I’m writing from a lounge in Nottinghamshire, England, which of course is making me think of all the culture and literature that emerged from the mythology of this place. Specifically, I’m thinking of how much I don’t like Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
No disrespect to the auteur, though. Like many of us, I grew up on Mel Brooks, who celebrates his 100th birthday this week. It’s just that I think what they say about Mel is like what they say about Mad Magazine: your favorite era tends to be when you first discovered him. Older fans tend to think the later stuff is crap and younger aficionados find it a little hard to relate to what their elders considered funny.
As a child of the late 1970s and 1980s (History of the World Part One was the first R-rated movie I ever saw in the movie theater), my favorite Mel has always been High Anxiety (1978), his Hitchcock homage. In that farce, Mel himself takes his first star-turn in the lead role as Dr. Richard Thorndyke, the new director of The Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. When we were kids, my brother and I could recite every line – and sometimes, on long car rides, that’s exactly what we’d do.
“You’re the cocker’s daughter?” Busted eardrums. Nurse Diesel. And: no one who’s appreciated Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) will ever be able to take it seriously after seeing Mel suffer a similar, but different, avian assault in High Anxiety.
As one of only 28 people in history who are EGOT winners, Mel Brooks certainly has left his mark on American culture. He’s also embraced by the Jewish community as one of our own—he was even the subject of an enjoyable biography by Jeremy Dauber in the excellent Yale Jewish Library series. So we might ask, why does Mel Brooks belong in the pantheon of great 20th century Jews? (As for the 21st century—thank G-d we still have him, but it seems like a bit of a victory lap.)
Born Melvin Kaminsky, Mel’s early c.v. follows a classic Jewish 20th century arc: born to Russian Jewish immigrants in a tenement in Brooklyn, he fell in love with theater and movies and was determined to make a career in show business. He fought the Nazis in Europe during World War II, then returned home to start a comedy career in that safe haven for post-war Jews, the borscht belt in the Catskills. Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, Get Smart, and the movies followed in the 1960s.
It seems to me that Mel Brooks’s comedy was always that easy sort of “Our Crowd” humor: if you know, you know. These are familiar characters, accents, and punchlines; it was warm and comfortable to be with people who were so recognizable. I don’t think his humor ever displayed a deep knowledge about Judaism—just about Jewish-Americanism.
Take a look at History of the World Part One—or even, G-d help us, Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Spaceballs: the belly laughs and slapstick and knowing winks to Jewish points-of-reference are all there, but they’re of the most obvious kinds. Bris jokes. Jewish American princesses. Shlemiels and shlimazels. The easiest and most obvious touchstones for belly laughs.
But there’s more going on beneath the surface.
Mel always maintained that his humor was a weapon against the antisemites. This becomes clear in Dauber’s biography and Mel’s somewhat less useful memoir, All About Me! (2021). Considering that Mel was on the ground in Europe with the U.S. army during World War II, he internalized the ghastly meaning of Jew-hatred. But instead of becoming self-righteous, or a social activist, he weaponized his humor.
His comedy wasn’t the pointed political humor that emerged in the 60s and 70s—think Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, and ultimately Richard Pryor. Instead, he turned Nazis into buffoons. We’re not afraid of you, his humor maintained; no—I’m laughing at you and your idiotic hate.
Obviously, the culmination of this is The Producers (1967), where the Nazis are a bunch of goose-stepping, effeminate, and utterly ridiculous morons. It’s before my time, but it definitely belongs in the time capsule of the American Jewish experience.
I have two reflections about The Producers that I want to share.
The first is a story that was told to me by the wife of one of my rabbis. (I’ll leave her anonymous, because she told me this story 30 years ago, and I haven’t doublechecked my recollection with her.) She told me this story about seeing the movie in the cinema when it first came out.
She told me: first remember what the Holocaust meant in the mid-1960s. It was still an open, festering wound. Twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the massacre of one-third of the Jews in the world was incomprehensible. And there were survivors—not the precious few elders telling their stories that we have today, but even people who were still young in 1967 who had been through the camps and were trying to navigate life in America after the Shoah.
People weren’t talking about the Shoah yet. Elie Wiesel’s Night was still new; there were very few other Holocaust memoirs available. There was a stunned, silent PTSD in the Jewish world.
So she and her friends went to see the new movie The Producers on Christmas Eve in New York. There were only Jewish people in the audience. And the movie commences. Kenneth Mars plays the deranged ex-Nazi Franz Liebkind who has written a musical “love letter” to Hitler. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder mount the play on Broadway, knowing that it’s the worst thing ever written. And there’s its centerpiece, “Springtime for Hitler.”
My rabbi’s wife described what it was like to be in that movie theater. Silence, shocked silence. Were we allowed to laugh at these things in 1967? The wounds were so fresh…
And then, at some point, a lone person in the audience starts laughing. Loudly. And it has a ripple effect. There is a great emotional release, and suddenly the whole theater is full of riotous laughter for the rest of the show. She told me that she’s never, before or since, experienced that kind of catharsis at the movies.
That’s what Mel Brooks means by “dancing on Hitler’s grave” – and I think he’d be immortal for that alone.
But I have one postscript to that story.
Because not long ago I rewatched The Producers for the first time in many years.
And I have to admit… it made me uncomfortable in the middle of the 2020s. Lisping Nazis didn’t seem as funny as they used to.
I think this represents a change in Jewish self-awareness. After October 7, after the Tree of Life terrorist attacks, after the constant drumbeat of antisemitic and antizionist assaults against us… Is it possible that we feel a little less secure in our place in the world? That the things at which we laughed at from a place of security a few years ago suddenly seem not so funny upon considering our vulnerabilities?
I’m all in favor of using humor to deflate the haters. This is an old Jewish tradition going back to the Book of Esther. But humor has a way of reverberating back upon ourselves, revealing things about our collective psyche that is hidden beneath the surface.
How can it be that The Producers was a cathartic release for an audience in the 1960s—and half a century later, it suddenly makes us feel very vulnerable about a world in which the ground feels like it’s shifting beneath us?
Perhaps Dr. Richard Thorndyke (of the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous) would have a deeper analysis to share. In the meantime, a very happy birthday to Mel Brooks. May he live to 120—and beyond.