{"id":522355,"date":"2026-06-28T08:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T08:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/522355\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T08:25:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T08:25:10","slug":"happy-birthday-mel-brooks-100-gloriously-tasteless-years-long-may-you-remain-above-ground-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/522355\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday, Mel Brooks: 100 gloriously tasteless years. Long may you remain above ground \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLet\u2019s swing, sing, shout, make noise!\u201d Mel Brooks<\/a> told The New York Times<\/a> more than 50 years ago. \u201cLet\u2019s not mimic death before our time comes! Let\u2019s be wet and noisy!\u201d<\/p>\n

Good advice. The inimitable comic genius, who turns 100 this weekend, would surely rather we didn\u2019t bring up obituaries, but at such times it\u2019s worth noting that we don\u2019t sufficiently celebrate our more venerable celebrities while they are still with us. <\/p>\n

Eva Marie Saint, the captivating star of On the Waterfront and North by Northwest, will be 102 on July 4th. Dick Van Dyke, charming multitalent, clocked up his century last December. Watch their films now. Be \u201cwet and noisy\u201d about them while they walk the earth.<\/p>\n

Brooks continues to live one of the great American lives. Born to working-class Jewish parents in Brooklyn (where else?) shortly before the Depression, he became, from the mid-1950s onwards, one of the most unstoppably funny men in the United States. <\/p>\n

He worked with the likes of Neil Simon and Woody Allen on the ground-breaking TV series Your Show of Shows. He hit paydirt with the self-explanatory skit The 2000 Year Old Man. \u201cThin lad, wore sandals, long hair, walked around with 11 other guys,\u201d the ancient said of Jesus.<\/p>\n

After a few quiet years, during which his second wife, the brilliant actor Anne Bancroft, paid the bills, he found further success writing the hit TV show Get Smart. Then, on the big screen, came the incandescently funny The Producers, a slow-burn hit that secured him an Oscar for best screenplay. Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein both arrived in 1974. <\/p>\n

You know all this. You may also know that he was an uncredited executive producer on David Lynch<\/a>\u2019s untouchable The Elephant Man. \u201cMel Brooks protected me and backed me up,\u201d Lynch later said. \u201cMore than almost anyone, Mel was the guy that put me on the map.\u201d <\/p>\n

You know that, in the current century, he had an enormous success with the musical version of The Producers on Broadway. In 2027 he will be reprising his role as Yogurt in a sequel to Spaceballs, his delightfully broad 1987 science-fiction parody.<\/p>\n

Along the way he broke a few taboos that have, in subsequent years, re-emerged more prohibitively than ever. We are not talking so much about The Producers. The gloriously tasteless Springtime for Hitler, the mock musical at the centre of that film, still raises laughs at revivals of the stage incarnation. <\/p>\n

It would, however, now be impossible, in a mainstream movie, for a film-maker from outside the black community to have such outrageous fun as Brooks enjoyed, during Blazing Saddles, with the N-word. Indeed, it is doubtful if even an African-American director could get away with it in 2026. It would matter little that Blazing Saddles is an attack on racism that understands the toxicity of the word.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe use the N-word a lot, maybe because Richard Pryor<\/a> was one of my key writers,\u201d Brooks told The New Yorker<\/a> in 2021. \u201cBut how could you have a movie that contains so many jokes about racial prejudice and not have the N-word? I\u2019m so lucky I did that before the door was shut on ever using anything like the N-word for any reason. It helps the picture tremendously.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Brooks is a celebrated writer, producer and performer. He helped develop new talent. He simply ignored notes from the studio and ploughed ahead with the riskiest jokes. He broke new ground (even if some of that ground did not stay broken).<\/p>\n

It is, however, on this happy weekend, vital to celebrate the man as well as the work. You will get a sense of his unstoppable personality from the recent HBO Max documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! He looks a bit creased around the edges. The voice has the odd crackle. But he is still recognisable as the endlessly warm fellow causing chatshow hosts to hyperventilate in clips stretching back for 70 years. <\/p>\n

He is of an age to have served in the Battle of the Bulge. \u201cDeath is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier,\u201d he later said. He is a great enthusiast for serious literature, famously naming Gene Wilder<\/a>\u2019s character in The Producers for Leopold Bloom, from James Joyce<\/a>\u2019s novel Ulysses.<\/p>\n

One of his greatest chatshow anecdotes \u2013 impossible to summarise \u2013 involved his first meeting with Cary Grant<\/a> after arriving in Hollywood. (You will need to watch the clip to grasp why this is funny.) At first Brooks is unimaginably excited, but, after a relentless series of calls from the great star, he eventually snaps: \u201cTell him I\u2019m not in!\u201d<\/p>\n

It is hard to imagine anyone not being into Mel Brooks. Long may he remain above ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cLet\u2019s swing, sing, shout, make noise!\u201d Mel Brooks told The New York Times more than 50 years ago.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[222646,321,20055,93,222645,61,60,27195,62439,80004],"class_list":["post-522355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-cary-grant","tag-celebrities","tag-david-lynch","tag-entertainment","tag-gene-wilder","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-james-joyce","tag-mel-brooks","tag-richard-pryor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}