The Untold Truth Of Mel Brooks

For decades, Mel Brooks has been synonymous with laughter. According to CNN, Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in 1926, the Brooklyn native cut his teeth as a writer on the iconic 1950s sketch comedy series Your Show of Shows. Further success came with the 1960 comedy album The 2000 Year Old Man, alongside his lifelong friend Carl Reiner, followed by co-creating the hit spy sitcom Get Smart in 1965.

Brooks headed to the big screen in 1967, making his directorial debut with The Producers — and winning an Oscar for the film's hilarious screenplay. More movies followed, including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and many more. Brooks has also seen big success on Broadway, creating hit musicals based on The Producers (which enjoyed an impressive six-year run) and Young Frankenstein. Brooks' run of success also extended into his personal life; he married Oscar-winning actress Anne Bancroft in 1964, with their romance enduring for more than 40 years until she passed away in 2005. 

Brooks' showbiz career has spanned eight decades, and even though he's one of the most popular comedians of the last century there's still much to learn about this perpetually busy nonagenarian funnyman. Get ready to discover the untold truth of Mel Brooks. 

When he was just 14, a young Mel Brooks landed his first job in show business. As he wrote in the The New York Times in 2001, he played drums in a band during the summers "at a place called the Butler Lodge in the Catskills." That was also where he discovered that what he really wanted to be was a comedian, when, two years later, a then-16-year-old Brooks was asked to step in when the show's regular emcee became ill. 

Brooks eagerly agreed, and took over the hosting duties for the night. He did so well he was soon upgraded to host. "I got big laughs with terrible jokes..." he remembered. "I never went back to the drums again — I was now a $25-a-week comic, and on my dressing room they'd hung a six-pointed star."

Speaking with Billboard, Brooks recalled that his "original dream was to play with Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman." All those years later, he looked back at his drumming days fondly. "I made a living at it," he said, revealing he was taught to play by legendary drummer Buddy Rich, lauded by Brooks as "the greatest drummer that ever lived." 

Of all Mel Brooks' directorial efforts, the most successful remains 1974's Blazing Saddles, with Box Office Mojo listing the film's worldwide gross at $119.6 million. Not only is it Brooks' most lucrative picture, but he also believes it's his most hilarious. In fact, Brooks firmly contends that not only is Blazing Saddles the funniest of his movies, he also made this less-than-humble boast to Vanity Fair. "I shouldn't brag about it, because it's my own movie, but I think it's the funniest movie ever made," he told the outlet.

To prove his point, Brooks revealed he set up a "laugh-off" at the American Film Institute, going head to head with director Billy Wilder's classic 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot. He explained how the "laugh-off" worked. "At 6 o'clock they come in to see Some Like It Hot, and you take a 20-minute break, and at 8 o'clock they see Blazing Saddles," Brooks said. "And you just measure the laughs. We have twice as many laughs, maybe three times as many. And bigger... People rolling in the aisles. It's a very funny movie."

After parodying westerns with Blazing Saddles and horror films with Young Frankenstein, Brooks next set his sights on spoofing the films of director Alfred Hitchcock. His 1977 comedy High Anxiety featured Brooks' hilarious take on such Hitchcock classics as Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds. 

Before embarking on the project, Brooks told Rolling Stone in a 1978 interview that he sought out Hitchcock to get his blessing. Hitchcock, then 80, not only loved the idea of Brooks parodying his movies, he even offered some suggestions for the script. "He was very helpful," Brooks explained in a TV interview with Joy Behar, recalling that he would visit Hitchcock each Friday to have a meal and work on the script together. 

Hitchcock also pitched Brooks a joke for High Anxiety, although it didn't make it into the film. The gag features the protagonist running from bad guys, guns drawn, when he finds himself at the end of a dock. Luckily, he sees a ferry about 12 feet away and makes a desperate leap, just barely making it. Only then, Brooks explained, he "realizes too late the ferry is coming in."

In 2014, Mel Brooks became the recipient of the ultimate old-school Hollywood honor: he was invited to leave his handprints and footprints permanently imprinted in cement outside Hollywood's TCL Chinese Theatre (once known as Grauman's Chinese Theatre). During the ceremony, Brooks pulled a sly prank. Unbeknownst to anyone, his left hand had been outfitted with an extra prosthetic finger, which, due to Hollywood makeup artistry, looked totally real. 

Thanks to his stunt, Brooks' handprints boast 11 fingers instead of the usual 10. "I desperately need to wash my hands," Brooks wrote on Twitter, the caption accompanying a photo of his 11-fingered imprint. After making his mark in wet cement, Brooks revealed his trick to the crowd by showing off his bonus digit. "There'll be a lot of tourists in the future who might notice that I have six fingers on my left hand," he joked.

Later that night, Brooks appeared with Conan O'Brien on his late-night talk show Conan, reported CBS News, where he explained his motivation. "I wanted to do something just a little different, I didn't know what. So — I got another finger," Brooks told O'Brien. 

To promote his 1981 comedy History of the World, Part I, Brooks recorded a disco-inflected rap single. "It's Good to Be the King" was based on the catchphrase of the movie's King Louis XVI, played by Brooks. As Night Flight recalled, the single — accompanied by a music video — was released in 1982 by Philadelphia soul label WMOT Records.

While Brooks no doubt saw the track as a novelty number, the song wound up making it onto the Billboard charts, ultimately peaking at #67 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. As Night Flight pointed out, this made Brooks "the first white artist performing a full-fledged rap song to penetrate the R&B chart." Meanwhile, the song was a bona fide hit in France, where it sold 375,000 copies and charted at "#2 on their equivalent SNEP chart."

Even stranger, Brooks' song led to a response song when Sylvia Robinson (whose label, Sugarhill Records, released the Sugarhill Gang's trailblazing hip-hop number "Rapper's Delight") released a musical answer, the single "It's Good to Be the Queen." Interestingly, Robinson's song did better in the charts than Brooks' did, climbing a few positions higher to peak at #53. 

In an interview with Men's Journal, Mel Brooks was asked to relay the best advice he ever received. His response, as one might expect, was not a serious one (we hope). "Around five years ago, Father John Frasier, who's a Catholic priest said, 'Get out of the Jew business and join us, the Catholics, because you're not going to be covered after you're done.'" According to Brooks, "I never did leave the Jew business, even though I liked him very much. Jews can't promise any afterlife. I think we say, 'This is it.'"

In that same interview, Brooks was also asked to share the advice he would give his younger self after the lifetime of experiences he's accumulated. "Forget about correcting your past. You learn from your past as you go along," he said. "You can't say, 'If I had...' You say, 'OK, all right. That was a mistake. I won't do that again.' That's how you learn."

Mel Brooks has generated a lot of laughs over the course of his long and storied comedy career, and he's made a lot of money doing it. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Brooks is worth an estimated $100 million, with the site noting that the 2001-2007 Broadway run of The Producers generated a staggering "$200 million in ticket sales" on its own.  

Despite having lots of it, money is not what motivates him. "At some point in your life, you got to say, 'I really can't go after money. I got to go after other things," Brooks told Men's Journal. For someone starting out with a family to support, Brooks can understand placing a high importance on making money, but also believes the pursuit of money shouldn't be someone's life's work, "when you're just wasting your time and making a lot more than you need," he explained.

He insisted that a big payday is no longer enough to entice him to sign onto a project. "These days, I'm Mr. Turn-down," he explained. "I said, 'I got enough. I got enough. I'm not going to sacrifice time, which, is a much more important commodity than money."