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At 95, Mel Brooks Knows All About Humor & Love with Anne Bancroft

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The following are excerpted from a Q&A in The New Yorker and Vulture both promoting the legendary 95 year-old writer/director/comedian’s autobiography All About Me out now. Urged to write it by his son Max while in quarantine, it’s his first.

On Anne Bancroft:

The way you write about your marriage to Anne Bancroft, it sounds like the most blissful relationship. What made your marriage work? We were totally honest with each other. We separated one night only. We had a big fight, and I said, “I’m not going to be living with you anymore.” I went to a hotel, and about three or four in the morning I called, and she was up. She said, “You coming home?” I said, “Yes.” And I never left again. It’s hard to explain love or why things work. There was never a lie, and it was so wonderful to have someone you could tell the God’s honest truth to at any time of night or day.

It’s 1961, and I’m working with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams on a Broadway show called All American. They had just had a huge hit with Bye Bye Birdie, and I was brought on to write the book for their new musical project.

One day, in the middle of writing, Charles, whom we all called Buddy, said, “Mel. Come with me. I have to go to a Perry Como show rehearsal at the Ziegfeld Theatre because I’m going to be playing the piano for Anne Bancroft. We’re rehearsing for a performance she is going to do at the Actors Studio later this week, and I have to find the right key for ‘Just You Wait (Henry Higgins).’ After I get the key, we’ll go back to work at my place.”

So I tagged along. After a few minutes, the guest star, Anne Bancroft, takes the stage. I’d never seen anything like it.

She was wearing a stunning white dress, and she was singing in a sultry voice a Gertrude Niesen favorite, “I Wanna Get Married.” She was just incredibly beautiful.

When the song was over, I leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, “Anne Bancroft! I love you!”

She laughed and shouted back, “Who the hell are you?”

I said, “I’m Mel Brooks! Nobody you’ve ever heard of!”

She said, “Wrong! I’ve got your 2000 Year Old Man record with Carl Reiner. It’s great.”

That was the beginning.

After Buddy got the key for their song, he said, “Let’s go back to my place.”

I said, “Forget it. I think I’m in love.”

I went backstage to see Anne. We started talking, and we never stopped.

I asked her, “What are you doing after this? Let’s go out for coffee.”

She said, “I’m sorry, I have an appointment. I have to see my agent, Bernie Seligman, at the William Morris office.”

I said, “Bernie Seligman? I have to see him too! I promised to get back to him two weeks ago.”

That was the beginning of a string of lies that I never stopped telling, just to be wherever she was.

On comedy:

You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios. I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”

That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene. I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.

You write in the book, “My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as being purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor.” What’s the difference? Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.

You were a drummer when you were a kid. Did drumming teach you anything about comedy? It did. It has to do with punch lines. It has to do with timing. It has to do with buildup and explosions. For a joke to work, I always needed that rim shot, when one of the drumsticks hits the rim of the snare as well as the center of the drum and gives you that crack, that explosion. It’s the same thing with a joke. A man walks into a grocery store. He says, “I want a half a pound of lox. I want some cream cheese.” And he stops and says, “All your shelves are filled with boxes of salt! Do you sell a lot of salt?” And the grocery man says, “Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt—boy, can he sell salt!” That’s the rim shot.

You write about seeing Ethel Merman in “Anything Goes” on Broadway when you were a kid, and on the way back you say, “I’m going into show business and nothing will stop me.” What was it about Ethel Merman that you loved so much? Her profound dedication to what she was doing. I don’t think she cared if there was an audience or not. When she was singing “You’re the Top,” she was in her glory. In those days, there were no microphones onstage, and Uncle Joe and I were in the third balcony, a mile away from the stage. I thought it was still a little too loud. The same thing with [Al] Jolson. He was lost in what he was doing, and he was in heaven. With most performers, there’s some little part of them that’s paying attention to the crowd. But being dedicated to the material, lost in what you’re doing—that was Ethel Merman.

What was your first professional comedy gig? When one of the comics got sick at the Butler Lodge, in Hurleyville, in the Borscht Belt, I filled in for him, because I knew his stuff. “I just flew in from Chicago, and boy, are my arms tired.” “I met a girl in Chicago that was so skinny. I brought her to a restaurant, and they said, ‘Check your umbrella.’ ” I just took the material he did, and I got a few laughs. But every once in a while somebody would come in and sit down, and I’d say, “Mrs. Schwartz, you’re late!” Then the big laughs happened, and I realized then and there, Oh, when it’s my observation, they laugh. Really laugh. If I’m going to be a comic, I’d better think of my own things to say.

You write about your experience in the Army, and one thing that stood out to me was that you were m.c.’ing variety shows for the Special Services division right after the war, with German civilians performing with American G.I.s. That sounds fraught. It was talent that was available. You needed to do an hour on the stage so that the soldiers would have some entertainment. But it was hard to do an hour if you couldn’t find enough G.I.s that were great singers, dancers, musicians, what have you. But there was a nice, little German reservoir of talent that was in show business before Hitler, so I just broke the rules and took a chance. They were often in tears: “I’m doing what I was meant to do, and thanks to you you’re letting me do that for an audience.” I never thought that every German was a criminal. Of course, many, many civilians were swayed by Hitler and became bad people. But I wasn’t in politics then. I was in show business. There was a great German tap dancer, and after a talk with him I tried to find out whether they were S.S. troopers hiding as tap dancers.

That sounds like “Springtime for Hitler”! The seeds were probably born in me then and there.

Obviously Charlie Chaplin had done “The Great Dictator” decades earlier, but when you came up with “The Producers” I don’t imagine that people thought that Hitler comedy was acceptable in any way. Did you have your own trepidation, as a Jewish person, as someone who was in the Second World War? That was a fight within me, a big struggle. Of course, I didn’t want to pay any homage in any way to the Third Reich. However, I was true to my story. You can encapsulate “The Producers” in one sentence: you can make more money with a flop than you can with a hit. But you need the ammunition to make that flop. I knew I was on thin ice, but I said, “This will surely send the Jews flying out of the theatre in a rage, and they’d have their flop.” And that’s what this story was all about, a great big flop making them rich. In the end, it turns out that I really was more interested in their relationship than anything else: two strangers become very good friends. That’s the unconscious engine that drives the movie.

When you write about “The Producers,” you say that you got outraged letters, and you wrote back, “The way you bring down Hitler and his ideology is not by getting on a soap box with him, but if you can reduce him to something laughable, you win.” Do you think that still works with the evils of the world? If you can reduce the enemy to an object of ridicule and laughter, you’ve won. And that’s why, when “The Producers” played throughout Europe, it was very successful.

After the war, you spent years working for Sid Caesar, and you write about the “creative anger” and “intense competitiveness” among the writers at “Your Show of Shows.” Was there something about the angst of this group that helped you figure out your comedic voice? It’s very funny. I was on the fencing team in high school, and I was only fair. But every time I fenced with a very good fencer the fencing teacher would say, “Mel, your fencing is better today.” The enemy sharpened my fencing, and it was the same thing in that writers’ room. In order to keep your status as one of Sid’s writers, you had to outfence them. Your joke had to succeed or your concept had to be superior, so there was a lot of hatred and a lot of back and forth. And there was a lot of love, because you realized that in their fight with you they were teaching you. It was complicated but wonderful, and Sid was the beneficiary.

Read the full Q&A here.

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