If it’s hard to think of Mel Brooks as a serious character, that’s largely because he refuses to take himself seriously. He remained in seclusion for much of 2006, attempting to come to terms with the loss of his wife, but even in his deepest grief he insisted that sorrow should be a private affair. In public, it was all laughs. A few months after Bancroft’s death, my wife and I were having dinner at a sushi place on the Upper East Side and spied him dining with some friends across the room. (That’s how living in New York is sometimes.) His arms were waving, and his dinner companions were in hysterics.
Brooks is a funny man. But is he the marginal man? Parish thinks so, and so does Mel. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he told Mike Wallace during a 60 Minutes interview several years ago. “I am a Jew. What about it? What’s so wrong? What’s the matter with being a Jew? I think there’s a lot of that way deep down beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.”