Worth bragging about

Bragging finds its way into most autobiographies, but I have never read any autobiography with as much boastfulness as All About Me! (2021) by Mel Brooks. Yet except for the final chapter, in which he describes the awards he has won and the glowing things famous people have said about him, none of this is grating. It's just part of the fun, and besides, as it has been said, it's not really bragging when it's true.

Certainly it's true that Brooks is a comic genius. Everything he touches turns to laughs. The book has a few personal details — his childhood in Brooklyn, his World War II service in Europe, his meeting and marriage to actress Anne Bancroft — yet the focus falls mostly on his many show business successes, each remarkable in its own way. He wrote skits for Sid Caesar, won a Grammy with Carl Reiner for the 2000 Year Old Man record, helped create the Get Smart TV series (he's the one responsible for Maxwell Smart's shoe-phone) and then directed a string of classic movie comedies before turning to Broadway, where years before Ethel Merman in Anything Goes had first inspired him to go into show business.

Brooks may boast a lot, but he gives plenty of credit to Caesar, Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn,  Cloris Leachman,  Nathan Lane and many others. I don't remember him saying a negative word about anyone. Even Hitler gets a kind word for inspiring Springtime for Hitler, the play within The Producers.

Most of his films are spoofs of film genres. Blazing Saddles takes on westerns, Young Frankenstein (my personal favorite) spoofs classic horror films, High Anxiety plays with Hitchcock, etc.  While Spaceballs may be having fun at the expense of Star Wars, it is actually a remake of It Happened One Night, Brooks says.

One secret to his success, he confesses, is that he always ignored Hollywood producers. He would always agree with whatever orders producers gave him, then go ahead and do everything his way. The producers always forgot their instructions to him when they saw the final result — and when they started counting the money that flowed in after the film's release.

If Brooks didn't listen to producers, he always listened to audiences, even if that audience was fellow writers or members of the cast and crew on a movie set. If they laughed he kept the joke in; if they didn't laugh or didn't laugh hard enough, he took it out.

People will always laugh at Mel Brooks films. And that is something to brag about.