Mel Brooks: I’ve tried to get even with Hitler by taking the Mickey out of him

Mel Brooks is a sophisticated guy. He collected fancy French wines and did a tasting on Johnny Carson’s show. He drops references to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. He was married for 40 years to that epitome of elegance, Anne Bancroft. He was a favourite lunch companion of Cary Grant, the suavest man who ever lived.

But in the new TV show History of the World, Part II, which is streaming in the US on Hulu, you can still find all the Mel Brooks signature comedy stylings: penis jokes, puke jokes and fart jokes.

“I like fart jokes,” he said, Zooming from his home in Santa Monica, California. “It adds some je ne sais quoi to the comedy. A touch of sophistication for the smarter people helps move the show along.”

After all, with the percussive campfire scene in his 1974 comedy classic, Blazing Saddles, where the cowhands sit around eating beans and passing wind, he elevated flatulence to cinematic history.

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The comedy legend, now 96, preferred to meet on Zoom because he’s wary of Covid-19. Strangers love to hug him and say, “Mel, I love you!” he said, adding, “I’m a target.”

The man behind outlandish, hilarious movies such as The Producers [which features the song Springtime for Hitler], Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, High Anxiety, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part I, along with the hit TV spy comedy Get Smart, no longer lives in a time when he can have “absolutely no restrictions on any and all subjects”, as he said about writing Blazing Saddles (which was slapped with its own content warning in 2020 when it was on HBO Max). And he lost the two loves of his life, Bancroft and [best friend and fellow comedian] Carl Reiner. But Mel Brooks is still a ball of fire.

Having lived through nearly a century of history, Brooks is sneaking up on his famous character, the 2,000 Year Old Man. But his taste in comedy is still as merrily immature as ever. He has sharp takes on world history, greed and hypocrisy. He knows who the villains are and what the stakes are, and yet he’s not afraid of the lowbrow.

Max Brooks, his son with Bancroft, said his father’s mantra is: “If you’re going to climb the tower, ring the bell. He believes if you’re going to make a piece of art, don’t be safe, don’t be careful, don’t pander to a certain group to win their favour.”

Mel Brooks is still making fun of Hitler. The new show has a sketch called Hitler on Ice, with three TV commentators savaging an ice-skating Führer who falls. One sniffs, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you put concentration camps in people’s countries, you better be flawless on the ice.”

Brooks’s parents were immigrants, his mother from Ukraine and his father from Germany. His father died of tuberculosis when Brooks was two; there was no money to send him to a sanatorium, Max Brooks said. When the little boy, born Melvin Kaminsky, needed fillings for his teeth that would have cost a dollar apiece, his mother could not afford it, so she had to let the dentist rip them out for half price.

He fought in the US army against the Nazis and dealt with anti-Semitism among some of his fellow soldiers. He said he felt like Errol Flynn when he got instruction on cavalry charges with horses and sabres. He was a corporal, a combat engineer who defused landmines and cleared booby-trapped buildings. (He was in the German town of Baumholder on V-E Day.) His three brothers also fought in the war and one, Lenny, a pilot, ended up a prisoner in a Nazi POW camp for 19 months, where he had to pretend he wasn’t Jewish.

“I was on a troop ship, and I paid a sailor on deck $50 to let me sleep under a lifeboat in case we were torpedoed,” Brooks recalled. “The smells were dreadful, 500 guys on a ship. It was 16 or 17 days from the navy yard in Brooklyn to Le Havre, France, zigzagging and trying not to get torpedoed.”

And ever since the war, he said, “I’ve tried to get even with Hitler by taking the Mickey out of him, making fun, but it’s difficult.”

Brooks, who was sometimes bullied as a child, learned to use comedy as a weapon. When his musical version of The Producers in 2001 – with a swanning, singing and dancing Hitler – held a preview in Chicago, “some big guy kept storming up the aisle and saying: ‘How dare you have Hitler, how dare you have the swastika? I was in World War II risking my life, and you do this on a stage?’ I said, ‘I was in World War II, and I didn’t see you there.’”

History of the World, Part I, the 1981 movie on which his current series is riffing, was a raunchy romp through different eras, from the Stone Age to the French Revolution. It featured the peerless Madeline Kahn as Empress Nympho, Nero’s wife; Sid Caesar as the cave man who invented music and the spear but could not quite figure out fire; and Brooks in multiple roles. He played Comicus, the stand-up philosopher; a singing Torquemada with a bevy of synchronised swimmers; and a libidinous Louis XVI, having his way with women and crowing, “It’s good to be the king.”

It was chockablock with puns, including the classic in which Harvey Korman, as the Count de Monet, chastised his impudent companion, “Don’t be saucy with me, Béarnaise.”

Brooks tacked on Part I to the title as a joke, he said, but then “I was plagued with about a billion calls, ‘Where’s Part II?’ I never intended to do Part II.”

But he and his producing partner, Kevin Salter, eventually gave in to popular demand. Brooks said he thought: “What the hell? Let’s try Part II.” They reached out to comedian Nick Kroll in 2020. He recruited Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz and showrunner David Stassen. “I’ve been laughing at comedy, some of which I didn’t create,” Brooks said, “which is very weird for me.” The writers did remind themselves, as Sykes said, to “Mel it up.”

Once the ball got rolling, all the comedians who idolised Brooks wanted in – from Johnny Knoxville (who plays Rasputin getting his attenuated member cut off) to Sarah Silverman (who is in a “Jews in space” skit previewed in Part I with the song “Jews, out in space, we’re zooming along, protecting the Hebrew race”) to Jack Black (a sneaky Stalin).

“Before Mel, I don’t think movies were hilarious,” Barinholtz said. “Before Blazing Saddles, regular people were not going to the movie theatres and laughing so hard they were hyperventilating. Mel, I think, really ushered that in.” He and some of the other comedians who worked on the show had not met Brooks before, Barinholtz said, adding, “He inspected our teeth and could tell that we were strong.”

Brooks, who narrated the final product with a muscly CGI body, helped the comedians decide which slices of history to explore in the sequel, and joined the Zoom writers’ room sometimes to weigh pitches or offer jokes from his vault of unused material.

“The first time we talked, he was like, ‘I have an idea for this joke where Robert E. Lee is at Appomattox and he turns to sign and his sword knocks his guys in the balls,’” Kroll said. “Then when we decided to do a whole section on Ulysses S. Grant and the signing at Appomattox, we were like: ‘Perfect. We can do that joke.’”

And like Part I, in which Comicus pulls up in a chariot to Caesar’s palace during the Roman Empire but it turns out to be the Las Vegas Caesars Palace, Part II has plenty of fun anachronisms, like Galileo on “TicciTocci” or Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad morphing into the New York subway.

Barinholtz said Brooks’s instruction was: “Don’t get too esoteric. Play the hits.” He said they didn’t use the racial and sexual epithets that peppered Brooks’s movies in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s but stuck to the same themes.

In one episode, a Native American Civil War soldier played by Zahn McClarnon has to do a stand-up routine to distract a bunch of West Virginia racists trying to hang Grant, played by Barinholtz. Noting that the colonisers had built Ohio on top of his razed family home, the soldier advised, “If you’re going to genocide a people, you should get something better out of it than Cleveland.”

Brooks, too, said he would no longer use the inflammatory words he used so freely back in the day. I asked him about his fellow comics – such as Chris Rock, Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld – who worry that wokeness is neutering comedy.

He looked over at Salter. “I had a talk with Kevin before this,” he told me. “He said: ‘If Maureen, for some reason, brings up woke and woke comedy, stay off it. Stay away.’”

He endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, but he said he doesn’t like to do political comedy because then “half the audience is going to be angry at me.” He prefers jokes like this one from the new show about the Virgin Mary: “She thinks her son is God. The mother’s definitely Jewish.”

Is he surprised anti-Semitism is on the rise?

“Why would you want to be anti-Jewish after those stories about concentration camps?” he said. “How could you be?”

My first memory of laughing until I cried was watching Sid Caesar cavort on Caesar’s Hour, the sequel to Your Show of Shows. Brooks wrote for both, as part of the most famous writers’ rooms in TV history. Brooks worked in those rooms with Mel Tolkin, the head writer; Carl Reiner; Neil Simon; Larry Gelbart (“the fastest mouth and brain in the West,” as Brooks called him, who went on to do M*A*S*H and Tootsie); Lucille Kallen, one of the first women writing for television, who did the domestic sketches for Your Show of Shows; Aaron Ruben (who later produced The Andy Griffith Show); and a very young Woody Allen.

Brooks not only has an EGOT [Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award], but Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. At the ceremony, the comedian pretended to pants [made like he was pulling down his trousers] the president as the crowd howled. But when Brooks switched to the big screen, he thought his movie career was over before it got off the ground. In 1968, Renata Adler reviewed The Producers for The New York Times and called it “a violently mixed bag. Some of it is shoddy and gross and cruel; the rest is funny in an entirely unexpected way”. She said she was torn between leaving and laughing.

“I said, ‘The New York Times didn’t like it, so maybe I should go back to television where they liked everything I did,’” Brooks recalled. By then, he had gotten divorced and remarried to Bancroft. He remembers her telling him, “No, you were born to make movies, and you just keep making them.” Now, The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein are all on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry of cherished American films.

Certainly, Brooks and Bancroft are one of Hollywood’s greatest love stories. People considered them an odd couple, the short comic with the funny mug and Brooklyn accent, and the gorgeous actress who created the indelible portrait of the pantherlike seductress and pre-cougar, Mrs Robinson, in The Graduate, even though she was only 35.

But they fell in love nearly instantly after meeting on the set of The Perry Como Show. Brooks compares his wooing style to Pepper Martin, a St Louis Cardinals player in the 1930s who was famous for stealing bases. She was also impressed with his taxi whistle, he said.

They soon learned that they loved all the same things, from baseball to foreign movies to Chinese food. And if Anne loved something Mel didn’t know about, such as opera, he decided to love it, too. “Anne was Catholic, a good Catholic,” Brooks said. “I lived with her for so long, I started crossing myself.”

Even after they had been married for about 35 years, the thrill was still there. As she put it to The New York Daily News: “I get excited when I hear his key in the door. It’s like, ‘Ooh! The party’s going to start!’”

After she died in 2005 from uterine cancer, Brooks never dated again. “Once you are married to Anne Bancroft, others don’t seem to be appealing,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

He is happy, as we end our 90-minute interview, because we have laughed a lot, and laughter, he said, is the most important thing to him.

“Money is honey, funny is money,” he said blithely, echoing a Max Bialystock line from The Producers. “I really care about saying things that make people roar with laughter. I was on the stage at Radio City Music Hall, and we took questions in the last part of my standup. One of the questions was, ‘What do you wear – long shorts or briefs?’ I yelled, ‘Depends!’ It’s a thrill to get a big laugh.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times

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