From wikipedia.org / © Angela George
Last week saw much hype and noise about the United States of America celebrating its 250th birthday. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the USA marked the 250th anniversary of its independence from the British by holding a Great American State Fair on Washington DC’s National Mall. This featured empty booths, cancelled musical performances, racist flags, power outages, collapsing roofs and a plywood model of the victory arch Trump wants to build on the Potomac that cracked, crumbled and oozed yellow gunk. How odd that hardly anyone wanted to go to it.
In other moves to celebrate America’s 250th Independence Day, Trump refurbished the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, also in Washington DC, so that its water would shine a patriotic blue, though it immediately shone a less patriotic green thanks to a sudden and unforeseen algae bloom. He also tried to extend the USA team’s run in the 2026 Football World Cup by arm-twisting Gianni Infantino and FIFA into breaking the sport’s red-card rules so that a key American player could play in the team’s next game – which they lost, courtesy of a 4-1 drubbing by Belgium, causing their exit from the competition.
The sound and fury about the 250th anniversary of American independence, and the Trump-esque shenanigans accompanying it, have obscured the fact that, one week earlier, the USA witnessed another important three-digit birthday. June 28th saw the 100th birthday of the legendary American filmmaker, comedian and general funnyman Mel Brooks. By the time he turned his hand to making movies in the late 1960s, Brooks already had impressive comic credentials – devising the famed 2000-Year-Old Man comedy sketch with Carl Reiner, for instance, or creating the classic spy-comedy TV show Get Smart (1965-70) with Buck Henry. But it’s fair to say his films are the body of work for which he’s most beloved.
Like much of the comedy I experienced from an early age – the Carry–On movies, or those starring Abbott and Costello, or the telly career of Ronnie Corbett – I’ve had a complicated and changing relationship with the oeuvre of Mel Brooks. As a youngster, I thought it was brilliant. As a young adult, who took himself much too seriously, I dismissed it – certainly, the later films Brooks made – as crass, cringeworthy guff. Now, in my old age, I can find pleasure in the entirety of Brooks’s canon and appreciate the artistry displayed in even what are, by general consensus, his lesser efforts. A bad joke might provoke a groan rather than a laugh, but to engineer that groan you still need a certain, warped skill.
I think I passed from my youthful period of Brooks-disdain to my more mature period of Brooks-admiration in the 1990s. This was when I was attempting to woo (with a total lack of success) a lady from New York whom I considered, for a while, the coolest thing on earth. We were chatting one evening about our favourite films and the object of my affections suddenly astounded me by saying she was a huge fan of… No, not Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), or Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), or Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), but… Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987).
From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Brooksfilms
“Seriously?” I spluttered. I’d seen this science-fiction / Star Wars piss-take shortly after its release and thought it was dreadful. But, patiently, the lady explained to me the sociological depth and cleverness of some of Spaceballs’ jokes that I’d missed – for example, when Bill Pullman and John Candy rescue the princess (Daphne Zuniga) and Pullman remarks, “That’s all we needed… A Jewish princess!” I had to concede there was more to Brooks’s humour than I’d thought.
So, I had my moment of epiphany. I decided, to misquote a line in The Producers, “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Mel Brooks party.”
Anyway, it’s a fortnight late for the great man’s 100th, but here is a belated guide to the funniest bits, in my opinion, of his movies. There’s no mention of The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Life Stinks (1991) because I haven’t seen those two.
L.S.D. gets auditioned in The Producers (1967)
The movie that put Brooks on the cinematic map, The Producers has had quite an afterlife, becoming a successful Broadway musical that, in 2005, was turned into a film itself. For me, its highlight isn’t the famous song-and-dance number Springtime for Hitler that’s the centrepiece of the show that impresario Zero Mostel and accountant Gene Wilder stage in the hope it’ll be a massive flop (allowing them to make a fortune from the shares they’ve sold in it). No, the highlight comes earlier.
That’s when hippy Lorenzo St. DuBois – L.S.D. to his friends – stumbles into the show’s auditions by mistake and performs, with his female guitar / keyboards / sax backing band, a funny-terrible number called Love Power. (“And I give a flower to the big fat cop / He takes his glove and he beats me up!”) Played by Dick Shawn with thigh-high furry boots and a Campbell’s soup-can hanging on a chain around his neck, the hapless L.S.D. is hilarious – and the sequence reaches a perfect conclusion when Mostel bellows ecstatically, “THAT’S OUR HITLER!”
From instagram.com / (c) Embassy Pictures
The campfire scene in Blazing Saddles (1974)
If I was more sophisticated, I’d nominate as the funniest moments in Brook’s smash-hit comedy-western the scenes where he skewers the residents of frontier town Rock Ridge for their bone-headed racism. (“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”) However… I’m nominating instead the sequence in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickens’s men sit around a campfire and stuff themselves with traditional cowboy fare – beans – with flatulent results.
I first saw Blazing Saddles when it played on a big screen in the assembly hall of my school as one of the movies chosen for the school’s Film Club. When the farting began, the teenaged audience, including myself, laughed like drains. We were still roaring our heads off minutes after the sequence finished. No other film shown during the several years I was a member of that Film Club – not Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), not Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), not Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – provoked so tumultuous a reaction. I’m not proud.
The monster meets the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974)
The most genuinely affectionate of Brooks’s genre parodies, Young Frankenstein pokes fun at the black-and-white Frankenstein movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s. My favourite part of it is when Brooks sends up the sequence in Bride of Frankenstein (1936) where the Frankenstein monster (Boris Karloff) is touchingly but briefly befriended by a lonely blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who’s unaware of his monstrousness. Here, the well-meaning but, well, blind hermit (Gene Hackman) accidentally and repeatedly scalds and burns the unfortunate monster (Peter Boyle) whilst trying to offer him broth, cigars, etc., until the latter flees from his cottage in terror. Despite the gleeful bad taste of the gags, the Young Frankenstein sequence retains some of the sweetness and sadness of the Bride of Frankenstein one. It also makes you wish Gene Hackman had played more comedy roles.
From wikipedia.org / © Gruskoff / Venture Films / 20th Century Fox
The boardroom table in Silent Movie (1976)
This was another movie shown at my school’s Film Club and another sequence that sent us – uncivilised little oiks that we were at the time – into paroxysms of laughter. Evil corporation Engulf & Devour intends to take over the studio of filmmaker Mel Funn (Brooks) but that won’t happen if the new movie Funn is making becomes a hit. Engulf & Devour’s board of executives hatch a fiendish plan to sabotage Funn and his movie – they’ll send sultry nightclub singer Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to seduce, then dump Funn and re-kindle the massive alcohol problem he had previously. When a picture of Vilma is unveiled to the executives, sitting around the boardroom table, they’re so impressed that the table rises by several inches.
The line Funn / Brooks inspires when Vilma does dump him, and he goes on a massive bender to drown his sorrows – “He is truly the lord of the winos!” – is pretty funny too.
The orchestra in High Anxiety (1977)
Brooks’s next film takes fond aim at the thriller movies of Alfred Hitchcock. Its hero, Dr Richard Harpo Thorndyke, again played by Brooks himself, suffers from the titular disorder, the vertigo-like ‘high anxiety’. While travelling in the back of a car, Thorndyke / Brooks suffers a moment of ominous foreboding, which is accompanied by an equally ominous swell of Bernard Herrmann-like orchestral music – the sort that Hitchcock liked to insert into his films to augment the mood. This being a Brooks film, though, Thorndyke’s car then passes a bus that contains, as passengers, the orchestra playing the music.
Yes, this is the second time Brooks has used that gag. It originally appeared in Blazing Saddles and involved the Count Basie Orchestra performing in the desert, But the orchestra-on-a-bus joke in High Anxiety works better, I think.
The Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part I (1981)
A truly hit-and-miss collection of gags and sketches, History of the World, Part 1 depicts five chapters in world history from the Stone Age to the French Revolution. Its undisputed highlight is a segment about the Spanish Inquisition. This features Brooks as Torquemada – his victims try to talk him out of torturing them, but are told, “You can’t Torquemada anything!” – and an elaborate Busby Berkeley-like song-and-dance number in a torture chamber which, with its exuberant bad taste, is as impressive as Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.
© Brooksfilms / 20th Century Fox
Snotty’s line in Spaceballs (1987)
Spaceballs spoofs Star Wars (1977) but also contains some elaborate send-ups of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979) – the latter even drafts in John Hurt to reprise his role as the unfortunate Kane. But the funniest, or groan-iest, bit in for me is a simple pun. A Scottish character called Snotty (Jeff MacGregor), obviously based on Scotty from Star Trek (1966-69), is in a control room flicking a series of switches. “Lock One!” he shouts. “Lock Two! Lock Three! Loch Lomond!”
The abbot in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)
You have to be a connoisseur of long-ago comedy double-acts to appreciate my favourite joke in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Brooks’ irreverent take on the then-recent and hugely-successful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). An abbot (Dick Van Patten) is walking in his finery outside his monastery and enjoying the adulation of the local population. Then a guy who looks and sounds suspiciously like Lou Costello yells at him, “Hey, Abbott!” Van Patten grumbles, “I hate that guy.”
Dracula tries to control Mina’s mind in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
I don’t hold it against Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which stars Leslie Neilson as the legendary vampire count, that it isn’t great. After all, there have been many attempts over the years to spoof vampire films and hardly any of them have been funny – see Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967) or Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1977). In fact, it wasn’t until Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014) that I encountered a vampire-movie parody that made me laugh.
However, Dracula: Dead and Loving It has one funny part where, from a distance, Dracula / Neilson exerts his willpower over the bitten and partly vampirised Mina (Amy Yasbeck) and tries to summon her: “Mina… Open your eyes… Arise… Come to the door…” The operation goes less smoothly when the mind-controlling vampire discovers there’s a confusing closet door in the way, and a hazardous footstool, and an inconvenient maidservant who’s also picking up his telepathic instructions: “Mina… You are in the closet. Open the door and come out… Watch out for the footstool… Stand up… Not you, sit… No, you sit… You stand…”
And just before I finish, some praise is due for Brooks as a producer too. He’s the man who oversaw both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).
From wikipedia.org / © Angela George