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Mon 11 August 2025 16:15, UK
Comedy is entirely subjective, much like any other art form, and there’s an argument to be made that the sentiment is especially true for people who built their careers on making people laugh. Mel Brooks has created some of the funniest movies in Hollywood history, but what tickles his funny bone?
As anyone would expect from somebody born in 1926 who’s still going strong almost a century later, his personal preferences lean towards the generation of performers he grew up around. Not that he’s got anything against comedy’s constant evolution and embrace of modernity, but he definitely prefers the old school.
He’s adamant that Harry Ritz deserves to be called “the funniest man ever,” and he peaked in the 1930s and 1940s. Similarly, he called Madeline Kahn “the single best comedian that ever lived,” and she did her best work in the 1970s. Brooks also has a soft spot for the Marx brothers and the Three Stooges, who reached the apex of their popularity before World War II.
Most, but not all, of his favourite films hail from a similar era. The EGOT-winning icon has always been obsessed with Fred Astaire and the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood musicals, but he also watches Ridley Scott’s Gladiator once a month alongside longtime friend Carl Reiner and declared Matt Damon’s The Bourne Identity as one of the 21st century’s best movies, so he’s not beholden to a single time period or genre.
If someone is feeling down, comedy is about the best pick-me-up there is, and Brooks has been responsible for salvaging many a miserable day when The Producers, Blazing Saddles, or Young Frankenstein is fired up to shake a viewer out of their stupor. The best comedies are timeless, and he’s written, directed, produced, and starred in several of them, with five films ticking that box for him.
As expected, when The Skanner asked Brooks to rattle off a quintet of pictures that are always guaranteed to leave him in stitches, 80% of them were hardly modern. “Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last,” he said. “Those are really my favourites.”
Those movies were released in 1959, 1942, 1931, and 1923, which checks out, based on the filmmaker’s fondness for the classics. And yet, a bawdy, R-rated smash hit made an appearance, although Brooks wanted to make it clear he wasn’t too enamoured with its successor. “I thought The Hangover was really funny,” he added. “But the sequel just exploited the first.”
In fact, Brooks appreciates Todd Phillips’ 2009 franchise-launcher so much that the “hysterical” scene where the hapless protagonists find themselves trapped in a hotel room with Mike Tyson’s pet tiger lurking in the bathroom was named as one of his 11 favourite scenes of all time, which he described as “an amazingly funny concept.”
The sequel? Not so much. The Hangover Part II was basically a carbon copy of the original that didn’t bring anything new to the table, and Brooks isn’t the only one who thought the cash-grabbing second chapter only existed to exploit the success of the first. The opener always makes him laugh, but the less said about the next one, the better.
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