Mel Brooks

1944–1946: World War II service

In early 1944, in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test.^[28] He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to learn electrical engineering, horse riding and saber fighting.^[28][29][30] In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army.^[29] Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army^[22] at Fort Dix,^[28] New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic and radio operator training.^{[28][31][32][30]}

Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment.^[28] Brooks says he boarded SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around February 15, 1945.^[28] A reporter for the United States Department of Defense writes that Brooks arrived in France in November 1944, and later in Belgium, serving with the 78th Infantry Division as a forward artillery observer.^[29] In December 1944, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge.^{[30][29][33][34]} Of his experience there, Brooks noted:

Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier.^[35]

Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany.^[36][37][30] Brooks was tasked with land-mine location; defusing was done by a specialist.^[28] Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing Jewish-American singer Al Jolson's hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!)" into a bullhorn.^[38][39][40] Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit.^[41] His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River,^[28] later building bridges over the Rhine River.^[29] In April 1945, Brooks's unit conducted its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains, Germany.^[29]

With the end of the war in Europe, Brooks joined the Special Services as a comic touring Army bases, and he was made acting corporal, put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden,^[10][30] and performed at Fort Dix.^[10] In June 1946, Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal.^[30]

1949–1959: Early work and breakthrough

After the war, Brooks's mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but he "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills",^[42] where he started working in Borscht Belt clubs as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic was too sick to perform, Brooks substituted, telling jokes and doing movie-star impressions. He also acted in summer stock theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did radio work.^[22] He eventually worked his way up to the job of tummler at Grossinger's.^[22][43]

Chris Yogerst writes that "In the years after the war, Brooks's hero was comedian Sid Caesar. Back in New York, Brooks would slink around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas. Eventually, Caesar cracked and paid Brooks a little cash to throw him gags....At 24, Brooks got his break as a full-time writer."^[44] Brooks found more rewarding work behind the scenes, as a comedy writer for television.^[45] In 1949, Caesar hired him to write jokes for the DuMont/NBC series The Admiral Broadway Revue,^[46] paying him, off-the-books, $50 a week. In 1950, Caesar created the variety show Your Show of Shows and hired Brooks as a writer along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Danny Simon and head writer Mel Tolkin.^[22] The writing staff proved widely influential.^[47] Reiner, as creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, based Morey Amsterdam's character Buddy Sorell on Brooks.^[48] Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) is inspired by the production of the show, and the character Ira Stone is based on Brooks.^[49][50] Your Show of Shows ended in 1954 when Imogene Coca left to host her own show.^[51]

Caesar created Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers, including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart. It ran from 1954 until 1957.^[52][53] Brooks recalled: "When I was a fledgling comedy writer working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, our head writer was Mel Tolkin... I really looked up to him. (By the way, I was 5-foot-7 and he was six feet tall.) He was a bona fide intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the traditions of great Russian literature. One day, he handed me a book. He said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.' The book was Dead Souls by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I'd never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time... It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be."^[54] He recalled "I went to the library, and read all the books I could carry—Conrad, Fielding, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoy. I decided that Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It’s like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page. ... And I said to myself, ‘My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a talker.’"^[3]

And yet, as he later admitted to Kenneth Tynan, working with Caesar often proved so stressful and humiliating that Brooks contemplated suicide thirteen or fourteen times, and said he even had the pills to do it. At one point, his wife Florence had to beg him not to jump off an uptown pedestrian bridge they were crossing.^[55]

1958–1969: "Rising below vulgarity"

Brooks and Carl Reiner became close friends and casually improvised comedy routines.^[3] Reiner played the straight man interviewer and would pitch parts to Brooks. Reiner recalled:

I’d pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be, but I always tried for something that would force him to go into panic, because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see. ... I’d make him a Jewish pirate, and he’d complain about how he was being pushed out of the business because of the price of sailcloth and the cost of crews nowadays. Another time, I introduced him as Carl Sandburg, and he made up reams of phony Sandburg poetry. There was no end to what he could be—a U-boat commander, a deaf songwriter, an entire convention of antique dealers.^[3]

One of Reiner's suggestions was a 2000-year-old man who had witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (who "came in the store, but never bought anything"), had been married several hundred times and had "over forty-two thousand children, and not one comes to visit me". At first Brooks and Reiner only performed the routine for friends, but by the late 1950s it gained a reputation in New York. (In 1973, it was reported that Brooks and Reiner first performed the routine at Norman Lear's Fire Island home in the 1950s.)^[56] Tynan saw the pair perform at a party in 1959 and called Brooks "the most original comic improvisor I had ever seen".^[3]

In 1960 Brooks, without his family, moved from New York to Hollywood, returning in 1961.^[57] He and Reiner began performing the 2000 Year Old Man act on The Steve Allen Show. The skit resulted in the release of the comedy album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks that sold over a million copies in 1961.^[22] They eventually expanded their routine with two more albums in 1961 and 1962, a revival in 1973, a 1975 animated TV special and a reunion album in 1998.^[10] The 2000 Year Old Man routine could create "nervous tension" for Brooks and Reiner, with a New York Times article noting that they had in fact not performed the sketch on albums in over a decade by the time of its 1973 revival and that "both say the need to perform is gone."^[56] At one point, the record sales of The 2000 Year Old Man were Brooks's chief source of income.^[10] Brooks adapted the character to create the 2500-Year-Old Brewmaster for Ballantine Beer. Interviewed by Dick Cavett in a series of ads, the Brewmaster (in a German accent, as opposed to the 2000 Year Old Man's Yiddish accent) said he was inside the original Trojan horse and "could've used a six-pack of fresh air".^[58]

Brooks wrote the book of the musical All American, with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. It starred Ray Bolger as a science professor at a Southern university who applies engineering principles to the college's football team. It was directed by Joshua Logan, who script-doctored the second act and added a gay subtext. It debuted on Broadway in 1962, where it ran for 80 performances. Brooks conceived the animated short The Critic (1963), a spoof of Norman McLaren's abstract animation. It was directed by Ernest Pintoff, and Brooks ad-libbed running commentary as the baffled moviegoer struggling to make sense of the short. It won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1964. That year, Brooks married the actress Anne Bancroft.^[3]

Brooks and Buck Henry created the spy sitcom Get Smart, about a bumbling James Bond–esque agent. Brooks said, "I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life... I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first."^[59] Starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, the series ran from 1965 until 1970, although Brooks had little involvement after the first season. It was highly rated for most of its production and won seven Primetime Emmy Awards,^[60] including Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969.

During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry.^[61] For several years, Brooks toyed with the outrageous idea of a musical comedy about Adolf Hitler.^[62] He explored the idea as a novel and a play before writing a script about two producers making the musical.^[22] He finally found two producers to fund it, and made his first feature film, The Producers (1967).^[63] It stars Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel as Leo Bloom and Max Bialystock, theater producers who realize that, under certain circumstances, a flop can make more money than a hit, as "the IRS isn't interested in flops." Searching for a surefire flop, they produce Springtime for Hitler by the dimwitted Nazi Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). Of Bloom, Brooks said “I stole the name from Ulysses. I don’t know what it meant to James Joyce, but to me Leo Bloom always meant a vulnerable Jew with curly hair. In the course of any narrative, the major characters have to metamorphose. They have to go through an experience that forces them to learn something and change. So Leo was going to change, he was going to bloom."^[3]

The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios and exhibitors would not touch it. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as a specialized attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won Best Original Screenplay over Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. Accepting the award, Brooks said:

Well, I'll just say what's in my heart: Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. But seriously, I'd like to thank Sidney Glazier, the producer of The Producers, for producing The Producers. Joseph E. Levine and his wife Rosalie for distributing the film. I'd also like to thank Zero Mostel. I'd also like to thank Gene Wilder. I'd also like to thank Gene Wilder. I'd also like to thank Gene Wilder. Thank you very much.^[64]

The Producers premiered to a limited audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1967, before achieving a wide release in 1968.^[65] It became a smash underground hit on the nationwide college circuit, later in revivals. Peter Sellers championed the film, paying for full-page ads in Variety and The New York Times.^[65] David Ehrenstein traces the phrase "creative accounting" to the film. Roger Ebert included it in his canon of Great Movies, and remembered being in an elevator with Brooks and Bancroft shortly after it was released: "A woman got on the elevator, recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady', he said, 'it rose below vulgarity.'"^[66]

1970–1979: Stardom

Following the success of The Producers, Glazier financed Brooks's The Twelve Chairs (1970). Loosely based on Ilf and Petrov's novel about greed in post-revolutionary Russia, it stars Ron Moody, Frank Langella and Dom DeLuise as three men individually searching for a fortune of diamonds hidden in a set of 12 antique chairs. Brooks makes a cameo as an alcoholic ex-serf who "yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear". Gene Siskel wrote "Brooks's wild humor is, predictably, amply represented by his own performance and his script. What is remarkable is the quality of his direction. ... Brooks is in complete control of the many film techniques—visual and dramatic—he employs: slow motion, speed-ups and sight gags clearly borrowed from the silent era."^[67] It was shot in Yugoslavia with a budget of $1.5 million, and was a box office flop. It is notable for the song "Hope For the Best, Expect the Worst."

Brooks wrote an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, but was unable to sell the idea to any studio and believed that his career was over. In 1972, he met agent David Begelman, who helped him set up a deal with Warner Bros. to hire Brooks as a script doctor for the unproduced Tex-X. Eventually, Brooks was hired as director for what became Blazing Saddles (1974).^[22]

Blazing Saddles stars Cleavon Little as Black Bart, the Black sheriff of a racist Western town, and Gene Wilder as the washed-up Waco Kid. It featured Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, Madeline Kahn, Alex Karras and Brooks, with cameos by DeLuise and Count Basie. It had music by Brooks and John Morris and a budget of $2.6 million. A spoof of Westerns, it references Destry Rides Again (1939), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), High Noon (1952) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In a surreal sequence, it spoofs the musical spectaculars of Busby Berkeley. Brooks recalled

It was time to take two eyes, the way Picasso had done it, and put them on one side of the nose, because the official movie portrait of the West was simply a lie. For nine months, we worked together like maniacs. We went all the way—especially Richard Pryor, who was very brave and very far-out and very catalytic. I figured my career was finished anyway, so I wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry. ... We used dirty language on the screen for the first time, and to me the whole thing was like a big psychoanalytic session. I just got everything out of me—all my furor, my frenzy, my insanity, my love of life and hatred of death.^[3]

Blazing Saddles became the second-highest US grossing film of 1974, grossing $119.5 million in the United States and Canada. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actress (Kahn), Best Film Editing and Best Original Song. It won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy – Written Directly for the Screen. Brooks has said that it "has to do with love more than anything else. I mean when that black guy rides into that Old Western town and even a little old lady says 'Up yours, nigger!', you know that his heart is broken. So it's really the story of that heart being mended."^[22] Brooks described the film as "a Jewish western with a black hero".^[3] Ebert called it "a crazed grabbag of a movie that does everything to keep us laughing except hit us over the head with a rubber chicken. Mostly, it succeeds."^[68]

When Wilder replaced Gig Young as the Waco Kid, he did so on condition that Brooks's next film would be a script^[69] that Wilder had been working on: a spoof of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). After filming of Blazing Saddles wrapped, Wilder and Brooks began writing Young Frankenstein and shot it in the spring of 1974. It starred Wilder as the grandson of Victor Frankenstein, Teri Garr as his assistant, Marty Feldman as Igor and Peter Boyle as the monster. It also featured Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Cloris Leachman and a cameo from Gene Hackman. Morris scored, and special effects were by Universal monsters veteran Kenneth Strickfaden. Filmed in black and white by Gerald Hirschfeld, it made use of iris shots, wipes and fades to black.

Young Frankenstein was the third-highest-grossing film domestically of 1974, just behind Blazing Saddles, with a gross of $86 million. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound. Pauline Kael wrote "The style of the picture is controlled excess, and the whole thing is remarkably consistent in tone … The movie works because it has the Mary Shelley story to lean on: we know that the monster will be created and will get loose. And Brooks makes a leap up as a director because, although the comedy doesn’t build, he carries the story through. … Staying with the story, Brooks even has a satisfying windup, which makes this just about the only comedy of recent years that doesn’t collapse."^[70] In 1975, Brooks returned to TV with When Things Were Rotten, a Robin Hood spoof that lasted 13 episodes.

Brooks got a call from Ron Clark pitching the first feature-length silent comedy in four decades.^[71] Silent Movie (1976), written by Brooks and Clark, starred Brooks as a director making the first feature-length silent comedy in four decades. It featured DeLuise, Feldman, Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters and, playing themselves, Anne Bancroft, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds and mime Marcel Marceau, who utters the film's only audible line of dialogue: "Non!" An homage to silent comedians Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, it was less successful than Brooks's previous two films, but grossed $36 million. That year, he ranked fifth on the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll.^[22] Ebert wrote "It's clear at almost every moment that the filmmakers had a ball making it. ... the thing about Brooks's inside jokes is that their outsides are funny, too."^[72]

High Anxiety (1977), Brooks's parody of Alfred Hitchcock, was written by Brooks, Clark, Rudy De Luca and Barry Levinson, and was the first movie Brooks produced himself. Starring Kahn, Korman, Leachman, Ron Carey, Howard Morris, Dick Van Patten and Brooks as Professor Richard H. (Harpo) Thorndyke, a Nobel Prize–winning psychiatrist who suffers from "high anxiety",^[22] it spoofs the Hitchcock films Suspicion, Spellbound, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and Vertigo.^[3]

1980–2001: Brooksfilms

In 1980, Siskel and Ebert named Brooks and Woody Allen "America's two funniest filmmakers".^[73] Released that year was the dramatic film The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch and produced by Brooks. Brooks had been bowled over by Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and agreed to produce his next film. Knowing that anyone seeing a poster reading "Mel Brooks presents The Elephant Man" would expect a comedy, he started the company Brooksfilms. It has since produced a number of dramatic films, including David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). It produced Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year (1982), based on Brooks's time writing for Your Show of Shows, including an encounter with actor Errol Flynn (Peter O'Toole).^[74] Brooks sought to purchase the rights to Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road for many years. David Jones's 84 Charing Cross Road, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, was released in 1987.

In 1981 Brooks joked that the only genres that he had not spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles.^[22] History of the World, Part I was a humorous look at human history from the Dawn of Man to the French Revolution. Written, produced and directed by Brooks and narrated by Orson Welles, it earned $31 million. Kael wrote, "Either you get stuck thinking about the bad taste or you let yourself laugh at the obscenity in the humor as you do Buñuel's perverse dirty jokes."^[75]

Brooks produced a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). To Be or Not to Be (1983) was directed by Alan Johnson and starred Brooks, Bancroft, Charles Durning, Tim Matheson, Jose Ferrer and Christopher Lloyd. Vincent Canby called it "smashingly funny. I'm not at all sure that it's a classic, but it's so good in its own right, in the way it preserves and revives the wonderfully farcical Edwin Justus Mayer screenplay, that you leave the theater having a brand-new high."^[76] 'It generated international publicity by featuring a controversial song on its soundtrack—"To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap)"—satirizing German society in the 1940s, with Brooks playing Hitler.

In 1987, Brooks directed the science fiction spoof Spaceballs, starring DeLuise, Bill Pullman, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Daphne Zuniga, Dick Van Patten, Joan Rivers and Brooks.

In 1989 Brooks (with co-executive producer Alan Spencer) returned to television with the sitcom The Nutt House, featuring Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman. It was originally broadcast on NBC, but the network aired only five of the eleven produced episodes before canceling it. During the next decade Brooks directed Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). Life Stinks, loosely inspired by Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941), was a financial and critical failure, but is notable as the only film Brooks directed that is neither a parody nor a film about other films or theater. People magazine wrote, "Anyone in a mood for a hearty laugh couldn't do better than Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which gave fans a parody of Robin Hood, especially Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves."^[77] It also references Michael Curtiz's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Brooks's When Things Were Rotten. It is filled with one-liners and the occasional breaking of the fourth wall. It stars Cary Elwes and, in his screen debut, Dave Chapelle. Brooks cameos as Rabbi Tuckman. In 1996, he began his role as Uncle Phil on Mad About You.^[78]

2001–present: Broadway

Brooks and Thomas Meehan's musical adaptation of The Producers premiered on Broadway in 2001. Starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick as Bialystock and Bloom, it received critical acclaim and significant box office success. Ben Brantley praised the production: "Mr. Brooks has taken what could have been overblown camp into a far warmer realm in which affection always outweighs irony."^[79] It broke the Tony Award record with 12 wins, including Best Musical. It was made into a 2005 film adaptation directed by Susan Stroman with Lane, Broderick, Gary Beach and Roger Bart reprising their stage roles, and new cast members Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. Brooks cameos in the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he casts Larry David as Bialystock on Broadway.^[78]

Brooks appeared in the PBS documentary Broadway: The American Musical (2004), discussing his experience with The Producers and his love of the Great American Songbook.^[80] In April 2006, Brooks began composing the score to a musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein. It premiered at Seattle's Paramount Theater, between August 7, 2007, and September 1, 2007. It opened on Broadway at the former Lyric Theater (then the Hilton Theatre), New York, on October 11, 2007 to mixed reviews. In the final musical number, the full company sings, "next year, Blazing Saddles!" In 2010 Brooks confirmed a Blazing Saddles musical was in development, saying that it could be finished within a year; however, no creative team or plan has been announced.^[81] Brooks worked on Spaceballs: The Animated Series, which premiered in 2008, on G4 TV.

Brooks has lent his voice to animation, making a cameo in The Simpsons episode "Homer vs. Patty and Selma".^[82] He voiced Bigweld, the master inventor, in Robots (2005), and in Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) he voiced Albert Einstein. He voiced Dracula's father, Vlad, in Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)^[83] and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018).

In 2012, Brooks and Carl Reiner joined Jerry Seinfeld on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.^[84] American Masters produced a Brooks biography, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, which premiered in May 2013.^[85] In 2018, he discussed his wartime experiences in the documentary GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II.^[86]

In 2021 Brooks published a memoir, All About Me!.^[87] On October 18, 2021, it was announced that Brooks would write and produce History of the World, Part II, a follow-up series to his 1981 movie.^[88] He received a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his role as the narrator in the series.

In June 2025, Brooks announced a sequel to Spaceballs, Spaceballs: The New One, was being produced with a release date targeted for 2027.^[89] That month, it was announced that Brooks would be executive-producing Very Young Frankenstein for FX.^[90]

Judd Apatow's documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! was released on HBO Max in January 2026.^[91][92]

Marriages, family and longevity

Brooks met Florence Baum,^[93] a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, on Broadway.^[94][95] They were married from 1953 until their divorce in 1962. They had three children, Stephanie, Nicky and Eddie.^[96] After earning a salary of $5,000 a week on Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour,^[97] his salary dropped to $85 a week as a freelance writer. For five years he had few gigs, and was living in Greenwich Village on Perry Street in a fourth-floor walk-up.^[61] In 1960, to escape his situation, Brooks moved in with a friend, in Los Angeles.^[57] In 1961, after his return to New York, he found that Baum had begun suing him for legal separation. Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud^[98] was an autobiographical script based on his marriage.^[44][19] By 1966, Brooks was "living in a fairly old but comfortable New York town house".^[58]

Brooks married actress Anne Bancroft in 1964, and they remained together for 41 years until her death in 2005.^[99] They met at a rehearsal for The Perry Como Show in 1961 and were married on August 5, 1964, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau.^[99][100] Their son, Max Brooks, was born in 1972.^[99][100] In 2010, Brooks credited Bancroft as "the guiding force" behind his involvement in developing The Producers and Young Frankenstein for the musical theater, saying of his first meeting with her: "From that day, until her death ... we were glued together."^[101] He has remained single since she died, stating in 2023 that "Once you are married to Anne Bancroft, others don't seem to be appealing".^[102] Brooks said of Bancroft, “She had good taste in everything—except husbands."^[103]

According to actor David DeLuise on Wizards of Waverly Pod, Brooks is his godfather; DeLuise's father, Dom DeLuise, was a frequent co-star of Brooks in his earlier career.^[104]

On June 28, 2026, Brooks turned 100.^[105]

Interests

Brooks is a voracious reader; Kenneth Tynan describes "Brooks the secret connoisseur, worshiper of good writing, and expert on the Russian classics, with special reverence to Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy." He kept a photograph of Tolstoy above his desk.^[3] In The Producers, Bialystock refers to Bloom as "Prince Myshkin", a character from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and the name Leo Bloom refers to Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce's Ulysses.^[106] He was a close friend of Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. The hero of Heller's Good as Gold is partly based on Brooks.^[3]

Jewish identity

Brooks has often expressed pride in his Jewish identity. In 2021, Brooks told NPR's Terry Gross: "I love being a Jew, I love Jewish humor..."^[87]

Regarding religion, Brooks stated, "I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all. I think it's the relationship with the people and the pride I have. The tribe surviving so many misfortunes, and being so brave and contributing so much knowledge to the world and showing courage".^[107] He says "Look at Jewish history: Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breast, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one."^[108]

On Jewish films, Brooks said, "They can be anything and anywhere ... if there's a tribal thing, like, the 'please God, protect us' feeling ... we don't know where and how it's gonna come out. Avatar was a Jewish movie ... these people on the run, chasing—and being pursued".^[109]

Politics

Brooks endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election in his first-ever public endorsement of a political candidate.^[110][111] He endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.^[112]

Comedy albums

• 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (World Pacific Records, 1960)^[127]
• 2001 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Capitol Records, 1961)
• Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival (Capitol Records, 1962)
• 2000 and Thirteen with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973)^[128]
• The Incomplete Works of Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973)
• Excerpts from The Complete 2000 Year Old Man (Rhino Records, 1994)^[129]
• The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (Rhino Records, 1997)

Soundtracks

• The Producers (RCA Victor, 1968)
• High Anxiety – Original Soundtrack (Asylum Records, 1978)
• History of the World, Part I (Warner Bros. Records, 1981)
• To Be or Not to Be (Island Records, 1984)
• The Producers: Original Broadway Recording (Sony Classical, 2001)