I’m always looking for a way to get near Mel Brooks. Can you blame me? He has acted in, directed, produced, and written some of the most memorable films in human history—among them The Producers, Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and Spaceballs. He is the reason I went into comedy. As a young man, I obsessively watched his films and his appearances on late-night television. I would listen to his 2000 Year Old Man albums—in which Mel played the character of an ancient man explaining the origins of humanity—and dream of having the same job as him.

Once, I interviewed Mel at an event where he was so funny that I locked up completely and didn’t dare attempt a single joke. After I wrote the foreword to his book about the making of Young Frankenstein, I got to watch him record the audio version of it. Fifteen minutes into the reading, he stopped and shouted, “Why did I make this thing so damned long?! This is going to take forever!” Then there was the time that I took my friend and fellow comedian Bill Hader to Mel’s office just to chat. He regaled us with stories for several hours. When we were getting ready to leave, Mel said, “Come and visit again, but not soon! Wait a few months.” As we walked to our car, he screamed from the far distance, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Mel is turning 97 this summer. He is way sharper than I am, which isn’t saying much, and he is still riotously funny. Recently I visited him at his house in Los Angeles, not just so I could bask once more in the comic genius of a true master (although also that), but because I hoped to glean some of his wisdom. I wanted to understand what made Mel Brooks who he is, and I attempted to steer him toward the philosophical and the spiritual, so that we might all benefit from what he has learned in almost a century on this Earth. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. And to make me seem less dumb.

Judd Apatow: I’m always happy to have an excuse to talk to you.

Mel Brooks: I usually say no. No, no. It’s not you; it’s COVID. I’m afraid. I got sick. I got so sick, I had to go to the hospital.

Apatow: Really?

Brooks: Yeah. Remdesivir. You can only get it in the hospital. So I got it. I think it saved me. I felt like I was swallowing glass.

Apatow: Oh no.

Brooks: Oh, it was awful.

Apatow: Well, the pandemic has been the biggest calamity in the United States in a long time. But you’ve seen other big calamities. When you think about World War II and everybody saying, We have to join together to get this done, do you think, We don’t have that anymore ?

Brooks: Oh yeah. I went overseas as a private in the artillery. I was a radio operator. And when we got to Europe, I was going to be a fast-speed radio operator and forward observer in the artillery. Got off the boat, got onto a truck. They said, “You’re in the combat engineers. We need a lot of combat engineers to build bridges and to defuse mines and booby traps. And you’re going to love it.”

Apatow: You’re going to love it!

Brooks: I got over in February 1945, and the war was over a few months later—March, April, May, and I was home. So I was lucky. But I defused a lot of booby traps, a lot of mines. One good thing was I got my training at a farmhouse in Normandy. And there was a little kid with a bicycle, and he fell in love with me because I gave him chewing gum and chocolate, and he’d go “Private Mel, Private Mel!” He’d just follow me on his tricycle. Sweet little French kid.

Apatow: Were you drafted or did you enlist?

Brooks: I enlisted, but not as a hero. Somebody from the Army came to Eastern District High School in Brooklyn and said, “If you join the Reserve, we will send you to the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program for your last year of school, and it will actually be your first year of college.” Sounded good. So I enlisted in the Army Reserve.

Apatow: They were nice enough to put you in the division that had to defuse mines.

Brooks: You’d go to the toilet, and there was a chain that hung down, and if you pulled the chain, you’d blow up the house. You’d go right to heaven. So the first place we’d look was in that water closet, right above the toilet. And then every door could have a hinge attached to a bomb. When the troops cleared out a farmhouse, we’d go right in and clean it up so that they could actually sleep in it, stay in it for a night or two, instead of on the ground. The scariest and funniest one was a jar of pickles. Our top sergeant explained to us: “Don’t open a jar.” Because in the middle of the pickles, there could be dynamite. He had defused it already. So he took out the jar, he took off the lid, and in the middle of the pickles there was a stick of dynamite.

Apatow: Oh my God.

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Brooks: Crafty. So anyway, we would test the soil around the farmhouse with our bayonets at a 45-degree angle. We’d hit the soil, and if we heard a tink or a dink dink dink, we were supposed to defuse.

Apatow: And do you remember your state of mind? Were you thinking, Any day now, I’m going to get blown up? Or did you just feel confident, like, We know what we’re doing ?

Brooks: It was more Any day now, I’m going to get blown up.

Mel Brooks in the Army during World War II (Courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense)

Apatow: How did people treat the Jewish soldiers?

Brooks: Once in a while you’d get a couple of guys from Alabama who would ask, “Take off your helmet. I want to see if your ears are long.” Sometimes for real, just curious. And sometimes just mean. A lot of mean guys.

Apatow: When my mom was in college—this is in the early 1960s—her roommate at Michigan State asked to see her horns. For real. “Can I see your horns?”

Brooks: When I was a kid, I’d feel sorry for non-Jewish kids who would go by, and the Jews would harass them. I always felt that in my little clique of Jews, that that’s what the world was. Mostly Jews and a few strange people. It was quite a revelation when I was in the Army, that maybe me and two other guys were the only Jews in a battalion.

Apatow: Fighting to free the Jews.

Brooks: It was strange. I mean, it was an eye-opener. I woke up.

Apatow: Do you have an interpretation of how people have changed over the generations? Or do you think it’s all basically the same?

Brooks: No, it’s not basically the same. They’ve changed, mostly for the better, mostly for being more tolerant and more understanding about people. And you know, as a matter of fact, it’s only recently that I’m aware of so much anti-Semitism. For many years, there was none that I was aware of.

Apatow: Yeah, well. You’re the one Jew everyone likes.

Brooks: In the Army, I was entertaining and I was fun, and they overlooked that I was Jewish. They just liked me for my personality.

Apatow: Were you depressed?

Brooks: No! It was terrible and wonderful.

Apatow: And the wonderful part was the camaraderie?

Brooks: The wonderful part was camaraderie. The day the war ended, or was going to be ended, it was May 7. And they said, “Tomorrow, the war ends.” A buddy came with me from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where we both learned how to be radio operators for the Field Artillery—we both located into the combat engineers. He said to me, “Come with me.” We were in a little schoolhouse. And in the basement, he had set up a table with white wine. And he said, “We’re going to sleep here tonight and stay here all day tomorrow.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Because tomorrow is going to be V-E Day. And knowing soldiers, they’re going to shoot their rifles up and yell and celebrate. Shoot a lot of stuff up in the air, forgetting that some of those bullets have to come down. So we’re going to spend all of it here.” Until when the celebration was over.

Years later when we made The Elephant Man, we had a 20-day break because we were going to a location in London, and the writers had roughly 20 days where we could rewrite. I said, “How would you guys like to see where I was stationed?” So we took the ferry and then hired a car in Paris, and we went to Normandy. I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. And the door opened: a bear of a man with a great big black beard. Scary guy. “Que voulez-vous? ” “What do you want?” And he said, “Un moment, un moment.” “One minute.” [Gasps] “Ah, Private Mel!” he shouted. I said, “Oh my God. You were that little—” “Yes! Je suis l’enfant.” “I was the little boy.” He was a monster. He was a big, beautiful guy. And it was a great afternoon.

Apatow: That’s incredible.

Brooks: I’ll never forget that roar. “Private Mel!”

Apatow: When you look back now, do you think the level of fear you experienced during the war affected you when you got back and started working in comedy?

Brooks: Yeah. But in the end, fighting in World War II was better than facing a tough Jewish audience in the mountains. Because I mean, they could kill you. I remember I once said, “Man of 1,000 faces!” I did faces, you know. And I did one; I did Harpo Marx. I figured, I’ll get a laugh by two, you know. And they waited. When I got to about 280, I said, They’re actually waiting for 1,000 faces.

Apatow: Did you know before the war that you wanted to be a comedian in the Catskills?

Brooks: That was the dream. That was the road to being a star comic. If you wanted to become Henny Youngman, I don’t know why, but that was the road you took.

Apatow: Who was the person before World War II that you loved, that you thought, Oh, I’d love to be like that person ?

Brooks: Actually, there was one comic who was really funny. Myron Cohen was his name. He’s very Jewish, and I stole one of his really great, great jokes. The joke went like this: “Guy walks into an appetizing store.” I mean, so Jewish—there are no appetizing stores! “Guy walks into an appetizing store, says to the grocery guy, ‘I want some lox, I want some cream cheese, I want four bagels, I want—’ He stops. He says, ‘Salt, salt. Why have you got so many boxes of salt? All your shelves are covered with red boxes of salt. You must have 100 boxes of salt. You sell a lot of salt?’ And the grocer says, ‘Yeah, well, if I sell a box of salt a week, I’ll throw a party. It’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt? Boy, can he sell salt.’ ” And I love it. I love that joke.

Apatow: How do you think you would have been a different comedian if you hadn’t gone to World War II?

Brooks: When you’re a kid, you don’t really understand totalitarianism. You don’t know what it’s all about, and why they’re shooting. You really don’t understand: Why war? When I found out what Hitler was doing with Jews, that was enough to drive me crazy. I don’t know whether I would fight in any other war, but I was gung ho.

Apatow: Were you funny as a result of being around other funny people or as a result of no one being funny?

Brooks: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I have no idea. I think other people.

Apatow: You were on the very first Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, with Groucho Marx.

Brooks: Johnny Carson was the best. On other shows, they’d fight for the spotlight or they’d fight for the laugh. Johnny Carson never, never fought for the laugh. And he could get plenty. He was good at it. However, if you hit him in the right spot, he’d leave his chair and be down under his desk. Holding his belly, you know? Quite often, I got him down on the ground.

Left: Brooks performs on the first-ever broadcast of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, October 1962. Right: Brooks and Anne Bancroft, his wife of 41 years, in the 1990s. (NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty; Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

Apatow: But the tape from that very first episode is lost to time.

Brooks: I think they needed the tape.

Apatow: They were like, We got to erase this so we can tape another one! How funny was Groucho? Was he genuinely hilarious? Or was it people writing for him?

Brooks: He was funny. His choice of what to say was sometimes so bizarre, so different. When we hung around with Groucho, he was Julius; he was not Groucho. For some reason, he was triggered to cap a story with a comment that was funnier than what you were doing.

Apatow: He would top everybody.

Brooks: He would top it. He was a topper.

Apatow: There were different cliques of comics. The Hillcrest group, like Jack Benny and all those guys. Then your group was Dom DeLuise and Gene Wilder. It almost seems like Dom was your Chris Farley—anything for a laugh. The second he walked in, you were so happy, and you’d laugh your ass off, and he would want you to laugh your ass off.

Brooks: Right. Exactly, exactly. He loved being funny. He loved making comedy. And yeah. We did that yenem velt.

Apatow: What’s that?

Brooks: It’s a Jewish word which means “otherworld,” maybe “heavenly.” Yenem velt. And it was Dom and his wife, Carol; and there was Norman Lear and Larry Gelbart. And once in a while Ron Clark. And of course, Carl Reiner and his wife, Estelle. You know, Carl wouldn’t let us sleep. We’d go for a weekend at a house in Palm Springs. And we’d all say goodnight, you know, be in our pajamas and stuff. And then over the intercom you’d hear, “Oh, yenem velt ! Oh, yenem velt !” That was Carl. “There is no velt like yenem velt !” Otherworld. It’s like heaven.

Apatow: You’ve had amazing friends. Was that the blessing of your life?

Brooks: It was a blessing. I was so lucky to run into people who were so sweet. And Carl was my best friend, you know. He cared for you. You could feel his love. And he’d stop whatever he was doing. He was so generous with his time for you. Carl was a very different person.

Apatow: I lived with Adam Sandler right after college. So it’s funny for us—

Brooks: He is so incredibly prolific. I can’t get over the amount of good ideas and good jokes and good characters.

Apatow: When he wins awards, I think back to when I lived with Adam, like, Why did we get into comedy? And it really was you, and Rodney Dangerfield, but also the idea that you could write sometimes, be the director sometimes, or the producer. Your career was the model for so many of us.

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Brooks: A multijob. I remember on the Show of Shows, we would write a sketch that was a little dangerous here and there, and they’d cut out the danger and they’d trim it. And I vowed that when I grew up, I’d be a director, so that I didn’t have to give it to a director to spoil. It all became about defending your initial thought, your initial concept. So I started being a writer. Then I defended the script by being a director. Then I defended the project by being the producer, so they wouldn’t sell it or distribute it incorrectly.

Apatow: But that’s stressful too, right? The fighting with the studios. Were you stressed as a businessman, just with the daily battles, or did you get a kick out of it?

Brooks: Mostly stressed.

Left: Brooks wrote, produced, directed, and starred in History of the World, Part I (1981). Right: Brooks and the producer Michael Hertzberg on the set of Blazing Saddles in 1974. (Everett Collection; Everett Collection)

Apatow: Is there a film experience that was your most fun one?

Brooks: I think I finally relaxed by making Robin Hood.

Apatow: And Dave Chappelle is in it.

Brooks: Yeah! From nowhere. I just liked this sweet kid. He came up during the filming; he said, “I’d like to do Malcolm X.” I said, “How?” And he went into this rant. I said, “Do it! Do it!” And he did it in the movie. It was great. Dave Chappelle. Wonderful, sweet guy. Great guy.

Apatow: Did you evolve as a person? What was the arc of your acquiring wisdom, the big lessons you had to learn along the way?

Brooks: You just can’t spout at the mouth. There is a thing called manners, which is very hard to understand why they invented this thing that held you back. It held me back. You can’t live a real life if you’re just a bunch of firecrackers going off. You got to play ball with the universe. So I settled down. I learned that from my oldest brother, Irving. Irving, Lenny, Bernie, and me. And Irving was the wisest. We lost our father when I was 2 and Irving was 10. So Irving took on that duty of raising me. He was the guy in my life. He explained math to me, which was just a jungle of insanity. To this day, I don’t know why we need it.

Apatow: For counting money.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. Get somebody who loves it; let him do the math. It’s called an accountant. But Irving—we all ate dinner together. So Irving would say, “Shut up,” or “Pay attention,” or “Pass the potatoes.” He was our intelligence, our regulator. And I think Irving really was a great influence in my life, to tame me.

Apatow: Were you just obnoxious, or high-strung?

Brooks: Obnoxious and unthinking. And he made me an aware human being. I was not aware until Irving taught me.

Apatow: And what did Anne [Bancroft, his wife of 41 years, who died in 2005] have to teach you?

Brooks: Anne was one of the wisest people I ever met. And she gave me the best advice, always gave me the best advice. When The New York Times gave me a terrible review of my first movie, The Producers (Renata Adler—thank you, Renata! It was just a terrible review), I said, “Okay, they don’t like me in movies. They liked me in television. I’m going back to television.” Anne said, “No, you’re not. It’s a remarkable movie. It shows how talented you are. You’re gonna stay in movies, and you’re gonna make more movies.” And she’d be there, you know? She was just lovely and wise.

Apatow: Didn’t you win an Oscar for The Producers ?

Brooks: Yeah, for writing.

Apatow: So Renata immediately was proved incorrect. Didn’t you beat Stanley Kubrick for 2001? [Ed. note: He did.]

Brooks: I sent a letter to Renata Adler a few times. I said, “Wrong! You were wrong!”

Apatow: Did she respond?

Brooks: No, I never got a response.

Apatow: Isn’t it funny how mad those reviews can make you when you’re young, and you don’t realize that they don’t matter as much as you thought they did?

Brooks: I always said the critics were very good to me after the movie they knocked. They’d kill something like Blazing Saddles. And then when they reviewed High Anxiety, they’d say, “What happened to the genius that gave us Blazing Saddles ?” And then later they’d say, “This is no High Anxiety.”

Apatow: People now are like, “Can you even show Blazing Saddles ?” Fifty years later. It’s like, “Oh, is that too far?” For something that is also so beloved. I mean, it’s dangerous not to have that type of satire in society.

Brooks: The comedian has always been the court jester. He’s always, You got it wrong, your majesty; you got that one wrong. He’s got to whisper in the king’s ear when the king gets off on the wrong track. We have a good job to do.

Apatow: When did you realize that part of what you’d like to do with some of your comedy was to be shocking? That you were going further than everybody else?

Brooks: That’s a good question, because I didn’t know I was being shocking. I just thought I’d get a big laugh here. The purpose was not to be shocking. The purpose was in the surprise, which, of course I’d get a bigger laugh. It was always to get the biggest laugh. Never to make a political point—I was never making any points. I was always: Surprise them! You know, surprise them and get a big laugh.

Mel Brooks in the late 1960s (TCD / Prod.DB / Alamy)

Apatow: But unconsciously you have a morality that defines your comedy style. Because it’s everywhere—about human nature and the way people are cruel to each other, and the mocking of hurtful people.

Brooks: Sometimes I get angry at something and say, Don’t you know that what you did was bad? Here, I’m going to show you. I’ll just put you on skates. So: Hitler on ice! When I did “The Inquisition” [the song in History of the World, Part I ], I think underneath it the engine was to say, Hey, look what they did to Jews. But as long as you were laughing, it was okay.

Apatow: Because Carl Reiner said that one of the keys to understanding you is that you like to push the joke all the way to abstraction. What do you think he meant by that?

Brooks: That the joke should have more than one meaning than just the joke. Information. You went all the way from comedy to information.

Apatow: Are you very religious? I’m seen as a Jewish comedy person. But I’m not very religious.

Brooks: No.

Apatow: And was your family not religious? I mean, my family wasn’t either.

Brooks: Well, my family wasn’t religious, because we were pretty poor and my mother had to raise four boys with no husband.

Apatow: No time for religion.

Brooks: If she wanted to go to synagogue on a High Holy Day, they were charging a dollar to get in and sit down. And she had four children—that was five bucks. She simply couldn’t afford it. So, not that she wasn’t religious; she just couldn’t.

Apatow: Did you ever feel pulled into it later in life?

Brooks: Never.

Apatow: Where did your philosophy or your spirituality land?

Brooks: To this day, I haven’t worked it out. I’m not sure. I say, “Well, if there is a God, I’m pretty sure he’s Jewish.” But I didn’t think religion would save me. If there is a God, he probably has sent me some warnings that I didn’t heed.

Apatow: Harold Ramis used to say that he didn’t believe in God at all, which made life very simple: “If I don’t believe in God, then in every moment, I get to decide if I’m a good person or a bad person. And I’ve just decided to be a good person. I’d rather do that. And that’s all it is. If it’s up to me, I’d rather be a good guy.”

Brooks: That’s great. I like that. I like that a lot.

Apatow: Because some people spend their whole life searching for answers. But that wasn’t your thing.

Brooks: No.

Apatow: Do you think it was replaced by creativity or comedy? Or did you not even feel it as something that needed to be filled?

Brooks: I say praying is good, but penicillin is better.

Apatow: You were always a big reader, right?

Brooks: Well, when I was just a kid writer—I’ll never forget—Mel Tolkin, the head writer of the Show of Shows, when I worked with him, he said, “Even though you’re an animal from Brooklyn, I think you have the beginnings of a mind.” So he said, “I’m gonna help you; you know, you’re a natural comedy writer, but you should read what comedy is and maybe you’ll get an idea of what path to take.” And he gave me Dead Souls to read. Nikolai Gogol. It’s a brilliant idea and great writing. And then later I read Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, who wrote The Twelve Chairs. I love The Twelve Chairs. I made it into a movie.

Apatow: How did reading those novels change how you were writing, and your creativity?

Brooks: Immensely. They were serious until there was some insane twist at the end, and you say, “Gee, this guy. He really takes his time!” He waits, he sucks you in, and you believe him, and you’re almost in tears, and suddenly you’re laughing. I said, “This guy knows how to do it!” So I read a lot of Gogol and a lot of other comedy writers.

Apatow: Chekhov?

Brooks: Yeah, well, Chekhov wasn’t that funny. But reading was another education.

Apatow: About the absurdity of life.

Brooks: Exactly. So Tolkin was responsible for my leaving the comedy of “I just flew in from Chicago. And boy, are my arms tired.” I checked out of that kind of comedy for something more real and more human.

Brooks and Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein in 1974 (20th Century Fox / Album / Alamy)

Apatow: So he was the mentor of that.

Brooks: Yeah. And Sid was that kind of comedian. He loved real-life comedy, not jokes.

Apatow: A lot of comedians are depressed or tortured. Sid Caesar had his struggles with alcohol. Did you see that?

Brooks: Absolutely. When he finished the show on Saturday night, we would go to a kind of nightclub slash restaurant, like Al & Dick’s. Anyway, he took with him a bottle of vodka and finished that bottle. He needed the relief—the relief and release. And then on Sunday, sometimes I’d visit him just as a friend, not as a writer. And he’d been in the shower for an hour just letting the water run on his head. It was amazing.

I’ll tell you a great story about me and Sid Caesar. I asked to have dinner with Sid, alone. Me and Sid. No other writers. I said, “Sid, you’re genuinely funny. You make funny faces. You can make funny voices. You can imitate a pinball machine. Nobody else can. You’re a pinball machine! You’re perfect.” I said, “Your Show of Shows. You do it on Saturday, and you really knock yourself out. It’s brilliant. It’s funny. It’s hysterically fun. Sunday morning? It’s forgotten. Monday, Tuesday come around. Forgotten. We’re writing a new one. There’s no memory of the show. There’s no history.” I said, “Movies! A bad Buster Keaton movie, 65 years later, is still around, because we can go see it. And we remembered it when we were kids. You make one movie a year, and you’re immortal.” And I said, “I’ve decided I’m gonna go into movies.”

And so a week goes by and he says, “I’m thinking!” I’d pass him in the hall. “I’m thinking!” Finally, he calls me and says, “I want to have dinner with you.” So he sits down and he says, “I think you’re right. But I couldn’t resist. Because when I told Max Liebman” (our producer), “he told Pat Weaver” (who conceived of the Today show). Brilliant guy, Pat Weaver. “And Pat Weaver took it to David Sarnoff” (who ran RCA and founded NBC), “and they got excited.”

And so when it got to Sarnoff, they had a board meeting! Big shots. Sid was making something like $5,000 a show, which was a lot of money in 1952 or 1953; $5,000 a show, every Saturday night. So Max called him in, and Pat Weaver was there. And they had a meeting, and he was offered a three-year contract for $25,000 a show. He said, “I didn’t have to think about it twice. That’s a million dollars this season. I just couldn’t say no. I didn’t know how to say no to that.” So he said, “After our contract is over, we’ll go into movies.” I said, “It may be too late.” And that was it.

Apatow: It’s true that people should remember Sid Caesar more.

Brooks: My finest hour was writing for Sid Caesar as a young comedy writer. The kids today say, “Who?” How could you say “Who?” 

Apatow: You were so forward-thinking about that, because in today’s media landscape, one of the big issues is there’s too much stuff, and it disappears really fast. So to have planted your flag with all these movies—you know, Blazing Saddles is like The Wizard of Oz.

Brooks: So it’s still true that movies are forever.

Apatow: I always remember seeing Young Frankenstein here in Santa Monica. The biggest laughs I’ve ever heard. There’s Something About Mary, Airplane!, and Young Frankenstein—and Young Frankenstein clearly had the most. The place was just losing their minds. But I was surprised at the jokes’ success rates. Because how we do it today is so different than how you did it. We improvise our brains out. If a joke doesn’t work, we have 10 other jokes in the footage. But you’re just believing in your scripts. You don’t have eight other “Oh, Gene riffed a whole nother version of this.” It’s pretty incredible. Do you notice a difference—like when you were working with Nick Kroll [on History of the World, Part II, released in March], did you go, Damn, Nick’s as funny as some of those guys ?

Brooks: Well, you know—funny is funny. They were great. It’s just a pleasure. Sometimes I could still make them laugh, which is a thrill for me. I had an idea about General Robert E. Lee at the surrender at Appomattox. I said, “He’s the only guy really dressed up. He was always very snappy, and he wore his sword. He always wears his sword to the meeting, you know? And every time he turned around, he hit somebody in the balls with it.” They loved that. It’s in the show.

Apatow: We all know the writers’ rooms where people will say anything to make the room laugh.

Brooks: Yeah.

Apatow: But now people go, “Will I get in trouble?”

Brooks: Nothing is off the table. Nothing. It’s not for us to censor ourselves. There are plenty of censors around, you know?

Apatow: Could you sense your influence on them, in how they wrote jokes?

Brooks: I don’t know. I’m not sure about that. Sometimes comedy’s a mystery. The why and how.

Apatow: Isn’t it weird? You just never know. Every joke is an experiment that could succeed or fail spectacularly.

Brooks: Exactly, exactly. You never know. But there is one rule: You don’t go further if it didn’t make you laugh. You personally have to break up and laugh, or the idea is off the board.

Brooks, Apatow, and Carl Reiner in 2013 (Courtesy of Judd Apatow)

Apatow: I remember I once saw you talking about how you don’t like to type. That had a big influence on me. I tried to write longhand, but I didn’t like that. So I started doing more dictation. I don’t even like the idea of typing, because I feel like it slows down my mind that I’m doing this mechanical thing.

Brooks: It seemed to me that anytime it was typed, it was finished.

Apatow: No matter how bad it was.

Brooks: Because I couldn’t type, and I would write in longhand. And then some secretary would type, and I’d say, “Whoa, looks good.” The look of it was good. That’s why typed is dangerous.

Apatow: Do you noodle around with creative things now?

Brooks: Once in a while. I never know when it’s gonna strike me, you know? I think of something and it’s a mystery where it comes from, and how it proceeds in your mind, to how it gets organized into a sketch or into a play.

Apatow: People always say that the key to aging is being engaged and social and having friends—that it’s more important than even quitting smoking, that you have a passion.

Brooks: Some people are—there’s a reason why they last. Because they’ve got a good mind that grabs something and uses it. I remember sitting at the table at NBC. A couple of us were sitting there, and George Burns was sitting opposite me. I had tuna fish. And Jack Benny was a guest star on, maybe it was on Carson or something. But anyway, he walked past our table. And he was dressed as an Indian chief with moccasins, feathers, and everything. And George Burns looked up and said, “Hi, Jack. Working?” Just, I mean, gifted. The turn of mind that seized on something and nailed it.

Apatow: Sometimes an idea comes and it’s so out of the blue that it makes you go, There must be something going on, because it’s just weird that that arrived in some way. That’s the only time I ever think that there might be a God.

Brooks: Strange emanations from where and how.

Apatow: Bob Dylan used to say the whole song just came. You were around in that scene in the ’60s, though. Would you go to see Lenny Bruce?

Brooks: Absolutely. Lenny Bruce had a tremendous—what a mind. For instance, I’ll never forget, in one of his shows, he said out of the blue, “What if Jesus was electrocuted?” Just that one sentence. I really shrieked. What a mind.

Apatow: Would we all be wearing little electric chairs?

Brooks: You’re right! He said, “At the top of every tall building, there’d be an electric chair. And we’d wear little electric chairs around our neck.” I mean, it was amazing.

Apatow: It really felt like no one else was doing this.

Brooks: In five minutes, he really just busted up all my thinking.

Apatow: Was it shocking?

Brooks: Yeah. No one talked like that before. I said, “That’s the opposite of ‘I just flew in from Chicago. And boy, are my arms tired.’ ”

Apatow: Your body of work is so enormous. How do you look at it now?

Brooks: I don’t look back at it. I simply don’t. I just know that we did a lot of good things.

Apatow: Well, there’s a quote from you where you said, “We should enjoy life; we should not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.”

Brooks: Yeah.

Apatow: Has that always been your philosophy?

Brooks: No, I just made that up at the moment.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “The Immortal Mel Brooks.”

Donald Trump has been indicted by federal prosecutors in connection with his removal of documents from the White House, the former president announced on his social-media site tonight. He said that he has been summoned to appear on Tuesday at a U.S. courthouse in Miami. Several outlets reported that he faces seven counts, but more information was not immediately available.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump wrote in a post, adding, “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

[David A. Graham: Don’t take your eye of Jack Smith]

In fact, the indictment is, like so many of the signal moments of his presidency, both eminently foreseeable and utterly astonishing. If it never seemed possible that a former president would face such charges, that’s mostly because it never seemed possible that a president would abscond with a large number of documents and then defy a subpoena to return them. Trump’s shock also reflects his feeling that he was, or ought to be, immune to consequences for his actions and not subject to the same rule of law as other citizens.

This indictment began looking likely in August 2022, when the FBI conducted a surprise search at Mar-a-Lago. Each new revelation since then has pointed toward charges. The federal government repeatedly asked Trump to return the documents; he refused, claiming that some belonged to him and that he had already returned those that didn’t. Some of the documents are believed to be extremely sensitive to national security. By this spring, I wrote, the big question was when and not if.

The indictment does not break the taboo of indicting a former president—that happened in April, when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records. But the case in Florida, apparently brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, represents the first federal charges against a former president. And it poses a far greater danger to Trump than the New York case, for several reasons.

[David A. Graham: Lordy, there are tapes]

The public evidence in both cases suggests that the Florida case is much stronger. The Manhattan prosecution is based on a tenuous legal theory. As I have previously reported, legal experts and former prosecutors see the legal questions in this case to be much simpler. Many former officials have been prosecuted for mishandling official records and classified records. Trump has tried to draw a parallel to President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence, both of whom also took classified documents, but neither of those cases includes the appearance of great efforts to obstruct the government and refuse to return papers. (Trump also faces potential legal troubles in Atlanta, where a local prosecutor is investigating efforts to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.)

If the legal question for federal prosecutors is straightforward, the political calculations are much more complex. As if charging a former president were not explosive enough, Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election.

But Trump faces his own political complications. Voters have proved fairly willing to forgive politicians’ personal failings, especially in recent decades and especially when it comes to Trump. (The Manhattan case, for example, stems from hush-money payments to an adult-film actor who has claimed a sexual liaison.) But the removal of the documents is an act that stems directly from his role as president, and it implicates the very security of the country. The documents removed are reported to have included detailed information about Iran’s missile program and intelligence programs in China—the sorts of things that are kept under tight wraps in government facilities, but were reportedly stuffed haphazardly in storage areas at Mar-a-Lago.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Trump was also able to survive his (also unprecedented) two impeachments, both because he could write them off as political processes and because he was ultimately accountable to politicians, including many aligned with him politically or afraid of his backers. In this case, Trump will have to come before a jury of his peers or a federal judge.

In Trump’s long career in and out of the courts, he has not yet faced a legal peril this serious, but just how serious it is will not be clear until the charges emerge. Prosecutors could use several laws to bring those charges, with different standards and different penalties.

His defense will face difficulties, including the huge amounts of evidence obtained in the raid, as well as a ruling that one of his lawyers had to turn over information that otherwise would have been shielded by attorney-client privilege. Trump will likely try to spin the charges as concerning “process crimes,” as though those are not just crimes, and deflect from the papers themselves. He has also claimed that he declassified all of the papers at the end of his presidency, but he produced no evidence for that, and his lawyers have avoided making the claim in filings. Reports last week said that prosecutors have a recording in which he seems to acknowledge that he cannot show a document to visitors because it is classified. And if he’s charged for refusing to return the documents, their classification status will not matter.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

Trump is certain to make his strongest and most impassioned defense in the court of public opinion, where he will present himself as the victim of a politicized witch hunt. He previewed that argument in a video posted tonight. That’s a familiar refrain, and one that has never borne much weight, but it has also bound his strongest supporters more closely to him—in fact, as his legal troubles have escalated, so has his polling in the Republican primary. Yet the overall population has always been, and remains, skeptical of him.

Court cases take time, and Trump’s attorneys will make every effort to draw this one out, trying to push a trial past the point of the 2024 election. If Trump wins, he would likely have the power to shut down any probe and perhaps even to pardon himself. That means that the court of public opinion may also render its verdict sooner than any federal court, and the jury will be American voters.

Last Friday, The Atlantic published Tim Alberta’s profile of then–CNN CEO Chris Licht. Yesterday, Licht was ousted from the network. Below, in selected excerpts from today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, Alberta reflects on how Licht’s attempts to save the network went so wrong.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive The golf merger may be dead on arrival Is Gen Z coming for the GOP? The happiest way to change jobs A Plan Gone Awry

When Chris Licht was brought in to replace CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker in 2022, he was on a mission: He wanted to rid the network of what he saw as the mistakes of the Trump era, and to welcome more Republican viewers. After spending long periods of time talking with Licht over the past year, my colleague Tim Alberta found that while Licht’s theory of how to fix CNN may have made sense, the execution of that theory seemed to backfire at every turn.

The Atlantic published Alberta’s major profile of Licht last Friday. Yesterday, CNN staff learned that Licht is leaving the network. On today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, in his first (and, so far, only) interview on his reporting about Licht and CNN, Alberta joined host Hanna Rosin to discuss this week’s news. Below are some highlights from their conversation.

Licht came in with an “incredibly ambitious objective.”

After Alberta told Rosin how hard he’d worked to pitch Licht’s team on this story, she wondered: Why did Alberta want to write this profile so badly? “CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years,” he replied. “I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years. And I’d seen firsthand, time and time and time again, how, at rallies or smaller candidate events, CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6 and on everything else.”

“Licht came in and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN—was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank-and-file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years. And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over one of the world’s biggest news organizations … at a really sensitive time.”

Licht was an awkward fit from the start.

Licht’s network predecessor, Jeff Zucker, was a beloved, “larger-than-life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody—not only the on-air talent but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews,” Alberta explained. Licht, on the other hand, “went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t. So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was sort of cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.”

One of Licht’s first decisions as CEO was to turn Zucker’s former office—on the 17th floor of the CNN building, in the heart of the network’s newsroom—into a conference room. He then moved himself up to an office on the 22nd floor, a spot that most employees didn’t even know how to find. “And that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists,” Alberta said.

Licht’s mission was about more than just CNN.

“This was about the journalism industry itself,” Alberta said. Licht was “making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a real threat to democracy itself.”

So what happened to that mission?

Alberta quotes “the great philosopher Mike Tyson”: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth … Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times.

“The recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that, in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out, as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and go strong on certain stories,” Alberta said. “But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky.”

One particularly troubling question was “what [to] do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?”

Licht’s programming decisions sometimes seemed to answer that question in ways that conflicted with his stated vision, Alberta explained, culminating in the network’s much-criticized town hall with Donald Trump last month.

Licht seemed defeated during Alberta’s final interview.

When Alberta met with Licht in mid-May, a week after the Trump town hall, “I could sense, having … gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language, that there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong.”

Looking back, did Licht’s mission fail?

Alberta pointed out that Licht set a lofty goal for himself: to reimagine the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that had been “systematically manipulated” into not trusting them for decades. “It’s hard to draw any other conclusion” than failure “just based on the ratings,” Alberta said. “One year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse.”

Rosin posed an important final question: “My immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN was, In our political climate, is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?”

“I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest,” Alberta replied. He noted that he sees some of the internet’s “pile on” of Licht as unfair. Licht is a “talented guy” who has been successful in his past roles, Alberta said, and “I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be.”

“I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Today’s News In a surprise decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Alabama’s current congressional map dilutes the electoral power of its Black voters, a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal prosecutors handling the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents were spotted at a Miami courthouse where a grand jury has been hearing witness testimony, further evidence of a potential indictment. The Baptist minister Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and an influential coalition of conservative Christians, has died at the age of 93. Robertson is widely considered a key figure in the rise of religious conservatism over recent decades. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers the battle over smartphones in schools. Weekly Planet: The not-COVID reason to mask is here, Katherine J. Wu writes.

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Evening Read CBS Photo Archive / Getty

The People Who Use Their Parents’ First Name

By Jacob Stern

On a 1971 episode of The Brady Bunch, the family’s eldest son, Greg, decides that, as a freshly minted high schooler, he ought to be treated like a man. When he asks for his own bedroom, his parents acquiesce. When he asks for money to buy new clothes, they give it to him. When he asks to skip the family camping trip, they say okay.

But when he sits down at the breakfast table and calls his parents by their first name—“Morning, Carol! Morning, Mike!”—well, that’s a bridge too far. “Now, look, Greg,” his father answers with a wag of his finger. “Calling your parents by their first names might be the fad these days, but around here, we are still ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ to you!”

Read the full article.

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.