Mel Brooks is Still Funny

His genius, though, is not for ancient one-liners or for nostalgia. His genius is for such ambitious forms as the all-encompassing comedy routine and the genre-quoting and genre-annihilating epic movie, including Blazing Saddles (1974), a Jewish Western with a black hero; Young Frankenstein (1974), a film that expands the metaphysical ambitions of horror; History of the World: Part I (1981), a lewd corrective to historical piety; and Spaceballs(1987), a slapstick mock-out of the alleged profundities of the Star Wars series.

Throughout his work, large projects and small, Brooks displays an endless fascination with such primal experiences as fear and cruelty, accident and death. His view of life is essentially pessimistic, though he has the startling and reviving habit of springing laughter out of calamity. The 2,000 Year Old Man comedy routine, which he did for years with Carl Reiner as his earnest interlocutor, ranged all over human experience, which is to say all over human vulnerability and disaster. On one occasion, Reiner asked him, “How do you differentiate between tragedy and comedy?” and Brooks answered, “If I’ll cut my finger, that’s tragedy. … Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

From “Portrait of an artist as an old man: Mel Brooks in his 90s” by David Denby for the Atlantic 

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