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Mon 4 August 2025 20:15, UK
If there is one mantra that governed Mel Brooks‘ career in comedy, it was “no regrets”.
Seriously, the comic genius who has made the world laugh for 70 years once said he had no regrets over any of the controversial gags he created over the years. In fact, if you were to force him to pick a regret, it would simply be the jokes he didn’t tell.
So, with that in mind, how did the man with no regrets once tell Esquire that he did, indeed, have one regret that bugged him for more than a decade? Well, this regret wasn’t about anything he did or didn’t do. Instead, it was about how one of his movies was perceived by a prestigious organisation whose sole raison d’être is “championing the moving image as an art form”.
In 2000, the American Film Institute published its list of ‘100 Years…100 Laughs’, which ranked the 100 funniest movies in US cinema history. Brooks, a man synonymous with American comedy, had three films in the top 100, which admittedly seems a little light for a man of such legendary mirth-making. However, all three were in the top 15, at least, with Young Frankenstein hitting number 13 and The Producers nestling just outside the top ten at number 11.
Brooks’ sole entry in the top ten was his rib-tickling 1974 classic, Blazing Saddles, and for most directors, this would be an achievement in and of itself. After all, it meant the AFI only considered five movies in 100 years of the medium to be funnier than Brooks’ boundary-pushing western spoof. These films were Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, and at number one, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.
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However, while Brooks didn’t have any specific beef with the movies ranked fifth to second, he did have a problem with Wilder’s classic, which starred Marilyn Monroe, and a cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. It wasn’t that he didn’t think it was a good movie, or that it wasn’t funny; he just took issue with the idea that it was even half as funny as Blazing Saddles.
“The only regret, and I’ve told AFI this, they put Some Like It Hot as the funniest movie of all time,” Brooks scoffed in 2014. “What I want to do is have a contest in theatres, and we’ll rig up some laugh meters, and we’ll run Some Like It Hot and then run Blazing Saddles, and see which one gets more laughs, and there will be no contest. It won’t even get half of the laughs we get.”
After jokingly proposing this laugh meter contest, Brooks didn’t backtrack in his opinion or pay much deference to Wilder’s beloved film. Instead, he doubled down, admitting “it’s been bugging me” ever since the AFI list was published, and that Blazing Saddles being sixth was a “ridiculous” decision.
Once Brooks got going on his rant, he wouldn’t be stopped. He next suggested that he wasn’t best pleased to only have two other films in the top 100, grumbling, “Even my worst comedy should be three or four. It should be me and maybe The Gold Rush and maybe a little of [Buster] Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and that’s it. I don’t know about the others.”
It was evident that Brooks had needed to get this off his chest for a while, and after he unburdened himself of 14 years of irritation, he finally gave Wilder some respect for his film – but only a little bit. “I love him,” he insisted. “There’s no knocking Billy Wilder; he was an all-around filmmaker. How could a guy make Some Like It Hot and previously make Double Indemnity or Ace in the Hole?”
However, once again, that old aggravation reared its head. In a battle purely measured by “laughs versus laughs”, Brooks was convinced Blazing Saddles could best any film in history. “It can’t be beaten,” he proclaimed, sounding like the Don King of imaginary comedy contests. “It’s the Joe Louis of comedy films.”
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