Mel Brooks was very, very nervous. Here he was, putting the final touches on his $11-million comedy, History of the World -- Part 1 , and he was worried that the film might offend. "I don't know how audiences are going to like the Spanish Inquisition sequence," he is saying, seated in his Hollywood office behind a desk that might have been an aircraft carrier during World War II. " I have three Jews, each on a wheel. Torquemada pulls the handle and the wheels spin around. If three rabbis come up, you win a lot of money. I mean it's very dangerous to put Jews on racks and have Catholics torture them, and get laughs."

    The mood of concern vanishes as quickly as it struck. Brooks smiles; his blue eyes gleam. And why not? Though he has drubbed by critics -- the doyenne of deep think film criticism, Pauline Kael, has called him "intentionally graceless" -- Brooks has been vindicated at the box office, where Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein have grossed more than $100 million each. Most people, it seems, would rather spend an hou-and-a-half watching a Mel Brooks movie than reading a Pauline Kael review. And one reason Brooks is smiling, I suspect, is that in the zany cinema of his mind he spies revenge; those critics pinioned to the rack, in his own private version of the Inquisition.

    Melvin the Irreverent, the kinf of off-the-wall comedy, who insists that good taste is meaningless, that it's not a factor in art; the man who defines tragedy as when he cuts his finger and comedy as when you fall down an open sewer and die. There is horrific, hostile truth in that. Funny is someone else's pratfall. And yet, as Brooks himself admits, "My comedy is based on rage."

    I asked him to get more specific, "Mel, what makes you angry these days?"

    "The Nazis again, neo-Nazism," he says, "I wasn't even going to touch Hitler again in this movie [the first time he did it was in The Producers, his first film, when he turned teh Fuhrer into a comic buffon]. But I threw him in, just because they're getting me crazy with the vandals in the synagogues. And this throw-back, this kind of horror, has a kind of negative attraction for the aimless and uncoalesced, especially kids who are looking for a father figure. It's very dangerous.

    "That's why the rise of this militant right, the Moral Majority, is so scary," he goes on. "They appeal to our fear of death. They use God as their weapon. What it is is bigotry, racial prejudice. It's a whole bunch of Hitlers. They are very dangerous people, and they've got to be stopped."

    While Mel may be fueled by anger, he is basically a sweet guy -- a quality that is reflected in his movies.

    I called this to his attention: "There is always a tender male camaraderie in your films. Between Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles. Between Wilder and Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein...."

    "Are you leading to the the point that I am a known homosexual?" Brooks shot back. "Do you want to just get it out in the open?" Well, I'm not. I'm a Jewish person. I'm a father of children."

    Four children, to be exact. There are three from his first marriage, to Florence Baum, and one -- a son named Max -- from Brooks' 17-year marriage to actress Anne Bancroft, one of the great beauties and talents of this or any time. They are devoted to each other and live a fiercely private life in Beverly Hills. Both are emotional, volatile people. In one fiery conjugal squabble, Brooks is said to have grabbed Bancroft's arm, "Let go of me," she snapped. "My body is my instrument." Parried Brooks: "Oh, yeah? Then let's see you play 'Begin the Beguine.' " Dissolve to laughter.

    Brooks and Bancroft, in fact, were laughing the first time they met, back in 1961. He and a mutual friend had stopped by a TV studio to watch Bancroft rehearse a Perry Como special. "There was Anne, singing, in a beautiful white gown." Mel recalls. "She was singing 'Married I Can Always Get,' and I said to myself, 'Gee, she's beautiful. I think I'll marry her.' It was instant. I fell in love. As a matter of fact, I tripped over a cable and really fell in love. When she finished the song, I stood up and clapped. 'Bravo!' I shouted. 'Terrific!' Then I rushed up onto the stage. 'Hi,' I said, 'I'm Mel Brooks.' I was really a pushy kid. And I shook her hand, and she smiled and laughed. Three years later, I married her."

    And he married her despite fact that in Brooklyn, where he was brought up, "the thought of marrying someone who wore a crucifix would cause people to spit three times to avoid the evil eye." So how did Mel's Jewish mother react to the news that her boychick was going to marry a Catholic girl? "She said, 'Wonderful, wonderful, a big star.' And then she stuck her head int he oven. Only kidding," Brooks, in fact, is very close to his mother, who lives in Miami Beach and has custody of his two oscars - one for producing a short film, The Critic; the other a screenplay award for The Producers.

    Mel has been bouncing off his mother's comic sensibility for nearly all of his 54 years. Back in the early 1950s, when he and Carl Reiner were young writers on Your Show of Shows, still TV's finest hour-and-a-half of comedy, they would run around to parties and improvise routines featuring a 2,000-Year-Old-Man, played by Brooks. Mel drew the omnigenarian Hebrew from reality, basing him on his mother, his Uncle Joe and other old-timers who had recoiled from the culture shock of the New World. Mel would imagine Uncle Joe, say, responding to Reiner's questions and, with a Brooklyn-Yiddish accent, he'd reduce everything to a primitive literalness, cutting through the cant and hypocrisy of the ages.

    "Sir, how many wives have you had?"

    Brooks: "Hundreds and hundreds of wives."

    "And I would imagine you had many children. How many children have you had?"

    Brooks : "Over 42,000 children. And not one comes to visit me."

    Through the rock-age wisdom of the 2,000-Year-Old-Man as in his movies, Brooks has exaggerated our cultural obsessions, sent them up and exploited them in liberating them, gut-clutching guffaw. He is outrageous, and nothing, not Freud, nor feminists, nor flatulence, is beyond his satirical shaft. You could say, in fact, that he and Woody Allen have become, especially for young audiences, the official satirists of a society that badly needs a hot needle in the posterior.

    The size of Mel's ego is roughly equivalent to the borough of Brooklyn, yet there is not a trace of envy or condescension in his voice when he discusses his chief comic competitor. "Woody is going through some personal torment now, I imagine, because his last film, Stardust Memories, did not do what he wanted it to do," says Brooks. "But he should be very careful about overreacting to what's happened. You can't let the critics or the public mix you up. I loved Interiors. Annie Hall was a masterpiece. I loved Manhattan. Okay, Stardust Memories was perhaps a little too insular, but a lot of it was good. So he shouldn't abandon what made Annie Hall so great, and go back to just doing Bananas - a zany comedy - so he can be recognized again."

    But Brooks doesn't really think Allen will do that. After all, he points out, "Woody is in analysis. Freud said, 'I'm going to call it psychoanalysis, and Woody said, 'Okay, can I be the first oen in it?' Freud said, 'All right, yeah, Woody. Over here, here's the couch.' So he's been in a long time, and I'm sure with some good help Woody's going to be very careful about how he's emotionally pushed around."

    Brooksian conversation is peppered with references to analysis, which he sees as the panacea to the absurd world in which we live. And if he sometimes comes across sounding like a shilll for Sigmund Freud, so be it. Analysis has helped him enormously, he admits, and he prescribes it freely for others.

    "When I interview actresses, the most compelling thing about a young actress -- about any woman -- is her sense of self-esteem," Brooks says. "If a woman likes herself, then I will like her. But I get negative vibes when I'm interviewing a woman who is filled with self-doubt and self-disrespect. Love thyself. If you don't like yourself, you should get some help, group therapy, clinics -- you don't have to pay for psychiatry today. But you must get in touch with those things that are inhibiting your own liking of yourself.

    "Looks are okay," he continues. "Looks are nice. But looks are good for half and hour. Then, boom, you get past the face and right to the heart and right to the soul and right to the smartness of dumbness of the person."

    As for Brooks' own psychoanalytic odyssey, it's a long story. "I went into analysis when I was twenty-two and had my first nervous breakdown," he says. "I've had one hundred and four since. But at twenty-two I was writing for Your Show of Shows, making a lot of money, and I felt, 'Oh, my God, they'll find me out. I'm a little Jew from Brooklyn. They call me a writer. I'm certainly not Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. I can't do this job.' I found a psychiatrist and I was with him for six years, five times a week. Initially, I was afraid analysis would make me 'normal' and take away my talent. But what it did was to free me to be a more complete artist and a good writer."

    Through analysis, Brooks, who is the youngest of four sons, also learned to be a father. "A lot of people who are babies of the family eventually have a big identity crisis," he says. "Life doesn't let you be the baby. You have babies of your own. That was very difficulty for me."

    Difficult or not, on the surface at least, everything is coming up -- okay, let's be graceless -- rabbis for the former Melvin Kaminsky, onetime Catskills drummer and tummler. As head of Brooksfilms, Limited, which produced The Elephant Man, he is arguably one of the wealthiest and certainly one of the most powerfully independent filmmakers in Hollywood today.

    Brooks' success, however, has at least two sides. While acknowledging that he's more relaxed and secure, he also admits that he's still driven, still engraged. Why is Melvin mad? "Because I'm still short," he quips. But seriously, folks, lately Brooks has been going through a crisis, not so much of confidence as of concern, which has made him very, very nervous. As a result, he's returned to analysis.

    "I have career blocks," he says. "I want to get back to being that personal crazy man who makes movies. And I found myself, without realizing it, heading toward being a mogul. Suddenly, I said to myself, 'What I do best is make people laugh. I better get in touch with that again.' So I went back into analysis to find out what my goals were, to get in touch with who I am."

    But that's not quite the last word. I kenw that Brooks had been interviewed hundreds of times. So I asked him: "Is there any question you've never been asked that you'd just love to answer?"

    "Nobody has asked me about a girl whose first name is Sheila, who lives in a motel in Cincinnati. And there's a parking spot outside the motel that says my name, Mel Brooks. Nobody has asked me about that, so please don't bring it up! Only kidding, Annie."

THE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN ON SOME NICE LADIES
In between mouthfuls of baked salmon at Junior's Delicatessen in Hollywood, the 2,000 Year-Old Man recently favored me with some reminiscences about the great women he had known and lusted for in his heart.    Tell us about Salome. She was a woman who certainly knew how to dress for success, wasn't she?    "Salome was a stout girl. Salome was chubby. She covered herself up very good. She wore seven veils. And when she took off the last veil, she was like a Rubens painting. Back then that was a good thing. Today they like skeletons."    And Cleopatra?    "Well, Cleopatra, what they wrote was a lie, a total lie. First of all, she did not commit suicide by putting an asp, a-s-p	to her b-r-e-a-s-t-t-y. She didn't. She died at the age of eighty-four. She lived a lovely life. She died from a stroke. They rushed her to the Hospital Pyramid and they didn't get her there in time, and she passed away."    Marie Antoinette?    "Kept her jewels on top of her head. She wore a big wig over them. And that's the reason she always walked cock-eyed, because all the jewels made her dizzy."    And Joan of Arc, did you know her?    "I went with her, dummy, I went with her. Ah, Joan, what a cuttie. I didn't marry her because she was on a mission at the time. She used to say to me, "Look, I gotta save France." And I said to her, "You save France, I gotta wash up.	You save France.' "    With whom did you have the most romantic interlude of your life?    "Dolly Madison. James Madison was busy in the West Wing of the Oval House writing the Monroe Doctrine. He never paid attention to her. She had needs, the woman had needs...."    Excuse me, but it was James Monroe who wrote the Monroe Doctrine....    "So, maybe it was Dolley Monroe. Who was the firl who made the ice cream?"    Dolley Madison.    "Yeah, Dolley Madison. We got hot, we fell right in the ice cream, we didn't know what we were doing. My tush was cold for three days."