Mel Brooks at 100: Still Playing Yogurt, Still Betting That Ridicule Beats Reverence

Mel Brooks

Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 28, 1926 Brooklyn, New York City, United States
Occupation	Filmmaker and comedian
Known for	Toy Story 4, Young Frankenstein, Hotel Transylvania 2
Awards	Academy Award · Academy (lifetime achievement) · 2 Tony Award · Grammy · Emmy · Kennedy Center Honors · AFI Life Achievement (lifetime achievement)

Mel Brooks has never trusted solemnity. His working theory, repeated for most of his life, is that the surest way to strip a tyrant of power is to make him sing and dance badly, and the surest way to love a genre is to knock its furniture over. That conviction made him the parodist every later spoof still borrows from. It is also why the industry’s most decorated clown is about to climb back into a robe and a pair of oversized ears: in Spaceballs: The New One, the Amazon MGM sequel to his Star Wars send-up, he plays Yogurt, the shrivelled guardian of the Schwartz, and the vain President Skroob once again.

The awkward part is that Brooks has become what he spent a career puncturing. He is a monument now, saluted on his hundredth birthday by a wave of Hollywood tributes, and the subject of a two-part HBO Max documentary whose title borrows his oldest joke. The question his late career keeps asking is whether a man can be canonised and still be allowed to be rude.

The rudeness was earned early. Melvin James Kaminsky came into the world on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the youngest son of Kitty Brookman and Max Kaminsky; his father died when he was two, and he later built a stage name out of his mother’s maiden name. Drafted in 1944, he served as a combat engineer with the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion and went through the Battle of the Bulge. He has long said that ridicule is the only revenge on Hitler worth taking.

Television gave him his first room. In the early 1950s he joined the writers of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, a staff that included Carl Reiner and Neil Simon, and followed Caesar to Caesar’s Hour. With Reiner he improvised The 2000 Year Old Man at parties until friends insisted they record it; the routine became a series of albums and, decades later, a Grammy. In 1965 he and Buck Henry created Get Smart, a spy spoof that ran five seasons and taught American television that bumbling could be a franchise.

The Producers, his first feature as director, set the terms of everything that followed. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder play a Broadway con man and his accountant who stage Springtime for Hitler in the hope it will flop; some reviewers found the joke in poor taste, and Brooks won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay anyway. The Twelve Chairs, his adaptation of the Ilf and Petrov novel, sank at the box office. He still names it among his personal favourites.

Then came the year that made his name permanent. Blazing Saddles, written with a team that included Richard Pryor, dropped a Black sheriff, played by Cleavon Little, into a frontier town of bigots and pointed the camera at the bigots. Young Frankenstein, co-written with Gene Wilder and shot in black and white as a love letter to the Universal horror cycle, earned the pair an Oscar nomination. Both arrived in 1974. Over the next 13 years he kept the formula moving through Silent Movie, the Hitchcock pastiche High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I and Spaceballs.

Less visible, and more revealing, was Brooksfilms. When his company produced David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man in 1980, Brooks kept his own name off the credits so that audiences would not walk in expecting gags. The company went on to back David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The comic who insisted on putting his face on everything was capable of hiding it when the work demanded it, a contradiction the jokester persona rarely admits.

The canonised version of Brooks also skips the stretch where the form outran its inventor. Robin Hood: Men in Tights still had Cary Elwes and a young Dave Chappelle, but Dracula: Dead and Loving It was panned and failed commercially, and it remains the last film he directed. By then the spoof had passed to the Zucker brothers and their imitators. And the films he is proudest of now sit at the centre of a fight he joined willingly: in 2017 he told BBC Radio 4 that Blazing Saddles could never be made today because “we have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.” His defenders note that the film’s slurs always land on the people using them; his critics answer that a joke’s target is not the only person in the room.

What rescued the second half of his career was the stage. The Broadway version of The Producers, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, won a record 12 Tony Awards in 2001, three of them his, which completed a rare EGOT alongside his Emmys, including three for playing Uncle Phil on Mad About You. The honours have not stopped since: the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, the National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017 and an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in January 2024. In 2021 he published a memoir, All About Me!, and two years later he wrote and narrated History of the World, Part II for Hulu.

His private life has been public mostly through grief. His first marriage, to Florence Baum, produced three children. In 1964 he married Anne Bancroft, and they stayed together until her death in 2005; their son, Max Brooks, wrote the zombie novel World War Z. The deaths of Gene Wilder in 2016 and Carl Reiner in 2020 took the two partners who knew his comedy best, a loss that runs underneath Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, released on HBO Max in January 2026.

Brooks turned 100 on June 28, 2026, and the calendar around that birthday is busier than most working actors’ schedules. In May, FX and Hulu ordered Very Young Frankenstein to series, with Taika Waititi directing the pilot, Zach Galifianakis starring and Brooks as executive producer. Spaceballs: The New One, directed by Josh Greenbaum from a script by Josh Gad, Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez, brings back Rick Moranis and Bill Pullman and is set to open in US cinemas on April 23, 2027. He will be 100 when it opens, still arguing, through a puppet sage in rubber ears, that nothing sacred survives a good laugh, including himself.

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Tags: actors, Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles

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