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.”