Watch this video to see the tragic real-life story of Mel Brooks
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00:00Funnyman Mel Brooks' career has spanned eight decades. He's an icon of comedy on both stage
00:06and screen. But alongside his many successes has come failure on both personal and professional
00:12levels. This is his tragic real-life story.
00:15Mel Brooks came into the world on June 28, 1926, as Melvin Kaminsky, the youngest of four boys
00:22born on a kitchen table in his parents' Brooklyn tenement apartment. While many comedians had
00:28terrible childhoods and used comedy as a way to seek attention, Brooks was the opposite.
00:33According to the biography It's Good to Be the King, The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks,
00:37he was used to being the baby of the family and constantly showered with love.
00:42Well into adulthood, he felt a need to be at the center of attention at all times.
00:46This attitude is clear in one of Brooks' most famous interviews, for Playboy in 1975.
00:52He rarely answered a question without making a joke, that is, until he was asked about his
00:58father Max Kaminsky, who died of tuberculosis of the kidney when young Melvin was only two years
01:03old. During the interview, he talked about the intimacy of male relationships in his movie
01:09Blazing Saddles. As he explained,
01:11"'I can't tell you what sadness, what pain it is to me never to have known my own father.
01:16If only I could look at him, touch his face, see if he had eyebrows. Maybe in having the
01:21male characters in my movies find each other, I'm expressing the longing I feel to find my father
01:27and be close to him.'" In that 1975 Playboy interview, Brooks also revealed that he and
01:33most of the other Jewish kids in his neighborhood didn't swim because they would get picked on by
01:38other kids. If they did go to the pool, they had to travel in packs to protect themselves.
01:43Even in his predominantly Jewish neighborhood, he was, in his own words,
01:47scrawny. But he found another way to make himself valuable. As he put it,
01:51"'Why should they let this puny kid hang out with them? I gave them a reason,
01:55I became their jester. Also, they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I'd stick
02:00it in their eye.'" Brooks' humor was inspired by feeling marginalized as a Jewish kid in America,
02:05and by the long-suffering history of the Jewish people. He often felt that he couldn't get the
02:10girl because he wasn't tall enough or blonde enough. And when it came to the legacy of Jewish
02:15mourning, he wanted to respond to it with laughter instead of tears. As he told Playboy in 1966,
02:21"'If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death?'
02:25Mel Brooks and his three older brothers all served in World War II. Brooks himself was
02:30anti-war, but he felt determined to fight because he thought this war was just. He wanted to defend
02:35the Jewish people against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. But ironically, though Brooks joined
02:41the Army to fight anti-Semitism, he often endured that same prejudice from his fellow soldiers,
02:46who would call him by an ethnic slur. During a 2001 appearance on 60 Minutes,
02:51he discussed getting even with Hitler. As he explained,
02:54"'You have to bring him down with ridicule. Because if you stand on a soapbox and you
02:58match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is. But if you can make people laugh at him,
03:03then you're one up on him.'" Before Brooks made a career out of making fun of Hitler,
03:07he did his best comedy while serving in the Army. He would play the music of Jewish singer
03:11Al Jolson over a loudspeaker while the Germans played their propaganda.
03:16"'And at the end of my song, I heard,
03:18Hangefurt was eskimo. I heard a little, I heard a little of Klaus.'"
03:24Being a Jewish-American fighter came with an additional potential risk if you ended up
03:29captured. When Brooks' brother Lenny had to bail out of his plane, he took off his dog tags because
03:35they had an H for Hebrew on them, out of a fear that he could get sent to the concentration camps.
03:40Brooks got his start in comedy at age 14 by working as a drummer, which led to the decision
03:46to change his last name because Kaminsky was too long to fit in writing on the drum.
03:50One night while playing in the Catskills, he subbed in for another comic who had fallen ill.
03:55He was sweaty and unsteady, but he found a way to make the audience laugh.
03:59Then, while he served in World War II, he used his comedic and musical sensibilities
04:03to entertain the troops. It wasn't until the 50s that he got his first steady job in comedy
04:08as a writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. But while it was a plum gig,
04:13it also brought with it a lot of anxiety. In his 1975 Playboy interview, Brooks described
04:18his contributions to the show as full of, quote,
04:21"...energy and insanity."
04:23He felt tremendous pressure as one of the funniest writers of the time.
04:26When the topic of mental health came up in the interview, he revealed,
04:29"...I started having acute anxiety attacks. I used to vomit a lot between
04:34parked Plymouths in midtown Manhattan. Sometimes I'd get so anxiety-stricken I'd have to run,
04:39because I'd be generating too much adrenaline to do anything but run or scream."
04:44Eventually, Brooks sought out therapy, which helped him calm down and grow up.
04:49Mel Brooks met his first wife Florence Baum on Broadway when she was a dancer in the musical
04:54Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They married in November 1953 and went on to have three children
04:59together, Stephanie, Nicholas, and Edward. After Your Show of Shows was canceled, Brooks continued
05:05to work with Sid Caesar on his next show, Caesar's Hour. At this time, he was more focused on his
05:10career and hanging out with his co-workers than he was on spending time with his family.
05:15He had a hard time adjusting to marital life, and often worried that he would embarrass his
05:19wife with his boisterous behavior. After the cancellation of Caesar's Hour in 1957, Brooks
05:24endured a long lull in his career, as he found himself an unemployed husband and father of three.
05:30In 1960, wanting to escape his situation, he moved in with a friend in Los Angeles.
05:35Upon his return to New York the following year, he discovered that Baum was suing him
05:39for illegal separation. He later admitted,
05:42"...we married too young."
05:44In 1961, Brooks was newly single and still looking for work when he met actress Anne Bancroft. She
05:51was a two-time Tony Award winner, and he knew how to make her laugh. They got married in 1964.
05:56Soon after, he had a breakout success when he co-created the TV show Get Smart,
06:01which premiered in 1965. But his real dream was to work in film, so he wrote the screenplay for
06:07the producers, and he knew that he'd have to direct it to keep his vision intact.
06:11But all the major studios laughed at his intention to make a comedy about Hitler.
06:15He eventually secured financing from a producer named Joseph Levine, but the film was ultimately
06:21met with tepid box office numbers and some harsh reviews, although Brooks did win an Oscar for Best
06:27Original Screenplay. In a 2019 interview with USA Today, Brooks discussed some of the least
06:32friendly reactions he received about the producers. Rabbis wrote letters to him,
06:36expressing disappointment in him as a Jewish person for writing a comedy about Hitler.
06:41So Brooks wrote all of them back to explain his theory about the power of using humor
06:46as a means of humiliation.
06:48Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!"
06:55Despite winning an Oscar for the producers, nobody saw Mel Brooks as much of a success at
06:59that point in his career. His next film, 1970's The Twelve Chairs, had an even smaller budget,
07:05and it had to be shot in Yugoslavia. As Brooks recalled to Playboy in 1975,
07:10"...when I went to Yugoslavia, my hair was black. When I came back nine months later,
07:14it was gray."
07:15One time during shooting, he got so angry that he threw his director's chair into the Adriatic
07:21Sea. Afterwards, the entire crew went on strike. According to the cinematographer,
07:26they did so because Yugoslavia was a communist country, and they were unhappy that he threw
07:30the chair because it was technically public property. The Twelve Chairs ultimately wound
07:35up playing at only a few arthouse theaters. Nevertheless, to this day, Brooks insists that
07:40it's his favorite film. Afterwards, he began working on the script for Blazing Saddles,
07:45which would go on to become a huge hit and an enduring comedy classic. As he recalled
07:49to Playboy in 1975,
07:51"...it was designed as an esoteric little picture. I had no idea Middle America would see it."
07:56"'Scuse me while I whip this out."
07:59After the twin successes of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein in 1974, Brooks became
08:07a major power player in Hollywood, but then his career seesawed in the following years.
08:11He enjoyed mild success with his next film, 1976's Silent Movie, but then he had another flop the
08:17next year with the Alfred Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety. He didn't have another hit until 1981's
08:23History of the World Part I, and then not again after that until Spaceballs in 1987.
08:28Between those two, he was an executive producer on a disastrous sci-fi film called Solar Babies,
08:34which he claimed made him go broke. After the movie's release in 1986,
08:38Brooks was in a dark place because he was in so much debt. As he recalled in an interview
08:43on the podcast How Did This Get Made,
08:45"...I'm practically ready to jump off a roof, you know? I mean a roof like the Empire State
08:50Building. I'm ready to go."
08:52Solar Babies initially had a $5 million budget that eventually grew all the way to $23 million.
08:58Brooks was the one on the hook to find all that extra money,
09:00which included taking out a second mortgage on his home. Ultimately,
09:04the film made less than a million dollars at the box office and was panned by critics.
09:10Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft always seemed like an unlikely Hollywood couple. Nevertheless,
09:15they managed to stay together through thick and thin for over four decades.
09:19While they were dating, she won an Oscar for her portrayal of Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker,
09:24but it was her role as Mrs. Robinson in 1967's The Graduate that truly made her an icon.
09:29When Brooks and Bancroft met in 1961, they were both in the process of leaving their first
09:35spouses. Neither of them was yet a household name, but their careers were moving right along.
09:40They had a son named Max in 1972, and they remained happily married until Bancroft died
09:45of uterine cancer in 2005. Max, who would grow up to be a successful writer himself,
09:50spoke about his parents during a 2019 episode of CBS This Morning.
09:54It was only later when I got out into the world I realized that most people
09:59are not as animated, and most people are not as funny."
10:04Mel Brooks met his longtime comedy partner Carl Reiner when they were both working on
10:08Your Show of Shows. During that time, they came up with the character of the 2,000-year-old man
10:14as a joke that they would tell each other for fun. Then it became a comedy routine that they
10:18performed at parties, and after that, they recorded the act for five comedy albums that
10:22they produced between 1960 and 1997, even earning them a Grammy in 1998.
10:28In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Reiner recalled a first meeting Brooks.
10:32I thought, who is this guy? This guy is the funniest single human being on the planet.
10:37For about two and a half hours, Mel and I ad-libbed,
10:40cut it down to 47 minutes, and the 2,000-year-old man was born.
10:44Brooks and Reiner's friendship lasted 70 years, longer than either man was married. They vacationed
10:50together with their families and spurred each other on as they both directed some of the biggest
10:54comedy movies of the 70s and 80s. Later in life, they spent almost every day together at each
10:59other's homes watching TV and making jokes. When they couldn't see each other in person during the
11:04coronavirus pandemic in 2020, they got on the phone while watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune
11:09at the same time. That June, Reiner passed away of natural causes at the age of 98.
11:14As Brooks told The Guardian that year,
11:17I don't think I've ever had a better friend than Carl.