[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...

[Brooks'] films abound in lovingly precise dialect humor, a near-balletic control of physical comedy, and whirlwind pacing that begins in chaos and ends in sweet lunacy. Superficially, Brooks' movies … seem less careful than carefree. But Brooks says he does not believe in chance: his films are the result of meticulous construction, especially in the scriptwriting stage….