
Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man: Mel Brooks in His 90s - johnny313
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/portrait-of-an-artist-as-an-old-man-mel-brooks-in-his-90s/564683/?curator=MediaREDEF&amp;single_page=true
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TangoTrotFox
I find it bemusing to imagine Mel Brook's movies being released today. Think
about Blazing Saddles. It'd be met with nonstop claims about all sorts of
_isms_ and _ists_ with coordinated Twitter attacks to try to hurt Brooks or
any company that facilitated it or its release. And of course he is not, nor
are his films. In a way it's the same thing that's already happened to Mark
Twain and The Adventurers of Huckleberry Fin. It's now been banned in numerous
US schools under typically facile implications of _isms_ and _ists_ , because
of a certain word.

The thing I find most bewildering though is that people seem to no longer
actually care about content or context - it's all about the most incredibly
superficial approach to everything. It's interesting that both Mel Brooks with
Blazing Saddles, and Twain with Huck Fin, made a point of contrasting the
superficiality and nonsensical nature of labels against the strength of
character of those being labeled. The slave/prisoner in both tales being one
of the only decent and honorable peoples in their respective stories.

Just kind of sad to feel like we're regressing so much and calling it
progress.

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maxerickson
Oh come on, Huck Finn has been banned in stupid schools for _decades_.

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a_d
Mel Brooks features in two Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame) books: No laughing
matter and From Coney Island to here. It is amazing to read about how Mario
Puzo (of The Godfather), Mel Brooks, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel spent their
evenings together, playing cards, eating dinner, watching TV and just
‘shooting some shit’ as friend do. The passages in the book reminded me of
impressionist painters gathered in a Parisian cafe talking about where to get
cheap turpentine (as depicted in the book ‘Lust for life’). Worth a read!
There is also an article where two old friends (Brooks and Heller) meet
again:[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1979/03/11/mel-
brooks-meets-joseph-
heller/1f2e9a54-724f-4bf7-b000-460d1d778d18/?utm_term=.e18d582009f7)

Also, in one of the brilliant episodes of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars
Getting Coffee, he pays a visit to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (with Chinese
Take-out food) — I highly recommend watching that to get a glimpse of sharp
incisive wit in full action at age 90!

Edit: this link is better
[http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/27/news/ls-23428](http://articles.latimes.com/1998/feb/27/news/ls-23428)

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delinka
Chinese? There were definitely sandwiches. Maybe there was also Chinese, but
definitely sandwiches.

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a_d
Yes. Roast beef sandwiches, Potato salad and soup :)

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RickJWagner
It's a great pity that today's generation can't appreciate Brooks' greatest
works. Too politically incorrect.

Of course the irony is that Brooks' work was groundbreaking for it's time. He
skewered everyone equally, except for bigots who got a double dose. But in
today's society, much of it would be considered too raw. It really is a shame,
because it teaches us all to laugh at ourselves.

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splatzone
Really a whole generation? Anecdotal but I and so many of my friends in our
early twenties adore Mel Brooks

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qrbLPHiKpiux
Spaceballs and Blazing Saddles are my favorite movies from him.

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scandox
Young Frankenstein was written and developed by Gene Wilder. It was definitely
not born out of Brooks’ obsession with Mary Shelley’s novel and even Brooks
would hardly say so!

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justin66
You may well be right, but they certainly share a screenplay credit.

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bmmayer1
This passage resonates especially well with today's times:

Audiences hoping for safe spaces—especially Jewish audiences—can be rudely
jostled by Brooks’s wilder moments. The musical number “Springtime for
Hitler,” first unleashed in the movie version of The Producers (1968), of
course turned Nazism into merry choreography—boys and girls singing and
dancing in S.S. uniforms and regalia. The joke was something more than a joke.
Those who had seen Broadway shows in the ’50s and ’60s knew how closely Brooks
adhered to the shape and sound of Broadway style. The audience for musical
comedies was heavily Jewish, so the wit was partially aimed at them and at
Jews in general—an audience inclined to feel itself a victim of history.

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kazinator
Lil' old man!

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hprotagonist
Profiles like this seem to only be published when someone’s pretty near death.
(the Leonard Cohen new yorker profile being a good example).

not looking forward to that—Mel Brooks is a national treasure.

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melling
Excellent use of confirmation bias?

