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Articles by date All of Salon.com By department Get a free Allstate quote Search our Personals ... Corrections Mel Brooks The comedy impresario currently steamrolling Broadway owes "Blazing Saddles," fart humor and his dancing Hitler to a red rubber ball. By Mary Elizabeth Williams Sondheim didn't do it. Bernstein didn't, either. Rodgers and Hammerstein put together didn't come close. No, the creator of the Broadway show that smashed all the box office records is the man who gave us "Spaceballs." The maestro who revitalized the Great White Way is the guy who brought fart jokes to major motion pictures. And the impresario whose show netted an unprecedented 12 Tony awards was also the only winner to ever thank Hitler in his acceptance speech. Like his hit musical "The Producers," Mel Brooks is an unlikely combination of innocent optimism, bawdy irreverence and unbridled chutzpah. And if, at age 75, Brooks is the bright new darling of the American theater, it's because he has spent a lifetime brazenly getting in our faces and shamelessly prodding us to laugh, and because, for all the alleged comedy in our must-see TV and Tom Green world, we're starved for real humor. We need Mel Brooks to make us laugh as much as he needs to make us laugh. Melvin Kaminsky was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1926, on, he has proudly noted, the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. His father died when he was 2. He was a poor, picked-on Jewish kid who, like so many great clowns, learned early to use comedy as a defense against bullies. By the time he was 14 he was already working his way up the comic ranks in the Catskills, pratfalling by the pools and lobbing barbs from the stage whenever a sympathetic hotel manager would let him. | |
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