Mel Brooks is a charmer, a mensch and an intellectual. Who knew?
In his movies and TV appearances, Brooks comes across as a man who’d do anything for a guffaw. Loud, shameless and aggressive, he all but challenges the audience not to laugh.
With writing, directing and performing credits like “Your Show of Shows” (starring Sid Caesar), “Get Smart,” “The Producers,” and others, Brooks almost always succeeded.
He is absurd and funny. But Brooks’ manic intensity is also occasionally shrill and exhausting. Like a lot of comedians — Jewish and otherwise — who crave being the center of attention, he can appear pushy and unlikable.
That edge is rarely visible in PBS’ “American Masters” tribute, “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise,” a fast-moving, thoroughly enjoyable 90 minutes spent in the rambunctious company of a practiced performer. The 86-year-old Brooks may still be “on” every public minute, but at this point in his life it is gregariousness, not neediness and insecurity, that makes him shine in the spotlight.
“Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” airs 9 p.m. Monday, May 20 on KQED-Channel 9.
A contemporary, anecdote-filled interview with the Brooklyn-born Brooks serves as both the spine of the program and its motor. Augmented with television and movie clips and pungent one-liners and recollections by many of his collaborators and admirers, the interview is itself a performance, a fact that Brooks endearingly acknowledges throughout.
The former Melvin Kaminsky was 2 years old when his father died, and he confides that it was “a brushstroke of depression that really never left me, not having a father.”
His mother carried the ball, raising Mel and his three older brothers. Whether it was his mother or growing up in Brooklyn that instilled a sense of identity, Brooks always knew who he was.
“I was never religious, but terribly Jewish,” he says. “I liked being Jewish.”
Brooks admits that he realized he was an attention-seeker as an adolescent, and took up drumming (hence the title of the program) as well as acting. But he quickly discovered that cutting up and making people laugh was where his satisfaction and success lay.
After his return from the Army in World War II, he launched his entertainment career in the Catskills. The new medium of television was a natural lure for Borscht Belters, and in 1950 Brooks landed a job as a writer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” with talents like Carl Reiner and Neil Simon. He also worked on the star’s successor show, “Caesar’s Hour.”
When Caesar’s run ended in 1958, Brooks found it difficult to find backers for his own work, and fell into a two-year depression. Then came the hit comedy LP, “2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks,” proving there were plenty of laughs to be gleaned from a Yiddish accent.
“There is no Jewish kid,” David Steinberg asserts, “interested in comedy, for whom that isn’t a seminal album.”
A Jewish sensibility could be detected in “Get Smart,” the ’60s secret agent parody created by Brooks and the brilliant Buck Henry. Curiously, the “American Masters” program doesn’t invite its subject (or anyone else) to muse about what constitutes Jewish humor, or why Brooks’ brand was so popular.
For a guy who came out of the Catskills and the Golden Age of television, Brooks had no problem connecting with the acid generation. “The Producers” (1968) was brave and brilliant, and won Brooks the Oscar for best original screenplay, while “The Twelve Chairs” (1970) displays a craftsmanship and soulfulness that are in short supply in the comedies of Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler, the supposed Jewish comic geniuses of today.
Both films featured songs written by Brooks; one regrets that “Make a Noise” misses the opportunity to recall and celebrate Brooks’ talent as a composer and lyricist.
According to Joan Rivers, Brooks is an intellectual who read the classics and is steeped in classical music. He certainly knows movie genres well enough to parody them in “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Silent Movie” and “High Anxiety.” Collaborators on those films, from Cloris Leachman to Barry Levinson, offer insights into Brooks’ approach to directing comedy.
To its credit, “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” doesn’t impart the saccharine aftertaste of hagiography, in part because its subject isn’t content to call it a career and bask in compliments. He’s always hatching and developing projects, and the risk of failure and criticism is perpetual, even for a comic legend.
Furthermore, any inclination to romanticize Brooks is undercut by the brassy and sassy presence of actress Anne Bancroft. Brooks’ wife from 1964 until her death in 2005, she supplies (via archival snippets) some of the most acerbic and witty comments in any documentary.
Brooks’ vast body of work speaks for itself, though a coterie of admirers is happy to add their voices.
“Mel Brooks: Make a Noise” airs 9 p.m. Monday, May 20 on KQED Channel 9.