Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks, born Melvin James Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, is an American actor, filmmaker, comedian, songwriter, and playwright whose work grew out of the brash comic energy of mid-century New York, wartime experience, live performance, television writers’ rooms, and Hollywood parody. Over more than seven decades, he became known for farces and parodies that treated genre, history, show business, and fear itself as material for jokes.

Brooks was born on a tenement kitchen table in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and grew up in Williamsburg. His father, Max Kaminsky, came from a German Jewish family from Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland; his mother, Katie Brookman, was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev. His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney when Brooks was two. Brooks later said of that loss, “There’s an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I’m sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility.” Small and often teased as a child, he learned to “clothe it in comedy” to avoid trouble. At nine, after seeing Anything Goes at the Alvin Theater, he decided on show business. By fourteen, he was entertaining guests as a pool-side tummler at a Borscht Belt hotel.

Music and performance came early. Brooks studied drumming with Buddy Rich, earned money as a musician from age fourteen, and got his first chance as a comedian at sixteen when he filled in for an ill emcee. As a teenager, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, shortening his mother’s maiden name, Brookman, because it was too long to fit on his drums. After graduating from Eastern District High School in January 1944, he was drawn into World War II service. He joined the U.S. Army, trained in radio operation and other skills, and served in Europe as a combat engineer, helping locate land mines and clear danger as Allied forces advanced into Nazi Germany.

After the war in Europe ended, Brooks joined Special Services as a comic touring Army bases. His professional career later began in television as a writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he worked with Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Carl Reiner. With Reiner, he co-created “The 2000 Year Old Man,” which later brought Brooks the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000. With Buck Henry, he created the satirical spy series Get Smart, which ran from 1965 to 1970.

Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers in 1967. He followed The Twelve Chairs with a run of comedies including Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The Broadway musical version of The Producers ran from 2001 to 2007 and won 12 Tony Awards. Through Brooksfilms, he also produced The Elephant Man and The Fly. One of the few EGOT winners, he received honors including the Kennedy Center Honor, AFI Life Achievement Award, National Medal of Arts, BAFTA Fellowship, and an Honorary Academy Award. His comedy still carries because it turns anger, fear, vanity, and catastrophe into something blunt, silly, and unmistakably human.