"Humor is just another defense against the universe," Mel Brooks once observed. Screenwriter, director, actor, producer, comedian and occasional Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man: no one title is encompassing enough to capture--let alone tame--Brooks. He is...

Mel Brooks (born 1926) transformed traditional burlesque and Jewish humor into a hit-and-miss career writing and directing film parodies of traditional Hollywood genres. His biggest success came late in his career when he adapted his first film, The...

Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, to Max and Kate Brookman Kaminsky. His comedy career began at an early age with humorous routines he performed for his classmates at school, routines that he later incorporated into his films....

A woman once accosted filmmaker Mel Brooks and angrily told him that his 1968 comedy The Producers was "vulgar." "Madame," he said with an air of pride, "it rises below vulgarity." Mel Brooks spent a career as...

Mel Brooks (born June 28, 1926) is a multi-award winning American director, writer, comedian, actor and producer best known as a creator of broad film farces and comedy parodies. Brooks is a member of the short list of entertainers with the distinction...

A CELEBRATION of the sublime, ridiculous artistry of Mel Brooks gets underway Friday at the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre (8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring), which over the next few weeks will show some of Brooks's classic comedies on the big screen. "Still...

Mel Brooks produces a DVD of his classic By DOUG NYE The State (Columbia, S.C.) Friday, December 6, 2002 When Mel Brooks tells you his favorite screen team is Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, you wonder. "I love their musicals...

Twenty minutes to curtain…Dad: This should be great! I loved The Producers! And I don’t really care for musical theater!Mom: This should be great! I loved The Producers! And I love musical theater!Brother: I’m going to judge the entire show based on the first...

The $450 top ticket price for the new Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein is shocking in this regard: Why so little? After all, it’s a free country. If our Mel wants to charge a king’s ransom to see a show, what’s it to you? It’s...

[Brooks] is the little boy, the youngest son, so beloved by his family and continually tossed in the air that his feet didn't touch the ground till he was 6 years old. He has been resting securely on the wind ever since. He knows he can always get home. He also gives an audience this dreamy assurance: They can wander in fantasy and nightmare, but with Kafka or Lenny Bruce, other Jewish masters of controlled psychosis, they were not sure of getting home from the dream. With Mel Brooks, they are merely...

Brooks not only isn't a director—he isn't really a writer, either. He's the cutup in the audience whose manic laughter and unrestrained comments stop the show. Essentially, he is the audience; he's the most cynical and the most appreciative of audiences—nobody laughs harder, nobody gets more derisive. He was perfectly cast in the short "The Critic." His humor is a show-business comment on show business. Mel Brooks is in a special position: his criticis...

Mel Brooks, along with Woody Allen, has progressed as a prolific, one-man source of American screen comedy. Both comedians have picked up where Jerry Jewis died off and have actively participated in the writing, acting, producing and directing of their films. Neither has settled for a personal, distinctive style yet, but they are giving the previous, well-defined comic personae, such as W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, stiff competition. They work in safe ranges well below the level of the great silent c...