![\"Mel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Mel-Brooks-Actor-Filmmaker-2016-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Mon 4 August 2025 20:15, UK <\/p>\n
If there is one mantra that governed Mel Brooks<\/a>\u2018 career in comedy, it was \u201cno regrets\u201d. <\/p>\n 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\u2019t tell.<\/p>\n So, with that in mind, how did the man with no regrets<\/a> once tell Esquire that he did, indeed, have one regret that bugged him for more than a decade? Well, this regret wasn\u2019t about anything he did or didn\u2019t do. Instead, it was about how one of his movies was perceived by a prestigious organisation whose sole raison d\u2019\u00eatre is \u201cchampioning the moving image as an art form\u201d.<\/p>\n In 2000, the American Film Institute published its list of \u2018100 Years\u2026100 Laughs\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n Brooks\u2019 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\u2019 boundary-pushing western spoof. These films were Leo McCarey\u2019s Duck Soup, Woody Allen\u2019s Annie Hall, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s Dr Strangelove, Sydney Pollack\u2019s Tootsie, and at number one, Billy Wilder\u2019s Some Like It Hot. <\/p>\n However, while Brooks didn\u2019t have any specific beef with the movies ranked fifth to second, he did have a problem with Wilder\u2019s classic, which starred Marilyn Monroe, and a cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. It wasn\u2019t that he didn\u2019t think it was a good movie, or that it wasn\u2019t funny; he just took issue with the idea that it was even half as funny as Blazing Saddles.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe only regret, and I\u2019ve told AFI this, they put Some Like It Hot as the funniest movie of all time,\u201d Brooks scoffed in 2014. \u201cWhat I want to do is have a contest in theatres, and we\u2019ll rig up some laugh meters, and we\u2019ll 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\u2019t even get half of the laughs we get.\u201d<\/p>\n After jokingly proposing this laugh meter contest, Brooks didn\u2019t backtrack in his opinion or pay much deference to Wilder\u2019s beloved film. Instead, he doubled down, admitting \u201cit\u2019s been bugging me\u201d ever since the AFI list was published, and that Blazing Saddles being sixth was a \u201cridiculous\u201d decision. <\/p>\n Once Brooks got going on his rant, he wouldn\u2019t be stopped. He next suggested that he wasn\u2019t best pleased to only have two other films in the top 100, grumbling, \u201cEven 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\u2019s it. I don\u2019t know about the others.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Some](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Some-Like-It-Hot-1959-Marilyn-Monroe-Billy-Wilder-Far-Out-Magazine-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>(Credits: Far Out \/ United Artists)<\/p>\n