Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A group of cowboys are sitting around a campfire. They’re outlaws and killers and varmints, the lot of them. Tomorrow, they plan on riding through a small frontier town, and razing this bastion of civilization to the ground. Tonight, they’re feasting on a typical cowpoke dinner of black coffee and baked beans. One of these dingy gunslingers lets out a belch. Then the guy sitting across from him… well, he farts. Loudly. So does another cowpoke. That one’s gassy emission is even louder. Within seconds, there’s an entire orchestra of flatulence in full swing — Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in four honking butt movements. It’s a miracle the campfire doesn’t turn into a methane-fueled inferno.
The scene is crude, crass, vulgar. It’s also hilarious, and we’ve personally witnessed entire movie audiences doubled over and crying with laughter at this lowbrow high point of Blazing Saddles, the Mel Brooks masterpiece and a strong contender for the funniest comedy ever made. You can only imagine what it must have been like to be in a theater in 1974, when audiences weren’t used to this level of scatological humor onscreen. Those toots on the range are famous, if not infamous. Everybody remembers what Brooks himself called “the supreme volley of farts.”
What many people forget is the sight gag that comes right before it, as the camera passes by a sign on the fence surrounding the gang: “Administrative Personnel Only. Knock on Barbed Wire Before Entering.” It’s a throwaway joke that might have worked in either Mad Magazine or Your Show of Shows, the groundbreaking TV series that gave the writer-director his start. And the combo of that giggle-inducing amuse-bouche, followed by a massive serving of belly laughs, sums up Brooks’ comic sensibility to a T. He knows how to slip a blink-and-miss-it brainy bit into the mix. And he’s also unafraid to go right for the gut.
Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man, the two-part documentary that airs on HBO Jan. 22 and 23, is a few different things. It’s a continuation of filmmaker Judd Apatow’s lifelong obsession with interviewing and chronicling funny people, which has bled into his documentary work with co-director Michael Bonfiglio (George Carlin’s American Dream; the short Bob and Don: A Love Story) and others (the upcoming Maria Bamford: Paralyzed by Hope, co-directed by Neil Berkeley). It’s a portrait of a pioneer, hitting all the personal and professional beats you expect from someone with a half dozen career switch-ups over eight decades. It’s a timeline of American showbiz over the last half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st, covering Sid Caesar to Larry David, the Borscht Belt to Broadway.
What makes this extended look at the gentleman behind Blazing Saddles — and The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and other screen comedy landmarks — such a gas (sorry), however, isn’t just the abundance of vintage TV-appearance clips. Or the 100th recounting of his formative years and the resumé roll call. Or the peeks into both marriages, notably his 41-year union with Anne Bancroft, the occasional sideline commentary from his kids, or testimonials from several generations of famous folks he’s influenced. Or even the chats with Brooks himself, who, after many years of talking about his life and work onstage, has the old anecdotes down pat. All of these Documentary 101 elements are necessary, of course, and if you know little about the nonagenarian with the mantle full of awards, Apatow and Bonfiglio have provided a solid primer. Wanna know how the 14-year-old Melvin Kaminsky, a Brooklyn kid who got his first big laugh by breaking the fourth wall during a Catskills production, transformed into Mel Brooks, Hollywood living legend? Step right up.
No, the reason The 99-Year-Old Man is so vital is that it reminds you, early and often, that Brooks wasn’t always the adorable old man who gave theatergoers a great night out, or a link to a bygone entertainment ecosphere. He was a comedic subversive, a guy who pushed buttons and envelopes, a gleeful tweaker not just of clichés but of taboos. He was dangerous.
Take The Producers. Brooks had already had more than a few ups and downs by the mid-1960s, having been taken under Sid Caesar’s wing at the very moment television was being revolutionized and sticking with him as a sketch writer on Your Show of Shows to the bitter end. He desperately tried to get a gig after that series went off the air, and floundered for years until, along with Buck Henry, he conceived of the hit sitcom Get Smart in 1965. A ribbing of Bond-style spy adventures — even then, Brooks had a knack for turning parody into pop artistry — it elevated the Brooklyn native to boob-tube-genius status. Yet Brooks still wanted to break into the movies, and as the doc points out, he missed getting Caesar to leave the small screen and join him for glory on the big one by that much.
So when Brooks began to conceive of his debut film, he came up with a banger of a high-concept scenario: Two theater producers set out to make a fortune by staging a surefire flop. He cast Zero Mostel, already a fixture on the Great White Way, and Gene Wilder, soon to be an invaluable member of the Brooks repertory company. There are voluptuous vixens and downtown hipsters and more than a few dated caricatures. And then there is the play itself, and here’s where Brooks truly goes for broke. When was the last time you watched the opening number of “Springtime for Hitler”?
Other documentaries have done deep dives on Jewish humor and the Holocaust, but when The 99-Year-Old Man cuts to that Busby Berkeley-style overhead shot of dancers forming a swastika, you still find yourself gasping. Auschwitz had only been liberated 22 years prior to the film’s release, and now the guy who’d given us those 2,000 Year Old Man routines poking fun at ancient history was poking fun at a too-close-for-comfort recent-historical atrocity. Forget Lenny Bruce and Dr. Strangelove — this was the ultimate in sick humor, turning the machinery behind concentration camps into pure camp. It took no less than Peter Sellers taking out a full-page ad in an industry trade magazine to get people to pay more attention to the film, which was on the verge of disappearing from theaters. Brooks would end up winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
It would be several years and one misjudged Russian farce (The Twelve Chairs) before Andrew Bergman’s first draft of a comedy originally called Tex X came across Brooks’ radar. Along with Bergman and, crucially, Richard Pryor, he began to craft what would become Blazing Saddles. It was, and still is, 32 flavors of outrageous, filled with tons of timeless jokes, quotable lines, and words you shouldn’t repeat. Brooks found a way to make the sort of movie that could play off of Destry Rides Again one second (god bless Madeline Kahn’s Lily Von Shtupp), use racial epithets to puncture hypocrisy and polite social facades hiding roots-deep racism the next, and somehow find time to stage the sort of comedic anarchy that doesn’t break the fourth wall so much as obliterate it. Numerous interview subjects in the doc attest to the fact that you could not make this movie now, but it’s Dave Chappelle who gets the last word on the subject: “No, most people [couldn’t] make that movie, ever. Today, or even back then. But Mel Brooks could.”
The doc’s first part ends on the high of Blazing Saddles and what is essentially Brooks’ third act (out of five) as a professional parodist; 1974 was a great year for American movies — a partial list includes The Godfather: Part II, Chinatown, The Parallax View, The Conversation, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, California Split, Lenny, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — and an even better year for the filmmaker. Part Two picks up with Brooks’ other masterpiece released in Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, a pitch-perfect take on the Universal horror stable that could pass an aesthetic taste test next to the real thing. Young Frankenstein may seem like a no-brainer idea now, but Apatow and Bonfiglio put it in the context of the time by asking: Who makes a movie based on monster movies normally relegated to late-night repeats? And does it in black and white, with extraordinary fidelity and using the actual props from the original that the production team had discovered in some collector’s garage?
Young Frankenstein may not be as outright subversive as Saddles, but try telling that to a studio head who has to bankroll what must have seemed like a seriously niche in-joke in 1974. The film became a huge hit, the second part of a one-two punch that permanently established Brooks’ legacy. It may actually be the more influential comedy of the two, as it taught several generations as key lesson in crafting genre send-ups: Get it as close to the source material as possible, and the friction between the familiar and the ridiculous nearly sells itself. Brooks would go back to that well a number of times, sometimes to great effect; the documentary spends a lot of time on the ongoing love for Spaceballs, which isn’t surprising given the perpetually rabid Star Wars fandom and the affection Brooks’ movie has for that whole era of sci-fi blockbusters. You can now buy T-shirts and action figures from the writer-director’s fake tribute to movie merchandising run amok. A sequel is in the works.
The 99-Year-Old Man also dutifully ticks off the missteps, the attempts at “serious” filmmaking, the patron sainthood its subject provided via his Brooksfilm company (which produced The Elephant Man and Croneberg’s remake of The Fly), The Producers‘ resurrection as a Tony-winning juggernaut, and his reigning eminence grisé status. It leaves on a slightly sorrowful note, with Brooks framed as a sort of last man standing from a generation of comic giants; watching Rob Reiner talk about how Brooks would still come to Carl Reiner’s house every night to watch TV even after his best friend died is touching enough without clocking that the person speaking is now gone as well. But it also digs up one last controversy that seems almost quaint today. It involves the Spanish Inquisition.
When History of the World — Part 1 was released in 1981, Brooks was still riding high and able to get a green light for what’s essentially a series of sketch-comedy vignettes set in different eras. And the documentary does a great job of showing how this movie was, for many critics of Brooks’ work, a make-or-break moment. They either thought it was simply too much as a whole or a brilliant satire of power, corruption, and lies being the one constant throughout the centuries. (That, and dick jokes — see: masturbating cavemen). Yet everyone seemed to have issues and hot-take opinions on a Jewish comedian taking on the religious persecution of his people back in the 15th century, and once again reimagining systematic suffering as a movie-musical extravaganza. Watch it again. Part of you will likely think: “Really? This caused an uproar?” And another part of you may inadvertently think: “Oh. Oh, my god!”
The 99-Year-Old Man has lots more ground to cover after rehashing that brouhaha, but it’s really the doc’s big full-circle moment. Once again, Brooks thumbs his nose at “good” taste, and scores big. Once again, social feathers are ruffled, op-eds are published, sides are split with laughter. No one could make that movie now — but Brooks could, and did. Apatow and Bonfiglio’s affectionate look at a living legend, someone still walking red carpets and mugging for cameras a few months away from his centenary, pays tribute to one of the greats. But what it really does is remind you how Brooks changed comedy one Nazi- and fart-joke at a time. We could use more of Brooks’ style of high and low right now, more of his ability to wield laughter as a weapon against horror while still mounting an assault ion the funny bone by any means necessary. He proved you could do both. We owe Melvin Kaminsky from Brooklyn a lot.
