Writing in the
New York Times, Peter Schjedahl dubbed Brooks "America's 'patron saint' of 'going too far,' a manic yuck-artist in the checkered tradition of burlesque, the Marx brothers, and
Mad magazine." In
Newsweek reviewer Arthur Cooper remarked that "like a scrappy club fighter [Brooks] swings wildly with many punches but can knock you out with a series of jabs," adding that "what audiences are responding to are Brooks's anarchistic, zany tone and machine-gun tempo." Many critics credit the popularity of Brooks's style of humor--whose hallmark is often bad taste--with spawning the modern school of "gross-out" comedy and its numerous outrageous performers. Schjedahl claimed Brooks as the forerunner of the genre, the single artist who "brought to the screen a brand of convulsive comedy so completely original that it seems to have been dropped out of the sky." Writing in
Newsweek, Paul D. Zimmerman commented that Brooks is "like the fool in
King Lear. He is our jester, asking us to see ourselves as we really are, determined that we laugh ourselves sane." And after several years on the far side of critical acclaim, Brooks once again burst into the entertainment headlines with the 2001 musical adaptation of his movie
The Producers, creating one of the biggest hits Broadway has ever seen.
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