thecosmos according to mel brooks
by E. Graydon Carter Mel Brooks is a taut, compact, slightly bow-legged walnut, with clean, fine hands and a broad, animated mouth. His hair, it is fair to say, has gone the way of the rumble seat; and what remains, agrizzled grey wisp, is swung from one side of his head to the other in a valiant attempt to stave off the appearance of aman whose hair has gone the way of the rumble seat. At the Twentieth Century Fox commissary, a cool dining room with a canopied terrace that has some of the flavor of an officer's club in the days of the British Raj, Brooks bustles along, Fiorello LaGuardia with a deal memo, grabbing the hands of minor studio people, the maitre d', waiters, busboys. "Alphonse!" "Tony!" He moves too fast, thinks to fast, and eats too fast, sprinkling himself and his lunch companions as little pieces of food fly from his mouth. He prefers monologue to dialogue , and he can be funny , endearing, brilliant, infantile, vulgar, hopelessly corny, boastful, winning, and wise all within the space of a few mouthfuls of seafood salad. At his offices on the back lot, he is scrambling to complete the editing of Spaceballs, the first film he has directed in six years and, at $22.7 million, his most expensive film ever. It is yet another parody, this time a lampoon of the Star Wars/Aliens/Star Trek axis. It's a paradoxically risky venture; on the one hand, to parody a film genre, the genre has to have been around long enough to become a genre, and yet in the case of the space films, although there centerianly is much to parody, interest in the genre seems to be on the wane. Even George Lucas has stopped making them. Brooks's "dossier," as he calls his body of work, is substantial, if spotty , with great heights and best-forgotten lows. He is responsible for one of the most memorable American comedies ever, The Producers; a revered comedy album, The 2,000-Year-Old-Man; a string of intermittently funny parodies - Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety; The Twelve Chairs, an arty, early-seventies cult favorite; and Oscar-winning short, The Critic; a truly bad movie, The History of the World - Part I; a good television series, Get Smart; and a string of fine, high-minded, non-Mel Brooks Brooksfilms - The Elephant Man, Frances, My Favorite Year, and 84 Charing Cross Road(starring his wife, Anne Bancroft). At the beginning of it all, and paramount to Mel Brooks's being Mel Brooks, was his time spent writing for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Show in the fifties, seminal television, and still considered by those who worked on the show to be among the greatest television ever produced, but which when viewed today can seem neither funny nor particularly inventive. Show Business made Mel Brooks, and he flavors his talk with great heaps of "I Love This Business" industry schmaltz. He talks of the great respect he has for George Lucas. How he loves Laddie - his old friend, MGM President, Alan Ladd, Jr. David Begelman, when he was helping to get Blazing Saddles into production, told Brooks he loved him. Brooks tells about the time he wrote a parody of Death of a Salesman for a Broadway revue, New Faces of 1952. "I thought that Arthur Miller would kill me. And then I got a lover letter from him, and we've been friends ever since." When he did High Anxiety, Brooks says, "I went to Alfred Hitchcock and I begged an audience with him and he said, I'd love you to produce this, I loved Blazing Saddles. I trust you. I trust your intelligence. And please, no holds barred. Do it all.' And I said, 'I'm going to do The Birds, I'm going to do the shower.' And he said, 'Please. Do it all.' So I did a rough cut and showed it to him. He sat there and when his name came on the screen. He Actually Dabbed Hi Eyes." When the talk turns to Kenneth Tynan, who wrote an adoring profile of Brooks for The New Yorker, Brooks says: "Kenneth Tynan, by the way, if I can digress for a minute, was one of the best, most talented, loveliest guys I ever met in my life." Mel, you big beautiful person, you. If you need me for anything-anything-I'll be in my trailer. With Spaceballs, Brooks hopes to get back the stride he had before History of the World -Part I. Spaceballs is headed by two very wining young stars, Bill Pullman (the dazed kidnapper in Ruthless People) and Daphne Zuniga (who played the Claudette Colbert part in Rob Reiner's sublime film, The Sure Thing. Pullman plays a character named Lone Starr. His space ship is an interstellar Winnebago. Zuniga plays "Her Spoiled Highness" Princess Vespa from planet Druidia ("the first Druish Princess"). John Candy plays a Mawg ("Half man, half dog. 'I'm my own best friend,'"), and Rick Moranis plays the villain, Dark Helmut. Brooks wisely changed the movie's name from his original choice; Planet Moron. One of Spaceballs cast's chief assets is Brooks himself. Mel Brooks always writes well for Mel Brooks, and as a performer in his films he can be superb. In Spaceballs, hi President Skroob (unfortunate motto: "Skroob the people") is a frantic megalomaniac, borrowing equal parts from Brooks's own performance in Blazing Saddles and Groucho Marx's Rufus T. Firefly. He also plays a two-foot-high Yoda - and 2000-Year-Old-Man-like character named Yogurt, who "dispenses wisdom with fruit at the bottom." If Brooks has a parallel in movies, it is Woody Allen. They're both short. They're both Jewish. Both have had special deals with studios (Brooks at Fox; Allen at U.A. and now Orion); both write, direct, and star in many of their own movies; both began by writing gags for others; both, in fact, worked on Your Show of Shows; both have developed ensemble groups of actors whose faces pop up regularly in their movies; each plays a musical instrument appropriate to their styles of comedy - Allen, the clarinet, and Brooks, the drums; and both are known for their habit of bringing their own wine into good restaurants. Mel Brooks would like to thank Woody Allen for making Radio Days. The film crystallized a childhood very similar to Brooks's own, a life of dreaming about Manhattan skyscrapers and listening to the great radio comics Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen. Brooks, like Woody Allen, was born in a Brooklyn tenement. (Born Melvin Kaminsky, he changed his name first to Brooman, his mother's maiden name, and finally to Brooks.) His father, a Russian, worked as a process server and died at thirty-four of a kidney disease - when Mel was two and a half. Brooks lived a life out of a Malamud short story, raising pigeons on a rooftop and fending off bullies with hokes. Buddy Rich, a neighbor, taught him to play drums; and, in 1942, Brooks headed to the Catskills for summer work as a drummer and part-time tumbler, an entertainer who got the guests laughing by doing things like jumping into the pool with a suitcase full of rocks in a mock suicide attempt. That summer he met a young saxophone player working nearby: Sid Caesar. Caesar, says Brooks, was a major influence on his style of comedy. Other, earlier influences were teams - Laurel and Hardy, the Ritz Brothers, Groucho et al. "The Marx Brothers," says Brooks, "had the most influence on me, because they were a pastiche of strange physical comedy and very brave comedy. I mean, Harpo jumping on a big fat lady and sexually assaulting her, fighting with her, I mean punching her! In the middle of it all, they're making sharp political comments on war and peace, and it's a brilliant combination of things that I love. And when I was still a young man, I loved Martin and Lewis." "The Roots of my humor," says Brooks, "are in very old-fashioned Yiddish comedy as well, which is based on some failure-making fun of the inept, which is cruel. There was a great Jewish comic named Aaron Lebedeff, a forerunner of Danny Kaye. He did a song called "Rumania," imitating a guy who stuttered a lot. So Jews taking off on unfortunates, it's always compelling. Because you're saying in a strange way, 'Oh thank God, it's not me.' You enjoy the humor because you are not the butt of the joke. It's cruel, but effective." Charlie Chaplin used to say that tragedy was slipping on a banana peel; humor was seeing someone else slip on it. A Mel Brooks movie can be expected to have upwards of one hundred gag, one a minute, of which maybe three or hour will hit a high note. What often keeps his movies from being completely delightful is the sheer broadness of much of the humor - too often he will go for the easy laugh. He describes two scenes that mercifully didn't make it into his films. "One of the clichés I nearly used [in High Anxiety] was, I was going to open with a small Swiss village and you see a train that is obviously a toy train. And I was going to have a big foot crush the village and say, "Oops, I'm sorry." But I thought that was a little too exquisite and a little too subtle and I never did it." In the same film, he was to come out of Washington's nose on Mt. Rushmore wearing a green jumpsuit. His associates talked him out of it. (Bless them.) Then there are the lame, Perelmanesque names he gives his characters. Where Perelman was a master at making up actually funny names (Mot Juste, for instance, the French grammarian), Brooks's are crude puns: Count de Monet; Marcus Vindictus, Swiftus Lazarus. Has Brooks influenced other comics in America? With The Producers, certainly. In sheer raving, raging, loudness, Brooks's influence can be spotted in the routines of comedian/screamers like Bob Goldthwait and Sam Kinison. And Brooks likes to point to david and Jerry Zucker, and Him Abrahams, the trio responsible for Airplane and Top Secret, as examples of people he has influenced. "I think their perspective is almost Brooksian," he says. "Was I seminal vis a vis Saturday Night Live? Was Your Show of Shows seminal?" It may or may not be dispiriting to Brooks that for all he has to offer, he may be most widely identified with a sketch in Blazing Saddles about breaking wind. Brooks told Kenneth Tynan that his major reason for going into analysis in 1951 was to learn how to be a father instead of a son. When his father died, his three older brothers took over the paternal duties and later, Sid Caesar did too. Beginning with Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks "the father" was born. The traveling corps of Brooks comedy players is testament to his need to play father figure, as ih hi willingness to give young and often inexperienced directors their first chance: Graham Clifford on Frances, Richard Benjamin on My Favorite Year and Alan Johnson, a choreographer, on To Be or Not To Be. Is Mel Brooks The Funniest Man in America? He has been called that often. On the other hand, they love him in France-never a good sign for a comedian. To put the epithet to the test, Mel Brooks was given the following rigorous and exacting comedy examination.
1.QUESTION: Name a funny word?
2. QUESTION: What is the funniest number?
3. QUESTION: Funniest letter?
4. QUESTION: Funniest Day?
5. QUESTION: Funniest Month?
6. QUESTION: Who is the least funny man in America?
7. ESSAY QUESTION: Who is the funniest man in America? MEL BROOKS'S SCORE: 1. Correct. 2. Correct. 3. Correct. 4. Correct. 5. Incorrect. Correct answer is February. 6. Substantially correct. Alternate answers: Ed Koch, the mayor of New York; Steve Guttenburg, the actor. 7. B+. |